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Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

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51–60 of 85 posts

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#51
post #50

Meta: I am appalled by the amount of hate and (non-constructive) criticism in these comments. In a total role-reversal, all of the comments on TC are positive and encouraging. The congratulatory comments in this thread have been downvoted to negative points. What gives? Is it easier to criticize than give encouragement? These guys already have 95,000 active users... what a feat! I am ok with constructive criticisms a…

About the downvotes: "Congrats Josh" and "Woot go Josh!" don't add anything. If they were "Josh sucks!", they would be downvoted equally.

True, but there is a difference between downvoting and not-upvoting. Leaving them alone at 1 point would have let them sink to the bottom just as well and not appeared to be mean-spirited.

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#53
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still MINTING money on Facebook. I imagine the top 5 grossing facebook games make the top 5 grossing iPhone games look like adorable little hobbies. The #40 game on Facebook has 6M monthly active uniques. THe #120 game on Facebook has 2M MAU. How many iPhone games have those kind of numbers? Platform quibbles aside, I imagine it's the fastest/cheapest way to get tens/hundreds of thousands of users to test…

Agreed, the bet isn't on this game, its on the team. As in, "I bet they could displace Zynga one day".

That isn't even necessary as a success condition, but in general, YC invests in Texas Hold'em because they see the glimmer that suggests you're capable of eventually executing on FarmVille. (Zynga wasn't Zynga on day one, either.)

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#54
post #32
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really needs to be a BugMeNot for Facebook. Or something similar. edit: Mailinator's alternate addresses occasionally aren't blocked, but I haven't yet successfully received a confirm email :/

Why not just set up a fake facebook profile?

Cause it takes a lot of effort to make a 'fake' facebook profile - I had one and it only lasted a few months before it was locked out pending government-issue ID being sent to them, since I wasn't actually using it for anything more than looking at the occasional thing that required an account I can only assume they monitor for unusual use patterns.

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#55
post #13

I'm pleased for these guys, but a little surprised as well. Launching a Pokemon social game isn't exactly being disruptive; it's not as if there's any dearth of them on Facebook, particularly at a time when many companies are fleeing the already strip-mined platform for greener pastures.

People are still MINTING money on Facebook. I imagine the top 5 grossing facebook games make the top 5 grossing iPhone games look like adorable little hobbies. The #40 game on Facebook has 6M monthly active uniques. THe #120 game on Facebook has 2M MAU. How many iPhone games have those kind of numbers? Platform quibbles aside, I imagine it's the fastest/cheapest way to get tens/hundreds of thousands of users to test…

Yup, still one of the surprisingly best keep secrets in start-up-dom is that Facebook apps is a much better, albeit riskier market than iPhone apps.

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the downvotes: "Congrats Josh" and "Woot go Josh!" don't add anything. If they were "Josh sucks!", they would be downvoted equally.

True, but there is a difference between downvoting and not-upvoting. Leaving them alone at 1 point would have let them sink to the bottom just as well and not appeared to be mean-spirited.

I see that as noise, and I prefer to downvote noise. Not voting is reserved for comments with very small contributions or opinions I disagree with and don't seem properly justified. But that's just me.

I agree that downvoting is a harsh punishment, but it's also my opinion that this "noise" should be differentiated from the above cases, so I don't see any way around.

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#58
This startup actually has me more exciting than a lot of the other ones here, even though I doubt I'll ever use it. Games are rarely about being novel, they're about being good. And if if pg tells the truth about funding people, not ideas, then I'll be very interested to see how this turns out.

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#59
So here's my bug report:

- Quest completion progress doesn't update until I manually click through into the details.

- A retreating pet is referred to as {{pet_name}} (problem in the template layer?)

- Using just about any special character when naming a pet name instead

- A blank name will be accepted (I expected it to revert to the default name) and used as such.

-- "What would you like to call this monster?" alert box message is about as descriptive as "Would you like to perform this action?" (The offending part being just "this")

- If I'm allowed to try to use a capture card just once, this mechanic is not apparent. It just looks like the inventory disappears.

- switch pets screen appears to be cached on first view of the battle. Subsequent switches will not show damage to HP of any party members.

- sometimes the battle will just stop at "You have chosen to use Bash" message. Presumably the client has missed a response from the server and there is no retry logic?

- at some point it would start refreshing the page after every battle move is executed

- is successful escape (run away) supposed to be titled "you lost this battle"? (it also seems to have killed the in-play pet that escaped)

- after the battle, the pet graphics are always fixed, but the experience bars are sometimes re-ordered.

Some other observations:

- it's annoying to go to the dashboard after every single battle.

- the "weak bash" (0 energy move) is not available unless a pet has little energy (what if I want to just tap a wild pet , in a capture attempt?). At that point the UI is very un-intuitive, as regular bash becomes weak, and all the moves (including weak bash!) are greyed out.

- I wasn't able to figure out where pets beyond the 4th captured one are at. No apparent way to select or re-order the party.

-- as such the game quickly becomes nothing but a low-level grind, as first weak pets take up all the available slots and make it impossible to move further into the game.

- do I _have_ to explicitly click on "aquire[sic] reward" if it's only gold (presumably this is always wanted)

Re: Youngest Y Combinator Founders Launch MinoMonsters, The Pokemon Of Social Games

#60

Sorry to rain on the parade, but isn't this simply a clone of Pokemon? You start by selecting one of three monsters (they even resemble the starting three from the orignal game). The battle screen and fight dynamic looks almost identical. Am I missing something?

By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize other's work and belittle their motivations?
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