How do building buddies work on cityville

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Your friend can treat it as a rental opportunity and simply collect coins and experience points from it, like any other building. And you can visit it to do likewise. When you visit, you can harvest or collect on behalf of a friend, and they in turn can choose to accept your help:.

This is an example of accepting help. Helping friends out in this fashion costs the helper energy, but it also generates coins, XP and, most importantly, reputation points. Reputation points are like a social form of level represented by the heart icon on the right of this image.

Reputation acts as a secondary requirement on some game activities, just like levelling does, but its primary purpose is to do with XP and coin generation. The more reputation you have, the more XP that someone who hires you will get, and the more you will get also. In a similar vein, players can send requests to each other to become neighbors. Neighbors can more easily find and send gifts to each other.

Also, some city buildings and tasks require that a player has a specific number of neighbors. Neighbors thus become another kind of gating mechanism. The objective of all social activity in the game is to generate publishing actions.

Simple publishing is the act of broadcasting your game high scores onto the platform, but there are more sophisticated channels that can be better used to gather attention. Specifically, CityVille wants players to generate one of these four kinds of action:.

Wall Publishing: Wall publishing is the most straightforward social action to understand. As I wrote in the first part of this article, wall publishing most commonly takes the form of high scores announcements, or high scores with incentives.

All wall publishing is governed by a specific policy to which a developer must adhere: A game must clearly ask the player whether they want to share a game activity, and then must proceed to a second Facebook screen see above that once again asks if the player wants to go ahead and publish this story to their wall.

Only then will the story actually be published. Unsurprisingly, this creates a lot of fall-off. Moreover, a recent change in the policy by Facebook has restricted the visibility of wall publishing such that only players who have already installed the game can see stories published from the game. This change was brought about because Facebook noticed that many of their non-gaming users really disliked these kinds of stories cluttering up their walls, while gaming users disliked stories from games that they were not already playing.

CityVille uses cross-wall publishing to tell players when a friend has visited their town. The friend still has to choose to actually publish the story, but as you can see from the screen-grab above, the result is a game story that is more relevant to me than a general achievement publish would be. Notifications tell you if a friend has commented on a status update, posted on your wall, tagged you in a photo, or other similar activities.

Social game developers, including Zynga, abused notifications utterly. If you had ever installed Mafia Wars , for example, you would receive notifications from the game every day asking you to come back and play, offering bonuses, inducements and so on.

Notification spam became a huge irritant for users, and so eventually Facebook turned off the channel for developers. More recently, Facebook appear to have partially relented.

While games are still not permitted to advertise directly to players through the notification channel, requests from players to other users are permitted see above. This includes users who have not installed the game. Requests have always been a feature of Facebook, but since they started appearing in the notification stream they have become much more visible than before. Email: Last but not least, email from the game is a valid channel.

Email has been available to developers for about a year, but it is often under-used. The hazard with email is that players often consider it to be more personal and private than, say, notifications. So the use of email needs to veer away from spam and more toward relevant communications. CityVille is currently using email as a way to spread requests, not for large scale advertising. This makes it more useful to read Although on a personal note I think I will soon add a filter to my Gmail to junk those mails.

Some of the restrictions around how you can publish, or when, can be overcome by extended permissions. In order to email players, for example, the developer must get their permission to do so first. In order for the developer to access their social graph information, likewise. Other permissions are more added-value types. Players can give you permission to automate the process of wall-publishing, for example, to reduce it to just one step rather than two. There are several ways to ask for permission.

Some games try to make a mini-game out of it by inviting players to complete several steps in a social bar at the top of the game to get a prize, like this taken from Pet Society :. Others, like CityVille , bundle their permission question in as a part of the install question when the player first enters the application:. The mandatory method is more effective of course, although there is the possibility that if you ask too much of the player at installation then they might get put off.

To understand the social dynamics of CityVille , realise that they are selfish. In each case, the dynamics exist to tantalise a player with a tangible reward. If you visit your friend, you get a prize. If you send them a free gift that costs you nothing, they might send you one back. If you set up a bakery in their town, you will both gain from that. If you harvest their crops for them, you will gain reputation points. Social games are not trying to be connections or meaningful experiences for players.

That is a wholly different kind of game, and not one that they can easily become given the environment in which these games are played. Instead, they are built as amusements. It is reciprocal trade , assistance for incentive, not charity. While this does not preclude the possibility that some players will engage in acts of charity for personal reasons, the social dynamics are not created with that in mind.

Nobody knows exactly how much profit Zynga makes from their games. There is only guesswork, analysis of second hand information, anecdotal stories, correlations from other companies and data points around the web.

The general consensus seems to be that the answer is: A Lot. The most common executive-summary pieces of knowledge or social games go something like this:. Obviously this is all hazy. But it tells a story, and that story is that games-as-a-service is both a real opportunity, and one that is reliant on both visibility and retention as already discussed in the first two parts of this article. The longer and louder a game booms, the more paying customers you will find. And the more whales you will find also.

This means that a social game needs something to sell. CityVille, like many online games, has two virtual currencies. There are actually five different number quantities that the player earns reputation, goods, experience points, coins and cash but only the last two are currencies. Reputation and experience go toward accumulating social and game levels, while goods are for resupplying existing buildings. Game coins and game cash, on the other hand, are used to buy stuff.

All four parts of the promotion equation feed into each other and produce geometric results. In the early days of Facebook many developers practised seedy, spam-laden tactics to acquire users, and Zynga certainly was one of those. But what they've done with that attention along the way is figured out how to move it around, shift it from game to game, and keep using those opportunities to expand their reach further and further.

The result, as with all successful companies on the web, is that they're now tapping into Metcalfe-style effects. Zynga are able to add a tonne of users very quickly into a game because they have built the channels to do so.

Success follows more success, allows exponential expansion if you manipulate it in the right way, and that's why they're now the company adding 12m users in a week to their new game. Zynga are where they are today because they've realised that social gaming is actually about building a virtual network of applications inside Facebook through cross promotion, and they raced faster than anyone else to do so.

Most social games are considered amusements for the majority of players, so successful social game developers focus on delivering that kind of engagement.

They are obsessed with retention, a commonly-used term to describe whether players return to a game or bounce from it, and the period of weeks or months that the average retained customer spends in the game before boredom finally sets in.

Understanding retention is essential to achieving sustainable growth and revenue in a social game like CityVille. In order to understand what's really going on with a game, you need to look at the daily active users DAU as well as the monthly active users MAU. Tracking services like Appdata provide useful summaries of these statistics, as well as a calculation of one over the other.

The percentage for CityVille started off extremely high. That's not unusual in the first week of a game's launch however, because everything is new, users are only discovering it for the first time, and the MAU figure has not had a full month to build up. A more stable example is FarmVille :. FarmVille has long been a standard-bearer for engagement on big games. Quizzes: The reason why Crowdstar in particular has a low percentage is because one of their most popular apps is a quiz engine.

This often gives a skewed impression of how important a company might actually be in the social game space. Visibility Strategy: This is a bit of a repeat from the first part of the article, but the prevalence of publishing options in particular creates more hooks for lapsed players to return to a game. The Facebook economy works geometrically and exponentially, and that applies to retention as well as initial interest.

Game Activity: How Zynga structures its games, particularly with respect to time- and click-based dynamics, encourages players to remember to come back and play some more.

That's what I'm going to talk about mostly in this article. Late last year, Playfish released two games that they probably shouldn't have. One was Poker Rivals and the other was Gangster City. Each was, in its own way, a better execution of the incumbents in their genre, Zynga's Texas Hold'Em and Mafia Wars , and yet each has proved to be a failure.

The lesson is not that you can't fight Zynga. Crowdstar faced off a challenge from Zynga trying to eat its Happy Aquarium market with FishVille , and while both are well past their heyday, FishVille proved to be the loser. A hidden, but determining, factor for retention is whether this is the first time that players have encountered that game type. It's therefore important to be the first one of that type that the average user sees. Interestingly, this may have significant consequences for CityVille.

After all, social city-building games have now been around for a while, and although CityVille is doing some things differently, the game may end up falling into the same trap as FishVille or Gangster City. It's far too early to tell. The core game dynamic of CityVille is click-to-do.

Click to build, click to collect, click to plant, click to harvest, click to deliver supplies. So much clicking is oddly compelling. My current city in CityVille is only a couple of streets in size, but when I do expand it out significantly, I think I might find the extent of such manual maintenance becomes boring.

Timers prevent endless clicking. As I described in the previous post , social games like CityVille employ two kinds of timer: Specific timers on buildings or crops, and general timers in the form of energy.

Timers are deliberately staggered. Planting strawberries takes 5 minutes for them to grow, a cottage generates coins once per hour, and corn takes 24 hours to grow. So you can see why these activities encourage repeated visits. With FarmVille which uses the same system there are many apocryphal stories of players getting up in the middle of the night to harvest their virtual beetroot.

In fact this sort of timed game dynamic goes at least as far back as the Excel-in-space game Planetarion. Energy works another way.

It is a limit on the amount of click actions that you can take in a short space of time. Some clicks, but not all, dock the player a point of energy.

Constructing a building docks energy, but clearing dead crops is free. Energy is resupplied on its own timer at a rate of one point every five minutes, or replenished if the player attains a level. Timers used in this dual fashion are incredibly effective. What they do is to deliberately set up a conflict whereby players have to wait to do everything they want, but in the mean time can do some of the things that they want. Rather than use one global timer, as Planetarion did, the use of multiple timers creates the sensation that there is always something to do while waiting.

The mix of the two is highly compelling. While players enjoy the click activity see above , timers essentially introduce delayed gratification, and then CityVille offers premium ways to circumvent some but not all of that delay.

One of the foundations of monetisation in CityVille is buying more energy, for example. This gets you more activity and more clicks. The sheer number of rewards in CityVille is intriguing. Pellets are basically any object that appears on the ground when you collect from a building or harvest from your crops. They include:. The trick with pellets seems to be that the fundamentals required for the game economy to function coins, experience and goods in CityVille need to be constantly available.

The game might occasionally reward an extra drop of one of these pellets as a part of a regular click action, but the player expects a baseline for their hard work. Otherwise the game feels unfair. The other kinds of pellet thus become delights. A delight is a reward of happy circumstance and the perception of luck. In a TED talk by Tom Chatfield , he describes seven ways that games reward the brain, and he talks about how the perception of randomness and actual randomness are two different things.

Often when players are close to completing a set, for example, they start to feel as though the game is denying them the last piece unfairly. So games perhaps CityVille is one of them increase the likelihood that the last couple of items in the set will drop. Delightful pellets make a game like CityVille feel like more than just a box of functions. Have a cake! Delightful pellets make the game seem more charming, and they become compelling in their own right. Unlocks are a more long-term kind of reward.

An unlock opens up new areas of the game permanently for the player, allowing them to do new things that they could never do before, and altering their game experience.

Unlocks extend the game dynamic, or in some cases add whole new dynamics, and extension is one the core ways to prevent games especially amusements from becoming boring. CityVille has, broadly speaking, three kinds of unlock: Levels , gates and task trees.

Levels: Levels are a global monitor of how well the player is doing in the game. As the player earns XP from his activities, this goes toward attaining his next level. When he attains his next level, the game replenishes his energy, increases his maximum energy, gives him 1 game cash the much harder-to-earn game currency , and unlocks new parts of the game. Unlocks might include new kinds of building, new crops or new whole areas that you can access such as shipping.