Suggestions Etc.

Suggestions Etc.

Not turning these in, there's too much broken now for these to be addressed

Please note : I care about this game. If I didn't, I wouldn't have taken the time to write this. There are many that say nothing, and just leave.

To be fair, I don't know how Ian does it. I don't think I could stay inspired about working on the same code for as many years. He truly needs some help. Still, for the game to survive, problems have to be addressed.

Please allow us to turn off that pulsating mission-fail reminder. I dislike it when I see it when I'm in the process of getting the items the mission has asked for. I hate it when I've decided to fail a mission because it asked for an exorbitantly priced item on a very low mission level and it goes on pulsating for an hour or two. It will not succeed in getting me to buy the item, and I won't stand for seeing it. I either put a piece of opaque tape on my computer screen to cover it up, or go play a different game for a while. Let us disable it. Please.

In fact, get rid of ALL pulsating reminders, they are annoying, like a constant drumbeat you can't get rid of. Kids may think they're cool, but the adults are the ones spending. Or not.


Gender equality

"Blushing bride" and "maiden" are concepts from a time when women and men were held to different standards. Why are there no "blushing groom" items? What is the term for a male maiden?


Broken stuff

Spooks Busters no longer drops poisons.

Decapitation Fairy, after you reach the level where you're supposed to get a costume instead, does not decapitate your pet, nor do you get a costume.

Health balls (the old crystal balls) heal zero in battle

Slingshot Snookle does not work for all. Don't tell me to use Chrome, I don't like it. I use Firefox. It also doesn't work on my phone (which DOES use Chrome). If it doesn't work for all the main browsers, the game should be yanked until it's fixed, and the items removed as requirements for anything. I do not like being asked for quest items that are impossible for me to get.

Many reminders come up when they shouldn't, hours before the activity is actually available. Others work fine. Mission ones are always hours early (useless). FIXED

Many games do not work well on mobile because the pan and zoom is disabled (even in non-mobile mode), which makes it impossible to make precise actions. Try Pumpkin Patch. If I disable mobile mode on my phone, there should be no forced formatting, which would make it easier to play some games.

It is irksome having my doll disappear when I try on items, or when I finalize a lush fountain color change. This gets fixed and rebroken periodically, not a biggie, just have to equip spare earrings and after char is made, delete them one at a time until character reappears.

The probabilities for many random events got messed up when crystal balls were added. I have a separate blog with some probability computations. When people can't advance in regional goals because the probabilities got broken, people find other things to focus on, and dismiss the goals.

No progress goals after 75.

Nothing new. Weather changes were new and interesting, and were stopped for some reason.

This is a great game, but it seems like it's self-destructing.

Text Readability

Did you ever try to turn in a term paper written with yellow ink on white paper? Why not? It is unreadable and unprofessional

While playing Venomous Victory, when Serpent gets an extra roll, the text notifying you of this is OUTLINED to be more readable. If this can be done in a minigame, it can be done for the yellow text.

Namechanging / Picturechanging

(1) player's spreadsheets
Stop changing names of items. It does not make the game more fun to play on a base of shifting sand. We have spreadsheets that use these names. We have those spreadsheets because the GBs don't do all we need. No matter what is offered by GBs, people will always want to do more, because no two people think the same way. We may have the GB and still want more info.

The name changing is basically crapping all over the playerbase, with no gain. There are no name conversions posted in a special forum place, so it destroys our databases.

It is a compliment to a game when players care enough to make spreadsheets. But ... there was a guy here that played and chatted - spent lots of real money, and got up to maybe marada level 55 in about a year and a half. He made more spreadsheets about Mara stuff than I ever would - and after the name changes, he quit.

I can look up an item in Runescape's wiki and be presented with a chart showing the price of the item over time, since it was first created. The name (and usually the picture) has never been changed. I can drop out of playing for years, return, and feel like I never left, except for new stuff added.

I felt I'd been scammed when I saw a new book in the book shop, bought it, then pricechecked it and found I already had 47 of them.

(2) familiarity
Maybe we LIKED the old pictures, they are a part of our history. New is not always better, no one is modernizing the Mona Lisa.

I'm mostly referring to item pics, but it applies to other pics also. The new tombola pictures look like cheap random pics bought on the internet with a Marapets pet plopped on it - the old pics had Mara flavor. The Baspinar one shows a woodcutter's cabin, not a castle!

Light-Up Ushunda, Water table, Paffuto Skateboard, Apple Computer etc. - such magnificent, creative, unique items !!! All scrapped for a bunch of lookalikes.

(3) players returning after a long absence
When I returned to Mara after a 9 year absence, the first place I went to was the toy shop. It had always been my favorite shop, with all its unique items. I was surprised to see furniture in there, but other than that, I was happy to see all the old familiar items. There were a lot of new places and shops, but the old shops were still there, a comfort to me. Now the Toy shop has (to me) been destroyed, along with Armour (all those cute amulets !!) and Weapons, and it seems Books is next. There was nothing wrong with species weapons, and armor is useless anyways, so why the changes?

If I were returning today rather than when I did, I'd probably not stick around.

And why is this being done when there's so much broken stuff, anyways ?????


What photo giftbox doesn't do, why I keep my own list

I have the photo GB, and it's awesome. But it doesn't do everything, so I maintain my own list.

--- When Whirlpool changes my pet, I'd like to be able to click on something to tell me if I need this photo

--- I'd like to be able to click on players' pets in their profiles to see whether or not I need those photos. Particularly nice when they've offered a photo I already have, on a trade of mine.

What GF giftbox doesn't do, why I keep my own list

GB will not show me a concise table of info at a glance, which is what I want.

I have a spreadsheet with one line for each GF my main GF pet has eaten, and on that line are flags indicating which other pets have eaten that food. It's nice for getting the other pets' collections up. I don't want to feed my tertiary GF pets an item before the secondaries have had it.

(same for learnies)

Wardrobe : Makeup

The way makeup colors are shown sucks. In the new packaging, the true colors are not shown - you can't see what the color is. And when you look at contact lenses, all you see is a field of blue lens cases. The old packaging showed the colors better, and just showing a color swatch (no packaging at all) would be best. Often I just use Lush Fountain because I can see the colors there. At least, please use the old style of makeups inside wardrobe.

Wardrobe : The popup -assertive female please

This is supposed to be a website where all gender preferences are equal !! But those characters ..... it's a throwback to June Cleaver days.

The male looks assertive - eyes wide open, confident mouth, uplifted chin - ready to go out and do big things in the world. Good !!

But the female looks demure and submissive - half-closed eyes, hair draped over the forehead - not really capable of going out and doing big things.

C'mon, she need to look more professional. Please give her some guts - don't be portraying females as inferior.


Wardrobe : The popup - function

This has become important because so many of us will never be able to max our wardrobes. Thus, I pick and choose. I want to try stuff on, that's what missing wardrobe GB is for. If something costs megamillions in trades, and I can't see it on my doll, I don't buy it.

1. No need to see male and female chars side by side, just split the reset doll button into 2 buttons - reset doll (return to default doll without changing gender) and change gender (without changing clothes).

2. It was hard enough to see stuff on the doll in wardrobe, the popup is even smaller. It would be nice to have an option to pick a display magnification for the doll shown in wardrobe. Seeing makeup is hard. Maybe even a zoom-in-on-face feature.

3. The female char's wig is so long it obscures some items.

4. The background is white. I can't see several white or yellow items at all (e.g., energy element, stardust), so phooey on them.

5.When items were displayed on the wardrobe doll, we could look at the URL to see what color would change in Lush Fountain. I may or may not want something, depending what color in the item will be changeable.

6. Using the popup requires an extra action or 2 every time, and that gets old, especially since the only gain is seeing both M and F, which could be better accomplished with the switch.

Personal Preferences

We all have them. It would be nice to have more things customizable in settings.

- Enable / disable rotating pictures in menus

I once coded a rotating picture display, please kill me. They used to be a thing. At least the one I made rotated very slowly. I detest them now, give me static pictures please.

The trend in pictures now is to show one picture full size and below that, show icons of all available pictures - whichever icon is clicked on becomes the one displayed at full size. You can see these in any online store.

- Enable / disable black info 'eyelids' in menus

These are creepy, they literally make my skin crawl. Either offer the option to disable them, or make them only show on mouseover of an 'I' in a circle (which is industry standard) or both.

The rotating pictures and the info eyelids are why I have bookmarked nearly everything in Mara that is within menus. Haven't bookmarked the temples and pyramids yet (other than Wonky), so I never do them. Oh well.

- Enable / disable showing the rotating tombolas.

I have a lot running on my computer, and the tombola sometimes halts everything for a few seconds. I disabled animated gifs and that didn't work. A static picture of a tombola would be great.

- Enable / disable mission reminders

If a mission asks for something that costs over 500k on level 1-3, I will not do it, nor waste a magic carpet on it. I will just wait it out. I do not need a pulsating reminder in the corner warning me that I'm going to fail in xx minutes.

I want the option to not see them - I can disable temples, but not missions. There are players that enjoy themselves here, but don't do missions. Why irritate them with mission reminders?

Also, the mission reminders always come up at least 3 hours before I can do the mission. They are useless. I use the photo parlour reminder to let me know it's time to do a mission. Seems this has been fixed

All Reminders

I sometimes want to see what's available of the reminders I have set, and click maybe 50 times on the inventory icon to see what reminders will show up.

Please make it so that clicking a little dot somewhere will list all reminders in a big column - then you can click somewhere to make the list vanish.

End-of-Game Animation

Consider having an animation analogous to the tumbleweed but for winning, maybe a dancing minipet does somersaults across the screen. I sometimes play Window's Spider Solitaire just to be able to get to the fireworks screen