Dragon City (Facebook game)
Posted: Fri Sep 06, 2013 7:16 am
This game is evil. It's mechanics and functions are made for two purposes only. To make you recruit everyone you know, and to make you pay $ to them. But mostly to make you recruit everyone you know. Which is probably why it has 10 million "active" players. Not quite sure what the definiton of an active player is, but they have about 10 million of them.
The mechanics are simple. You buy dragon eggs, wait until the hatch, and then feed the hatched dragons. And then you wait for them to produce gold, out of nothing. Yes nothing. A level 5 Terra Dragon produces 55 gold per minute. Exactly where this gold comes from is not explained (maybe they're hoarding innocent villages). You feed the dragon to upgrade it. The process is instant. Which brings us to food.
To get food in the game you build a food farm. Then click on grow crops. When the crops have grown you have to click to harvest them. You can then feed your dragons with the food. The number of farms you can have is limited to the level you're in and you may not upgrade the farms before you reach level 8. Which brings us to Xp.
To inhibit any decent player from being able to think for them self the game follows a very restricted linear path in the beginning. You are limited to building and raising dragons based upon how much "experience" you have gained. You gain Xp for doing most things, such as farming, hatching eggs, and combat. And pretty much everything except for the most basic things require you to be in level x.
Of course to "encourage" "sharing" your "experience" the game will every so often slap a screen with one big button that sends a "mystery egg" to a random subset of your friends (you're given the option to dissallow the game from sending it should you be so unfortunate to hit it), but this is more or less a unsolicited spam which I refuse to send.
The second currency of this game is gems. You get them from things such as buying them with real money, sharing the game with your friends, and a few other rare occasions. You start with a few of them and the tutorial will teach you how to mindlessly spend them on nothing if don't pay enough attention (when it asks you to press "speed up" on a process that takes seconds to finish, just wait).
There are a lot of things in this game that reeks horrible. The dragons in this game doesn't have much to say, they might as well have been Pokemon and it would not make any difference in the actual game play at all. In fact the combat system is more or less a clone of the Pokemon combat system (which might be a clone of something else).
Back to the evil bit, if you'd want to exchange gifts and what not in this game with me you can send me a pm and we'll add each other on Facebook. And if you're even more generous you can let me invite/recruit you.
The mechanics are simple. You buy dragon eggs, wait until the hatch, and then feed the hatched dragons. And then you wait for them to produce gold, out of nothing. Yes nothing. A level 5 Terra Dragon produces 55 gold per minute. Exactly where this gold comes from is not explained (maybe they're hoarding innocent villages). You feed the dragon to upgrade it. The process is instant. Which brings us to food.
To get food in the game you build a food farm. Then click on grow crops. When the crops have grown you have to click to harvest them. You can then feed your dragons with the food. The number of farms you can have is limited to the level you're in and you may not upgrade the farms before you reach level 8. Which brings us to Xp.
To inhibit any decent player from being able to think for them self the game follows a very restricted linear path in the beginning. You are limited to building and raising dragons based upon how much "experience" you have gained. You gain Xp for doing most things, such as farming, hatching eggs, and combat. And pretty much everything except for the most basic things require you to be in level x.
Of course to "encourage" "sharing" your "experience" the game will every so often slap a screen with one big button that sends a "mystery egg" to a random subset of your friends (you're given the option to dissallow the game from sending it should you be so unfortunate to hit it), but this is more or less a unsolicited spam which I refuse to send.
The second currency of this game is gems. You get them from things such as buying them with real money, sharing the game with your friends, and a few other rare occasions. You start with a few of them and the tutorial will teach you how to mindlessly spend them on nothing if don't pay enough attention (when it asks you to press "speed up" on a process that takes seconds to finish, just wait).
There are a lot of things in this game that reeks horrible. The dragons in this game doesn't have much to say, they might as well have been Pokemon and it would not make any difference in the actual game play at all. In fact the combat system is more or less a clone of the Pokemon combat system (which might be a clone of something else).
Back to the evil bit, if you'd want to exchange gifts and what not in this game with me you can send me a pm and we'll add each other on Facebook. And if you're even more generous you can let me invite/recruit you.