MerAn's Comments

Selective memory bias. When we miss 3 times in a row at 95% chance to hit, we think "What the ****, that was like 1/100th of a percent chance!" instead of, "Well, the odds are pretty high it would happen eventually given the volume of attacks I make playing Kongai. Apparently eventually is now." We remember the 2 games where victory came down to an 81% chance of landing two attacks and we lost, while ignoring the 8 other games we won in those circumstances. Then we think, "**** the Random Number Generator!" instead of "Why the hell am I putting myself into situations where victory or defeat falls entirely on a couple random rolls? If I didn't just evaluate the odds of a single event, but the longterm risks and rewards, I could probably make my wins more reliable."

A game save server for uploading and download save game files would represent a pretty substantial investment given the sheer volume of games times the players. You'd either end up having to pay for it, leaving it unused by most Kong-ers, or... well, that's pretty much the only way I see Kongregate defraying the costs. As an individual, you could setup your own file sharing on your network save your flash games to it, and any computer that can access your network remotely would be able to grab them. Or, you could upload your save game files to a remote file storage, like Dropbox/gmail/whatever, and access them from anywhere with an internet connection. Or a thumb drive for that matter. If you're able to cobble together a macro to automate the task, it'll be a lot less obnoxious to manage your saves.

My pet deals 1-3 damage to enemies, but heals them for 70 to 130... And yet my win rate is still up because it soaks enough damage for me to kill the enemy before I die. I don't know whether to string the little goblin mage by its guts for its treason, or thank it for having my back in the end.

Was the chance to cast formula tweaked? Both of my skills are down 8% from their values last night with no changes to the character.

@mithrandil : You earn higher tier skills by maxing out the basics, eg Firebolt 1 will automatically grant you Fireball F.

I love mystical gems of arcane power as much as the next dark sorceress, but dramatically enlarging your hit box and giving up your crowd controls is NOT a power-up, foolish Mogarrin.

Oh! It has a little white tumor that I didn't notice against a white background. Blargh.

I'm confused on level 13. I did Glasses -> Blue -> Right Plunger -> Pink -> Disc, and have a smiley pink ball with white eyes and a blue tumor: It's what the box shows, as best as I can tell.

Ristar's third bit of trivia has its name in it, making it more of an answer than a hint. I'm assuming that's not intended.

Why does my family refuse to do any work, like cleaning, when there are no customers... but they still demand to be paid?

A continuous shaft from the floor of the hotel to the ceiling actually moves very few guests. In the worst case scenario, 25 guests boarding on the ground floor will hog the elevator to get to the top floor while everyone on the other floors waits and gets pissy. The actual throughput isn't that much better. The best arrangement I've managed is basically a snake - Starting from the first floor, 3 floors of elevator up, move across 1 room, 3 floors of elevator up, move back 1 room, 3 floors of elevator up, all the away to the ceiling. Without any other complaints, I average about 2.67 thumbs up. Suggestion: Stairs. Please, for the love of sweet merciful heavens, let these people use stairs. It's good exercise on them, and there's no waiting line.

Luck and chance aren't bad elements in a game. Well-implemented chance in a game allows a player to minimize the impact of bad luck and make the most of their good luck, and thus, the luck actually becomes an important facet of player skill. Trigger Knight has so little actual interactivity that the luck is simply luck. You can make the optimal play decisions based on the information available and still lose quite frequently. (Frequent loss isn't the problem. Old era games were brutal. The difference between those and this game is that the losses then were preventable, although it required mastering split-second timing and memorizing enemy patterns. Even if mastering the timing and patterns was improbable, you always felt like victory or defeat was in your hands.)

You can draw words like 'rainwater' by breaking it down into its component parts. A cloud pouring rain on the left side of the screen, a plus sign in the middle, and a cup of water on the right side of the screen, for instance. More abstract words like lie can be very difficult, but try establishing a context and using contrasts. I tried a picture of a boy next to a broken vase and his mother. He has a thought bubble showing him playing with the vase, but a speech bubble directed at his mother with a picture of a little girl playing with the vase. Beyond that, there are fairly universal pictionary-type game practices. + indicates that two words should be combined, - that a word should be removed, and an Ear that is not part of the primary drawing means "sounds like".

On the money issue, as best as I can tell, you get $21 per cycle for max upgraded Bank Hacking, $3 per cycle for each basic MoneyMaker, $6 for each upgraded MonkeyMaker, and $10 for each maxed out MoneyMaker. Basic MoneyMakers take 50 seconds to pay for themselves, upgraded MoneyMakers take ~92 seconds for their total cost, and maxed MoneyMakers take 205 seconds. Comparing just the upgrade cost to the extra money made per cycle, upgraded MoneyMakers need 133 seconds, and maxed MoneyMakers need 375 seconds to pay off their upgrade. TLDR: The descriptions lie, and upgrading is only worth it if you desperately need the space or expect the match to drag on for a while.

A lot better than most 1 star games - so much better that I feel bad about giving it a 1, but that has more to do with the other games deserving 0. The inability to see where you're landing until it's almost too late to adjust is crippling, and makes the game unplayably unfun.

Mister // Sisters // and Blister don't rhyme, apparently.

Before the update, I found it extremely unfun to watch my heroes repeatedly backtrack and rubberband, wasting time and money. The heroes are just as stupid, but now I don't feel like I'm being punished for it. My last real complaint would be the backtracking on linear paths. It seems that at every turn, even if the path is still completely one-way, your heroes have a chance to change directions/turn around. This is extremely frustrating when preset tiles force you to have several such turns. I've had literally no choice at times because the preset tiles were spawned in a Tetris Z shape at the entrance. The heroes would sometimes repeatedly return to the entrance until they left the dungeon without accomplishing anything! With the old gold system, I gave you a 2. Now, I'd say you're between 3 and 4, but I'm going to err on 4 because of your awesomely fast response to feedback. Without that last quirk, Dungeon Developer would easily deserve a 5/5.

Bias the monster spawns towards unknowns, with the rate increasing for each time you've beaten the game. After 5+ game completions, you should be running into something new about every other dungeon. Scale the number of free unlocks the same way. Two free unlocks with your second completion, three for your third, etc. Together, that would make completing your monster collection a lot less tedious. Consider adding a coliseum with multiple AI-controlled party members so you can actually play with the debuffs. Paralysis and such are completely worthless without someone else on your team to take advantage of them. Netplay could be fun, but that's such a large leap in functionality that it seems impractical.

The game handles ties poorly. I'm not sure what is used to decide the winner when more than one players have the same score, but it's annoying in any case. Also, the point system for two player games is broken. Consider this: If you answered all of your opponent's drawings correctly, you'd have 9 points and they'd have 6 points. Then, if you drew nothing, wrong picture, or just hit pass, they'd miss all of yours and the score would still be 9 to 6 in your favor. In other words, in a two player game, this means that your score has more to do with your opponent's drawing skill than your own abilities.

Book of Magic has acceptable gameplay, but what really makes it stand out is the obvious recognition that frustration and tedium do not equal challenge or fun. Mutual annihilation isn't an auto-loss, like most games. Loss itself doesn't force you to start over from your last save. As for negatives, the dialogue is extremely repetitive and annoying, but it's also interesting in a way. Not only do you see the same dialogue from the same perspective repeatedly, you can end up in the exact same role as your former tormentors, heroes, and/or victims.