Surely...

[Hilton1]

CivWorld would attract so many more players, and so much more praise, if you could join or create games with your friends?
Facebook is all about networking and I was expecting CivWorld to provide a synthesis of Facebook and Civ; A Civilisation game in which you could casually crush your friends without requiring them to buy a full standalone game, allowing even non-gamer friends to take part.

Is it just me who is surprised and dissapointed that (as far as I'm aware) there is no option to choose to play on a world with friends?

 

[h0ncho]

Agree, this is a pretty large oversight. But then, it's a beta.

 

[zbgayumn]

Well, it tells you when your FB friends are in a game, and there's nothing stopping you from playing together.

As for playing with friends exclusively, I think it's a problem of scale. You can't accommodate open games with 200 people and expect the same model to work for groups of 3-10 people. Maybe they could have gone in that smaller game direction, but I don't think that would've been smart from the marketers point of view.

 

[andy52584]

They have built in a way to have your friends play with you in the same game, but as of this intial open beta noone can do it as far as I can tell. The CivWorld wiki page on invites explains how to invite friends to your game, which seems to be the only way to get everyone in one game.

 

[starrywisdom]

Well, it tells you when your FB friends are in a game, and there's nothing stopping you from playing together.
.

Actually there is one very large thing stopping you from playing together - no join option directly. Since OB started games get filled, extremely quickly and you would have to have a lot of planning AND luck to be able to play together. I've got about 900 friends on my FB account I use for gaming, well over 200 of those are playing CivWorld and I've yet to have any of them in any of my games; in either closed or open beta lol.

 

[punctuator]

Yes, this definitely needs to be added. But surely that must be in the plans?

 

[starrywisdom]

They have built in a way to have your friends play with you in the same game, but as of this intial open beta noone can do it as far as I can tell. The CivWorld wiki page on invites explains how to invite friends to your game, which seems to be the only way to get everyone in one game.

This is how you 'earned' the ability to invite people into beta and is out of date now that the game is in open beta.

 

[andy52584]

An update on this. The wiki does seem to be outdated but I have recently come across the ability to invite my friends to my game directly. I am still completely clueless as to how this happened. I left for work and when I got home I had a message saying that I now had the ability to join more than one game. Along with that an Invite button appeared next to my current game.

Testing this I found that I was able to directly invite my wife into my game (she hadn't played Civ World yet) but my brother, who started a few days ago, is unable to join mine due to not having an open game slot.

In either case, this does at least prove that there can be the ability to directly invite friends into your game, but you have to earn it... I think. I have no idea what I may or may not have done to get to this point, all I know is that I was around the 110 fame mark and moved from #1 to #2 in my game's listing while I was at work. Any other relevant/irrelevant details are that my city was pop 11, I had 9 medals earned, and I've been playing since the day open beta started.

I'd like to know if anyone else has experienced this or can kindly explain the mechanics of it if they know.

 

[Glinda]

The invite system worked a lot better before the open beta, when games took hours to fill up. Now that they take only a few minutes, it's really hard to co-ordinate people into the same game, I agree.

Games that are not full, that have your friends in them show up in your list of games to join if you have a slot free, but you can't see WHICH friends are in the games.

Ability to get a second game is related to how close your current game is to over, not to your score in the game.