PBBG Review

The first reviews will be posted soon. I’ve been playing a couple of games and will post my opinions over the next weeks. The way it will work will be I will post a day by day guide to my progress on a game,  the days posted here may be a week behind the actual days so that regular posting can become a norm, and as wordpress allows me to schedule the posts I can add them as I go along and they will be posted each day, that way I will build a few in advance and not look like a slacker for not posting…

This is not really a review. As to review I would need to join the game. I couldn’t I will explain.

First. This game came to my attention after it joined the voting site. Within 4 days it had amassed 190 votes. I was suspicious. Why? Well looking at the games sign up page it lists the players online, the most I’d seen were 17 on-line, averaging from 8 to 13 each visit. So how do you get 190 votes in 4 days with less that 15 ish players on-line. Proxies?

Now let me explain why I could not sign up. Even though I used the same email address I use to sign up to other games, this game tells me that address is not valid. WTF? So I tried another, known working email address, same problem. I tried 3 times with 3 different email addresses and got the same message. So FAIL guys.

Because of the vote cheating and the inability to sign up, I recommend you look elsewhere for your PBBG fun.

I did not score this game as I could not even sign up Also it has now been suspended from the voting site.

I have begun the process of reviewing games. I have a list of the first 10 games I am going to review. I will be joining this weekend, then playing for about a week, then writing the first reviews after that. I will be updating my progress after that, checking for regular updates, economy problems, player reactions, staff actions etc. I think this will give us a good indication of how the games play etc.

I am also considering a scoring system.

Overall score would be a percentage of 4 things.

• 10% design
• 10% originality
• 30% community
• 50% game play

That means 1-10 points for design, 1-10 for originality, 1-30 for community, 1-50 for game play. These scores could rise or fall as the weeks go on, to show if the game is improving or getting worse. I plan to write a script to show a table of these scores and keep it up to date, will look at creating this over the next weeks.

I chose the 50% for game play simply because I consider this the most important decider for me. I’d be interested in your comments on how this system of scoring could work.

This is not a review more of a rant about the conduct of one of its players. I own a couple of games myself, they are obvious to anyone who knows how to click the links on the sidebar. The last two days a player has joined that has been spamming online members of my games with links to Hells Revenge. They even created a second account after the first was fedded for spamming the first time.

Now I do not know if Hells Revenge encourages its players to spam other games, but I don’t. So a warning to any owners who do not take this sort of thing seriously. I will be naming and shaming games that do spam me.

If the owner would like to comment on this post and explain his or her policy in this regard, they are quite welcome to. In the meantime, there will be no review for this game until I hear something different from the owner.

Tags: ethics, name and shame, policy, spammers

Welcome to the first post on our new blog on all things Persistant Browser Based Games (PBBG).

Over the next few months we hope to add reviews comments and other such things here so that you don’t have to waste your time playing PBBG’s that are just not worth playing. Your time is precious you don’t need to waste your time playing something that when there are so many great games out there.

We will also revisit sites every now and again just to see if they improve or get worse. So if you play PBBG’s and want the latest up to date information on your favourite addiction, then bookmark this site, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

We also plan at some time to have a podcast to work alongside the site so watch out for that too.

Tags: Games, PBBG, podcast, Reviews, subscribe