complaints

Nothing else needs to be said...

I'll put it into words anyway.

• Account creation text being changed to "Play for free" makes it feel more like generic slop.
• The /play page looks bloated and messy for a sign-up screen, if these screenshots and such need to be put somewhere it should be the home page.
• An additional click required to create a bot via clicking "customize", really?
• Immediate forced login upon creation is extremely vexing for anybody creating multiple bots.
• Not a fan of the immediate infant fight either. If the idea is to provide some type of built-in guidance, highlight the train button until level 20 or something.

Time to invest in 0 train bots since they are now finite!

Thanks for the feedback. For context, I started running ads for the game in January (223 new bots! 59 to level 2+ and 17 to level 10+ so far). The register page is the ad landing page, so a key target audience is people that have no idea what the game is. That's why that page now has info about the game and why the form has been streamlined (some fields removed/optional, auto-login/battle, etc.).

In general, expect to see ongoing changes in this area of the game as I continue to experiment and adjust based on data. I'll work to balance needs of veteran players with needs of new players as much as possible, but some (hopefully small) new friction points for veteran players may be inevitable. And hey, I was at least thoughtful enough to increase the AoE buff duration to 101 as part of the auto-battle change. :)

Perhaps an additional link to the old creation page for old timers?

heya! new player here [along with my friends]. couple of things [and one that's more general]:

• i think hiding the bot name is kind of a bad idea, especially seeing as you can't change it for a month after. perhaps it should actually be that your username is mirrored in [at least your initial] bot name? [it could already do this, i'm not sure]

• from what i've read, a lot of the issue for old players is it's a lot slower to make a lot of bots. i understand this would be a lot of effort but it's definitely worth considering a way to teach this to players [this would probably also involve allowing multiple bots to be had from one user, which iirc is in progress?] since that's VERY unintuitive right now

• also, it feels nearly impossible to gauge the difficulty of your opponents you want to fight. it'd be a lot nicer if you could at least see roughly how well you could do against them, even if itd hurt the magic a bit, because I don't know who to fight unless I explicitly search the forums for grinding bots [which isn't great]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and welcome!

especially seeing as you can't change it for a month after

It's actually worse than that - you cannot currently change it at all (I think you're thinking of bot reset, but that just sets you back to level 1). What I tried to solve with the default botname (which understandably new players will probably gloss over) is eliminating the "come up with 2 names before you can even try this game" friction point that previously existed. I like the idea of instead defaulting to your username - avoids the aforementioned friction and avoids having a random name. I made a note to come back to this.

this would probably also involve allowing multiple bots to be had from one user, which iirc is in progress?

I'm impressed you stumbled across this already! You're exactly correct. The vision is for your game login to function more like an MMO account with a single login where you can manage a bunch of characters/toons/bots. This shift will significantly change what bot creation looks like, so I'm hesitant to focus too much on the current registration flow, but at the same time the "MMO-style" login is realistically still a ways off, so if there are short-term wins to be had, I'm willing to revisit (e.g. the botname default mentioned above).

it'd be a lot nicer if you could at least see roughly how well you could do against them

Nice, this is where a new player perspective is really helpful. This is an interesting idea. I could imagine some sort of system that evaluates opponents and buckets them into {easy, medium, hard} (or something like that) and rewards you differently based on the bucket. This could fit into some ideas from last year that I have floating around (fight list revamp, all bots gain energy). Nothing planned in the short-term for this though (if you stick around, you'll get used to seeing me say that...).

I like the idea of instead defaulting to your username

This is done now.