I'm outta here - who wants the money?

On a side note, if you are the @jedd from New Zealand, I would like to have an off-line conversation, or two, with you. @goodge ( Delete or Edit)

All fair points and I don't disagree with anything you've said. But I think that even in the basic construct of the game, there were a lot of basic things not considered which really impact the game play. See my response to Brntbeer for a few specific thoughts. ( Delete or Edit)

Brntbeer -

Since you're asking, and I don't want to be one of those people who just complains with nothing productive to say, here's 10 things in no particular order:
1) Raging disparity between people's attack/defense sums. I have no idea how someone could have 350k+ sums because even with huge spy rings, there's no way to accumulate enough money to buy enough stuff to get that high (unless I guess you just do tasks 24 hours a day for months - and even then, I doubt it.)
2) The odds of wounding an opponent in most cases (at medium level) is between 40 and 60%. Which basically means if you attack all the time, odds are you'll get nowhere fast because you basically win as much as you lose. To the extent that attacking people is the foundation of the game, there needs to generally be some forward progress for doing so.
3) I've beaten people where it says I only had a 2% chance of winning and was rewarded less than $1k. And lost to people where I had an 80%+ chance of winning and lost $500k. Makes no sense.
4) I understand the desire to increase the viral nature of the game by rewarding people with large spy rings, but this is actually a mistaken thought in my opinion. If I spend 90% more time playing than someone else, I should be exponentially better than them. If they have a spy ring 100x bigger than mine, I could play forever and still probably never surpass them. This makes for a very frustrating user experience. Rewards need to be based on play and/or strategic decisions made in a game - not on the sheer number of people someone knows. Fixing this entails simply creating an algorithm that averages out the size of people's spy rings and weights more heavily on in game achievements. If you want to reward people with bigger spy rings, it should be incremental, not exponential.
5) There seem to be a lot of cool concepts in here - but they don't tie together in any meaningful way nor do I think there's consistency in how they work. For instance, Safe Houses - very cool concept - but to what end? At one point I owned every single safe house at the same time (except the one in Italy). Theoretically, these should have kicked off a lot of cash - but they didn't. I then sold all but one and seemed to earn almost the same amount of cash as I had been earning when I owned them all.
6) Swiss Bank - again, cool idea, but why put money in there? I'm better off spending my money on buying black market items which increase my attack/defense sums therefore protecting me from assassinations. It's not like I even earn interest on the money I put in the bank - on the contrary, I'm disincentivized (not sure that's a word) to do so because there's a 20% transaction fee.
7) I get the sense that the game was created by some creative people sitting around a room coming up with cool ideas. Unfortunately, it therefore plays like a series of disjointed concepts strewn together. Where's the overarching story line? What am I trying to achieve? How do in-game features all tie together towards some greater end/purpose? A strong UI person or two on this would probably add a lot of value.
8) If you're going to take advantage of technology that allows you to have groups of people connected to each other, why not allow people to actually create teams and go on assassinations together? Or where the actions of one member of a team/spy ring directly impact others? It would at least cause people to consider their actions and would allow for groups of people to "fight" each other.
9) Wire Transfers? Short of situations like mine where I want to leave the game and will just give away all my money, what's the game incentive to ever transfer someone else money?
10) with assassinations and tasks requiring so much energy, and energy refreshing painfully slowly, I basically can't come and "play" for more than a minute or two at a time because if I do a couple big tasks, or a few assassinations, I'm out of energy. I know you'd counter that it keeps people coming back and is easy for people to come play for a minute, but it precludes people who actually want to sit and play for 15-30 minutes at a shot from doing so.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. All this said, I do give the creators a lot of credit for creating a twitter based game with some really creative and cool looking features. It just needs some serious work before it's at a point where people won't churn out after 2-4 weeks. Given that the early adopters (generally people who love games) are usually the best marketing mouthpieces for the game, I'd think you'd be wise to quickly get some of this figured out before you lose too many more people like "me."

Jedd ( Delete or Edit)

Jed that was extremely well said. All your points are very valid. I think the latest attempt to get level 40's to go back to 1 shows that they don't have a real plan for the game.

I've played online RPG's and have gotten to the highest level and still had incentives to group up and trade stuff. Find rare items etc... something to keep you interested.

Here you only can buy on the black market - not get anything remotely unique and if you did get something that was good you probably would lose it.

As you said they created the first real interesting twitter game and should be congratulated. But at this point I think they are at a loss as to what to do. They should take a look at higher end games and borrow ideas from them.

Maybe you should just wait for some better updates rather than quit?

My the way your point 1 about how people get such high attack and defense amounts has been a long controversy and really the only way to have done that was to buy the items during the bank bug. Otherwise there is no way to buy that many high level items all at once without losing them. Your 2) is even worse than you state it. Right now you have to be within 10% of someone you attack or get attacked by to get ANYTHING. It limits the game way too much. You've seen me comment on 3... In fact my latest post about vertago beating me and then me beating him and not getting anything - that's stupid as hell - he has massive attack and defense which means he should have dropped items. And your 10) about energy is completely correct... you should be able to BUY energy and health. ( Delete or Edit)

I agree with all of Jedd's 10 points and I'm just about to leave the game myself. There are so many things that don't make any sense here. The assassination engine is more screwed up than ever. I just won against a player where I had 20% chances of winning (high risk) and got nothing. I then lost nearly 200000 of stuff to someone who has nearly identical strength as me and was a medium risk. Where's the logic in that? You all keep saying taking risk is rewarded. In my experience it's not. Both were new opponents to me so no "tired tactics" bullshit. I lost millions to guys like the first before and I never get anything when I win. This is getting incredibly tiresome and frustrating. There's no logic here. And your 20% bank fee? Are you trying to make this game frustrating on purpose? Aaaarrrgh!! I give it another week and if things don't improve I'm gone. I'm having a lot more fun with 140mafia right now anyway... ( Delete or Edit)

Sorry to see you go. ( Delete or Edit)

Hm...I don't have this problem. ( Delete or Edit)