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4 the words
19 May 2016 11:52 pmI've been using this site (4thewords.com) to motivate me to write. It's kind of like a roll playing themed writing site where you "battle" monsters for items (meaning you have to write a certain number of words in a certain amount of time) to complete quests. It's fun.
Well, they just rolled out an entire new design over the weekend. I feel for them because it is hilariously full of bugs. Everything is glitchy, but the worst offender is the way the "game" tracks word counts to award points.
We can now equip items. Weapons add attack points which make it easier to defeat monsters. It was explained that +1 attack equals a 1% increase in words (1 word per 100). I have a +3. But there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to defeating monsters. Sometimes I could do it in 2 words, sometimes it would take 400 words to beat a monster with 1400 "health". I spent all last night experimenting with the system to see where the problem was.
Tonight I solved it. Somehow, every time you save the document, it counts all of the words in the file since it was opened (called "words since last edit"). Even if you add no words, it counts that number as if you just wrote that many words. That's a major flaw.
I save all the time because I'm paranoid about losing words. Plus I wasn't refreshing my document between battles, so I'd start new battles with sometimes 400+ words since last edit. Meaning I won the battle after the first save even if I only wrote a couple words (for monsters with lower health.)
As an example:
I was battling a monster with 1400 health.
My file already had 95 words. I saved it without adding anything and my points jumped to 97.85 (95 plus the bonus for my weapons).
I saved the file eight more times, sometimes adding a few words, sometimes no words. In the end, I added a total of 26 words to the document. That's what it took to beat the monster. And even that got glitchy in the middle, adding more than just the words since last edit.
I left them another bug report, so hopefully they can narrow down where the problem is in the coding. I already left them a detailed report from last night on how it seemed beating monsters was random. Now I know why.
I think the sites going to be a lot of fun once it gets up and running. It's still in beta and free at the moment, but some day they plan to go to a pay system. With the number of bugs, I doubt that will be for a while. I really think they tried to implement too much at once. Before the update, the graphics were much simpler--cartoony but cute. The backgrounds were plain but the layout was well organized. Now the background is a colorful forest, the monsters and other characters are detailed and bright. Then underneath are all the ways things relate to each other--the quests, points, items, etc. Too much going on.
They should have gotten the quest system up and running with the old, simple graphics. Once all the bugs were gone, they could have updated the graphics and look of the site. But they seem kind of young--I'm sure they're learning a lot.
I really want to finish some of the little quests they have, but I feel like I'm exploiting the battle aspect of the game which is ranked on a leaderboard (I'm currently #1 with 52 wins since Monday--10 more than the person in 2nd and 30 more than the person in 4th) because I keep screwing around with it and because I save constantly so I beat monsters in minutes with few words written.
Honestly, it's just distracting me. Now that I know what the problem is, I think I can ignore that function and just write until they fix it.
Well, they just rolled out an entire new design over the weekend. I feel for them because it is hilariously full of bugs. Everything is glitchy, but the worst offender is the way the "game" tracks word counts to award points.
We can now equip items. Weapons add attack points which make it easier to defeat monsters. It was explained that +1 attack equals a 1% increase in words (1 word per 100). I have a +3. But there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to defeating monsters. Sometimes I could do it in 2 words, sometimes it would take 400 words to beat a monster with 1400 "health". I spent all last night experimenting with the system to see where the problem was.
Tonight I solved it. Somehow, every time you save the document, it counts all of the words in the file since it was opened (called "words since last edit"). Even if you add no words, it counts that number as if you just wrote that many words. That's a major flaw.
As an example:
I was battling a monster with 1400 health.
My file already had 95 words. I saved it without adding anything and my points jumped to 97.85 (95 plus the bonus for my weapons).
I saved the file eight more times, sometimes adding a few words, sometimes no words. In the end, I added a total of 26 words to the document. That's what it took to beat the monster. And even that got glitchy in the middle, adding more than just the words since last edit.
I left them another bug report, so hopefully they can narrow down where the problem is in the coding. I already left them a detailed report from last night on how it seemed beating monsters was random. Now I know why.
I think the sites going to be a lot of fun once it gets up and running. It's still in beta and free at the moment, but some day they plan to go to a pay system. With the number of bugs, I doubt that will be for a while. I really think they tried to implement too much at once. Before the update, the graphics were much simpler--cartoony but cute. The backgrounds were plain but the layout was well organized. Now the background is a colorful forest, the monsters and other characters are detailed and bright. Then underneath are all the ways things relate to each other--the quests, points, items, etc. Too much going on.
They should have gotten the quest system up and running with the old, simple graphics. Once all the bugs were gone, they could have updated the graphics and look of the site. But they seem kind of young--I'm sure they're learning a lot.
I really want to finish some of the little quests they have, but I feel like I'm exploiting the battle aspect of the game which is ranked on a leaderboard (I'm currently #1 with 52 wins since Monday--10 more than the person in 2nd and 30 more than the person in 4th) because I keep screwing around with it and because I save constantly so I beat monsters in minutes with few words written.
Honestly, it's just distracting me. Now that I know what the problem is, I think I can ignore that function and just write until they fix it.
