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On the subject of my current addiction
For the two of you on my f-list who play Love Nikki, you'll share my excitement when I logged in and saw this this morning. For the rest of you...you won't know what's going on. XD
Context: Love Nikki is a mobile game that is, essentially, playing dress-up. You steer an avatar named Nikki around a world whose political structure is based on styling contests, and you compete against the AI by assembling outfits that are judged on various criteria.
If you're interested and are competitive and don't mind using a website to calculate item combos, nikkis.info will let you import your wardrobe and tell you what to use.
There's a lot of farming/grinding involved--Toby finds it hilarious that I say "Hang on--I'm grinding for earrings!"--although you take some shortcuts by buying stuff. Which I do, but I have a rule that I can't spend money on mobile games unless I earn it through doing surveys or, occasionally, art, because I could get into deep, deep trouble that way. You don't have to spend money, though. It's possible to play without doing so, though it takes longer to get the various achievements.
One of the many things to do in it is a regular competition. They supply a theme, in this case, "Ice!", and you dress your avatar up and people vote on it.
There are thousands of people playing this game, and while I have learned strategies to get myself fairly consistently into the top 10%,* I hadn't yet broken into the top 999 until this comp, when I managed to hit the zeitgeist and have been bouncing violently up and down through the top 200 or so for the past 24 hours as waves of votes go through.
Today I broke the top 10. There's no telling where I'll be at the end of this competition--I assume I will not be in the top 20, which is where you get extra in-game prizes, since I peaked 2 days before the end of this round--but it's kinda fun while it lasts. :)
Note: If you're intrigued, you might want to know that it's an Asian game--I think originally Chinese?--with non-American devs who thus are unaware of subtleties of US race issues, and who therefore produce occasional eyerolls when viewed through an American cultural lens. They recently added two new darker skin tones, yay!, but introduced them as part of a hip-hop limited event and there's very few makeups that go with them as of yet (boo!). While many event items eventually end up in the store or other places that allow you to craft or otherwise acquire them, the new skin tones aren't available that way right now so I don't think new players will be able to get them. You start with two skin tones but the darker one only has one extra makeup at the start. Also, the darker skin tones get tags like "sexy" and "mature" while the lighter skin tone gets "pure" (the tags are how you figure out what items to use for a particular competition--elegant, pure, sexy, mature, lively, and a few other ones). I do have word from the subreddit /r/lovenikki that Chinese players think the Chinese outfits are eye-rollingly stereotypical so it's not just us, but I totally understand if it's too annoying to want to play.
The English-language game is run on North American servers, so we're playing with and competing against other NA players. There's a few other sets of servers around the world, and a few different versions of the game out there (mostly Asian) if you're intrigued and want to play it in other languages. The NA server is the youngest of the bunch, IIRC, and the other servers have more limited-edition outfits and the actual storyline of the game has a few more steps then the NA one does.
* The secret to getting into higher ranks in the competition is to understand a bit about the voting, and about the voters. For those who don't play LN: when you go to vote, you get presented with two entries each time and you vote for the one you prefer. You can do that 30 times, and then you have to wait for a while before you can vote again.
The game wants everyone to have a fair chance and to get seen and voted on about the same number of times, so if you don't like how you're doing, then you can change your outfit. Changing wipes out your votes so you start from scratch, but new entries are prioritized and get shown to a lot of people immediately after they're entered, so you'll get an idea of how well it's going to do in the 10-15 minutes after you change. If it's still low after that, change it again.
The voters are the other thing to understand: while there's players of all ages and genders, the majority are young girls who like wings and sparkles and fluffy gowns. The players also like rare and/or expensive items, so what tends to get voted up are the limited-edition items and items from what they call "hell suits" (not an official term--it's the players' term for suits--full outfits--that require weeks or months of grinding to get). They also tend to favor the more literal interpretations of the theme.
Timing counts a bit, too. If you want the maximum number of eyes, you should change your outfit between 12:00-14:00 PST and 19:00-21:00 PST, which are the times the game gives out free stamina (what you spend to go through the storyline), so more people log in and play at those times. I also have it from the subreddit that you don't want to change your outfit on the last evening of the competition--they last for 4 days--because there's not enough time to get a full complement of votes.
Voting goes in waves, which is even more clear to me now that I'm temporarily in the upper echelons. My avatar gets sent out a bunch of times, the votes make me climb the ranks, then it stops getting sent out and I sit at the same number of votes while my ranking sinks as other outfits get sent out and voted on. Then I get sent out again and climb again.
(I am not changing this outfit to attempt to push it farther up--I'm sitting tight for the rest of the competition to see how it does in the end.)
While I'm happy that I've made it this far up the ranks for this competition, I'm mildly annoyed that it's not a very creative outfit. The hair, staff, earrings, and dress are all from the current limited-edition event suit, and it's only smaller details that are assembled from other items in my wardrobe: the purple bow in the hair, the makeup, the necklace, the sparkles in front of her and the moon behind. And, of course, (sigh) the wings.
This was one of my earlier entries, which I liked better as it only used the earrings, crown, and staff from the current event (I forgot to put the sparkles and moon in when I reconstructed it for this screenshot), but my mildly competitive nature meant I scrapped it when I found it was barely in the top 50% after a couple of hours. :) The 12-year-olds don't like it!
Anyway, in conclusion: I used a fake Facebook account to create my game account, so if Facebook discovers this and deactivates the account, as many people on the Love Nikki subreddit have found, then I'll probably quit the game because it's tedious to go back over what I already did. I do not have the Facebook app installed on my phone, though, so I can't share to Facebook from the game (although the game still gives me points and in-game currency for making the attempt!) so I mmmay fly under the radar for a while--that seems to be how FB is finding the people whose fake accounts it's deactivating. FB doesn't want people using special game-only accounts, probably because they can't sell useful info to advertisers from that.
If you play and want to friend me, my ID is 104422404 and my in-game name is Alina Zohar (I opted for one of the randomly generated ones).
Context: Love Nikki is a mobile game that is, essentially, playing dress-up. You steer an avatar named Nikki around a world whose political structure is based on styling contests, and you compete against the AI by assembling outfits that are judged on various criteria.
If you're interested and are competitive and don't mind using a website to calculate item combos, nikkis.info will let you import your wardrobe and tell you what to use.
There's a lot of farming/grinding involved--Toby finds it hilarious that I say "Hang on--I'm grinding for earrings!"--although you take some shortcuts by buying stuff. Which I do, but I have a rule that I can't spend money on mobile games unless I earn it through doing surveys or, occasionally, art, because I could get into deep, deep trouble that way. You don't have to spend money, though. It's possible to play without doing so, though it takes longer to get the various achievements.
One of the many things to do in it is a regular competition. They supply a theme, in this case, "Ice!", and you dress your avatar up and people vote on it.
There are thousands of people playing this game, and while I have learned strategies to get myself fairly consistently into the top 10%,* I hadn't yet broken into the top 999 until this comp, when I managed to hit the zeitgeist and have been bouncing violently up and down through the top 200 or so for the past 24 hours as waves of votes go through.
Today I broke the top 10. There's no telling where I'll be at the end of this competition--I assume I will not be in the top 20, which is where you get extra in-game prizes, since I peaked 2 days before the end of this round--but it's kinda fun while it lasts. :)
Note: If you're intrigued, you might want to know that it's an Asian game--I think originally Chinese?--with non-American devs who thus are unaware of subtleties of US race issues, and who therefore produce occasional eyerolls when viewed through an American cultural lens. They recently added two new darker skin tones, yay!, but introduced them as part of a hip-hop limited event and there's very few makeups that go with them as of yet (boo!). While many event items eventually end up in the store or other places that allow you to craft or otherwise acquire them, the new skin tones aren't available that way right now so I don't think new players will be able to get them. You start with two skin tones but the darker one only has one extra makeup at the start. Also, the darker skin tones get tags like "sexy" and "mature" while the lighter skin tone gets "pure" (the tags are how you figure out what items to use for a particular competition--elegant, pure, sexy, mature, lively, and a few other ones). I do have word from the subreddit /r/lovenikki that Chinese players think the Chinese outfits are eye-rollingly stereotypical so it's not just us, but I totally understand if it's too annoying to want to play.
The English-language game is run on North American servers, so we're playing with and competing against other NA players. There's a few other sets of servers around the world, and a few different versions of the game out there (mostly Asian) if you're intrigued and want to play it in other languages. The NA server is the youngest of the bunch, IIRC, and the other servers have more limited-edition outfits and the actual storyline of the game has a few more steps then the NA one does.
* The secret to getting into higher ranks in the competition is to understand a bit about the voting, and about the voters. For those who don't play LN: when you go to vote, you get presented with two entries each time and you vote for the one you prefer. You can do that 30 times, and then you have to wait for a while before you can vote again.
The game wants everyone to have a fair chance and to get seen and voted on about the same number of times, so if you don't like how you're doing, then you can change your outfit. Changing wipes out your votes so you start from scratch, but new entries are prioritized and get shown to a lot of people immediately after they're entered, so you'll get an idea of how well it's going to do in the 10-15 minutes after you change. If it's still low after that, change it again.
The voters are the other thing to understand: while there's players of all ages and genders, the majority are young girls who like wings and sparkles and fluffy gowns. The players also like rare and/or expensive items, so what tends to get voted up are the limited-edition items and items from what they call "hell suits" (not an official term--it's the players' term for suits--full outfits--that require weeks or months of grinding to get). They also tend to favor the more literal interpretations of the theme.
Timing counts a bit, too. If you want the maximum number of eyes, you should change your outfit between 12:00-14:00 PST and 19:00-21:00 PST, which are the times the game gives out free stamina (what you spend to go through the storyline), so more people log in and play at those times. I also have it from the subreddit that you don't want to change your outfit on the last evening of the competition--they last for 4 days--because there's not enough time to get a full complement of votes.
Voting goes in waves, which is even more clear to me now that I'm temporarily in the upper echelons. My avatar gets sent out a bunch of times, the votes make me climb the ranks, then it stops getting sent out and I sit at the same number of votes while my ranking sinks as other outfits get sent out and voted on. Then I get sent out again and climb again.
(I am not changing this outfit to attempt to push it farther up--I'm sitting tight for the rest of the competition to see how it does in the end.)
While I'm happy that I've made it this far up the ranks for this competition, I'm mildly annoyed that it's not a very creative outfit. The hair, staff, earrings, and dress are all from the current limited-edition event suit, and it's only smaller details that are assembled from other items in my wardrobe: the purple bow in the hair, the makeup, the necklace, the sparkles in front of her and the moon behind. And, of course, (sigh) the wings.
This was one of my earlier entries, which I liked better as it only used the earrings, crown, and staff from the current event (I forgot to put the sparkles and moon in when I reconstructed it for this screenshot), but my mildly competitive nature meant I scrapped it when I found it was barely in the top 50% after a couple of hours. :) The 12-year-olds don't like it!
Anyway, in conclusion: I used a fake Facebook account to create my game account, so if Facebook discovers this and deactivates the account, as many people on the Love Nikki subreddit have found, then I'll probably quit the game because it's tedious to go back over what I already did. I do not have the Facebook app installed on my phone, though, so I can't share to Facebook from the game (although the game still gives me points and in-game currency for making the attempt!) so I mmmay fly under the radar for a while--that seems to be how FB is finding the people whose fake accounts it's deactivating. FB doesn't want people using special game-only accounts, probably because they can't sell useful info to advertisers from that.
If you play and want to friend me, my ID is 104422404 and my in-game name is Alina Zohar (I opted for one of the randomly generated ones).