glitch: a wacky new mmorpg played in browser

been playing over the last 48 hours. name for better or worse is Mr Spittles, it seemed to suit the avatar... I'm still not sure if I like it , but it is horribly compelling in a WoW-meets-Club Penguin kinda way.

hooray I have an invite from a certain Cindy Electronium to join the POXY FULE group. whatever that means.

it's the ilx group

Yep, that's me inviting you to the ilx0r group.

They seem to be having some internal problems at the moment, just as I was wanting to go back in after not having played for a few days.

yes I know really! it was a roundabout way of saying "ta for the invite" . I'll see you on there if the thing starts working.

Aha, sorry, was being slow.

hello ILx, I was going to join up the group, but I see you need to send me an invite. So... please do! If you'd like. My user name is Big Pecks (after my poor deceased Tailow from a Pokemon Emerald nuzlocke run) - I hadn't quite thought through what it would what it would be like, to be perceived as "Big Pecks" in an MMOPRG - but hey, it makes a change from "twee fvckery", or whatever I'd usually call myself I suppose!

Learning Mining IV at the moment, it is taking the looongest. Final 24 hours of it though! Then it's either onto Better Learning V (argh....) or some of the Refining ones, with the aim of creating better donations for the gods, so Better Learning V can be sped up as much as possible by grinding for Lem.

Did you know, it turns out pigges can die? HORROR :(

invited you!

Did you know, it turns out pigges can die? HORROR :(

You don't know horror until you've heard poisoned trees begging for their lives.

i've seen things you people wouldn't believe. a pig exploding off the shoulder of Mallos Means. I watched a poisoned tree beg for his life in the dark near Kadithima gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like butterfly milk in rain.

POISONED TREES???

http://i31.tinypic.com/ao455g.jpg "dot gif" etc etc...

*rocks back and forth humming to a piglet*

You wouldn't catch that sort of behaviour going on in the mines where everyone is a Good Egg and only after the sparkly (I really feel I should just join a sparkly hunter clan and quit my job - I must never play any pay-for mmorpgs I guess).

so i've stopped playing this completely except that whenever i get an email that i've finished a skill i queue up another skill (the one that takes the longest to learn). i guess soon i'll know all the skills and then maybe i'll feel like playing again?

heh, unfortunately me too.
i think i can see this being something i'll come back to at that point though.

i never really got back into it after the reset

got all the skills. now what?

I've kind of taken a bit of a break - partly because I've barely been at home for the last couple of weeks, but to play it properly it is a bit of a timesink. Basically, there are a few things that people always suggest when you come to a standstill:

a) street building projects/rook attacks - fun, but rare enough to mean that if you concentrate solely on one of these you'll be bored for ages while waiting for them.

b) playing the market - I don't consider this to actually be fun at all, so... meh. Good if you like that sort of thing.

c) collections - cubimals, music boxes, icons. Again, it kind of depends on whether you like that sort of thing: personally I can see the fun side but it's very much the sort of thing I'd only go for once I run out of everything else to do.

d) achievements - there are bloody loads of these, so getting them all can be a good long-term goal.

e) sandboxing - player-generated quests, philanthropy, cubimal racing, dice games, role-play, treasure hunts... and pretty much whatever else you can think of to get up to. This is the direction I was heading in before I took a break, and it can be very fun indeed, but I think it needs some investment in the game and community before you see a point to it.

They haven't implemented group areas yet, have they? I don't know if our little gang of poxy fules will be active enough to really get going with it but I'm still quite excited by the prospect.

group areas don't exist yet, but they just added a key system where you can create keys to grant permanent access to your home to people

i've heard they're making new long term goals

anyone still playing this? i haven't gone on in about a month, since they announced they were going back into beta.

i still login every couple days or so and switch to a new skill to learn

that's it tho... for all i know they've since repossessed my house. (all my piggies blew up a long while ago)

i switch out my skills every time i burn out one.
my ex is now level 54. apparently slocki still plays? Is that right?

she is like my Glitch BFF btw

I've been dipping back in a bit recently. Trying to keep it to a tea-time break level of gaming, though. Since I stored up a bunch of quests related to skills it's been a bit easier to keep a focus, but I dunno...

Nhex! Not slocks. Nhex.

heheh!

whoa, logged in and found like 10 new quests, they finally started to fill in quests for the later skills

http://www.glitch.com/ballot/animals/

How do I get into this, invite?

so this is shutting down:

http://www.glitch.com/closing/

i enjoyed playing it when everyone was into it last year, but i definitely hit a point where there wasn't much "game" left and all the leveling up and skills acquisition didn't result in anything particularly fruitful. i don't know if that improved after i stopped playing, but i guess it doesn't matter now.

Aw, RIP even if I haven't played for a year for much the same reasons as you. They sent me an email a month ago saying they had new features which I meant to come and have a look at... but just haven't had time.

same here... sad to see it go too, even if I never went back to it.

i'm not surprised but RIP glitch, you were a weird game + fun until i got bored

Awww, that is a shame. I think the post-game game really depended on immersing yourself in the community, and while I don't mind a dalliance with such things, I'm definitely more of a solo player, so it wasn't likely to work out for me without further non-sandbox things to get up to.

Their reasons seem pretty sound for closing, but I hope the developers find something more sustainable to work on, I'd love to see more from them.

aw, i really liked this thing awhile back
that's the saddest corporate statement I've ever seen

That is a real pity. i went back to my glitch account after a year, having got the new-features email, and it was still super cute but there was still that feeling, as reddening says, that none of the skill or object acquisitions resulted in anything fruitful. I'm sad for the developers, who seem to have put so much love and thought into it.

just logged in now and started dicking around... there's loads of interesting new stuff immediately. Worth giving a last kick.

yeah, there's a lot more space to explore and a bunch of quests - it'd be nice to play the game out until it's shuttered.

A world where I can't play musicboxes to crabs any more suddenly seems a bit bleak. If there was some way to download just that part of the game as an offline copy and hoard it forever I would.

Just thinking of how I can currently download and play 99% of the beloved games of my 80s childhood to feel that nostalgic glow (there are only 1 or 2 games I remember which I totally can't find online) but the online multiplayer games of now will stay dead, not revisitable. Sad!

well, too little too late, but i just jumped back into this and they did a really great job fixing the intro and working on stuff. sad stuff.

if your business plan hinges on people wanting to play your video game for longer than a month, you might want to reconsider.

just reread the thread; so sad. It really hit a wall, huh?
also the answer to this being no is probably what killed it:

Does this work ON IPAD?
― Euler, Friday, August 5, 2011 1:23 AM (1 year ago)

in the goodbye note they even mention that going with Flash was a big mistake

I played last night and while there wasn't a whole lot of ~new stuff~ that I kept tripping over or anything (some new regions, new "memories", sloths + foxes are cute) I definitely felt like I was going to miss it, but unfortunately for Glitch I miss it as an abstract thing that existed for occasional dipping into, rather than a thing I wanted to pay premium subscription rates to play every day. and someone said on chat that it costs like 300-500k in server costs per month to run so yeah, those two things don't match up.

it does look really nice and sound really nice and stuff, though. RIP

(too bad re Flash, doesn't seem like there was any way they could have gone non-Flash at the point they started, and yet a year or two later...)

Kinda sad, kinda bitter post-portem interview (don't think I've seen so much swearing in any of Butterfield's others)

The time it took to iterate the game to the point where it was fun was a challenge hampered by production problems, says Butterfield.

By the time the shutdown was announced, "there were more things that were fun in an immediate and obvious way," he says. "It's not like we weren't looking for them, but sometimes, shit that you build, it turns out, it's not so fun."

I meant to follow "kinda bitter" with "kinda funny" but maybe that's inappropriate

kinda both

I don't want to pile on something that's already sad, but when he says people didn't get what the game was...I mean, I played a bunch and subscribed for a few months and I don't think I could answer that question, either. I had maxed out a lot of skills that didn't seem to lead to anything and had run out of freshly whimsical situations to encounter, so...where was my continued "in" supposed to be?

maybe it was "community and friendship" but I am terrible at those.