Online Observations

Mytopia is Bringing the Social Networks Together

Mytopia (currently in beta) is the latest social something on the scene. It is an online multi-player service which lets you play games with your friends from popular social networks such as FaceBook, MySpace, and Bebo.

Of course, like I said, the service is in Beta.

Here’s an overview of my experience with the service so far (the way it is right now, it’s got nowhere to go but up… so it should improve):

There were no players online in any of the games I tried to play (sudoku, video poker, and bingo). I guess, that will change, but I wish that they would put some dummy players till the site takes off.
The site keeps losing my session. I had to login at least 20 times in 10 minutes. Almost every time I clicked on one of the links on the left hand navigation bar, it would ask me to login again.
The navigation is broken. I tried playing Sudoku by clicking on the link on the left navigation bar. That shows the game description page with a “Play Now” button on it. If you click that button, it takes you to the MyTopia home screen and asks you to login (again). The only way to start it is through the Club House which you can access from the MyTopia home screen.
Finally, they made me create an avatar when I signed up. The avatar that showed after I logged in was completely different from the one I created and saved.

Of course, there are some good things as well. There is no left navigation bar if you access the app from Facebook. The UI is nice and the screens look good for the games (see screen shots below). Hopefully, this site will become much more interesting as time goes on.

Screen shots (click images to see larger versions):

The Home Screen - I got tired of looking at the “Click to Login” message again and again.

Video Poker - I could play finally because there was 1 person online.

March 24th, 2008 Posted in Online Games, Social Networks

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Online Games, Social Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Mytopia is Bringing the Social Networks Together”

Art Says:

March 24th, 2008 at 7:59 pm

Hello,

Thanks for checking out Mytopia.

Just a reminder, we launched publicly a few hours ago, so we’re not surprised you don’t have many people to play with yet. This should improve as time goes on. However, you should always be able to start your game against mBot, the Mytopia concierge. This shifts your game into Practice Mode. (In Video Poker, you actually don’t need anyone present to play.) We’re currently implementing a feature that will let others jump in and take mBot’s place if they seeing you playing alone (and you approve, of course.)

Left hand navigation - these are actually site buttons and outside of Mytopia. You can navigate Mytopia only within the map itself. That said, viewing these links shouldn’t disconnect you from your game session, that’s a bug we will fix asap.

Thanks again for taking the time to check us out. We have a bunch of cool enhancements (and a ton of fixes) just around the corner, so we hope you’ll stay tuned. Feel free to contact me anytime with questions/suggestions.

Art
Customer Support
Mytopia, Inc.
http://www.mytopia.com
admin Says:

March 24th, 2008 at 8:26 pm

Thanks Mytopia for the heads up… I will surely be checking out the site very often.

It will be interesting to see how it holds up against sites such as Kongregate or SugarFreeGames. (Not sure if those are competition for you or not).

Cheers.
Galia Says:

July 9th, 2008 at 10:36 am

Hey there - wanted to let you know that we’ve released some new features to the community (the shop, leagues, inventory) and have also been smoothing out problems and building the online community since our beta launch in March. Plenty more cool stuff in the pipe, so give it a look and let us know what you think.

Thanks!