Zoffix Znet

So here you are... you've just made your very own blog, your website or... a game like Cafe World by Zynga. Now, you've decided to annoy your loyal users for no reason, but just don't know? Fear not! This short tutorial will explain how Zynga manages to successfully annoy their awesome users!

Ask anyone who knows me beyond my good looks... I'm really not a gamer. You won't see me robbing a bank in Mafia Wars, jacking off a horse in FarmVille or doing much else. Cafe World is different though. I can literally choose when I need to come back to the game, be it two hours or three days later; and I'll still be on top of everything. Isn't it great?

So, here I am, preppin' food every 24 hours in Cafe World while my real-world dinner is gettin' ready, and I'm all happy an' all... except Zynga - the creator of the game - decided to piss me off.

What you are about to read is the result of YEARS of research, and Zof' Portal is proud to finally present you *drumroll* The Easy Three-Step Annoyance System™

If your goal is to piss off your users, popups is your best if not THE ONLY way to success! This step is easy to grasp if you were using the Web about 3-5 years ago. Remember when you would visit your favorite pr0n site and about 15 useless popups would flood your screen? You'd have to close each one of them, due to lack if interest, while cursing once for each click?

That's exactly what you gotta do! Every time the user of your website, or game is trying to perform some critical task, or when they the least expect it - throw in a popup. Zynga really excels at this. When I'm serving my gifts, I get a pop-up mid-click! Not only I gotta close it now, I'm also moving around my cafe because the button-release event never got registered by the game. Isn't that kind of annoyance skill amazing?

It doesn't matter what kind of bullshit [see below] your popups contain or how many times you think your user saw them, just pop shit up! The goal is to disturb your users' normal operations.

Cafe World popup telling me to add "neighbours"

If you make someone look like an idiot, they'll hate you for life. This is why it's important to pretend your users are made of cardboard and are incapable of learning.

Repeat after me: user is a moron. User cannot learn. Repeat the same shit to your user FOREVER... and don't forget previous lesson - popups!

During my level 1 in Cafe World, I've learnt that you can add your friends as neighbours. I was slightly disapointed by the time it took to visit each one of them, but I understood that you can visit them once a day for a bonus. That was during level 1, now - couple of months later - I am level 50 in Cafe World, and Zynga doesn't even slow down with their "Add neighbours" popups. This means that I've seen this stupid popup about 5000 times already.

Gee, you can gift in Cafe World? REALLY?!

Along with learning that I can add neighbours during level 1, I've also learnt that you can gift in Cafe World... WOOOW! Zynga decided to take the two steps I've listed above to the next level, and introduced the "It's time to give back popup".

This stupid popup blocks your view and sores the hand with an extra click every time you use about 5 gifts. However, the reason it's much more powerful at annoying users is not the fact that it's repeated too often...

As with any other app on Facebook, there is a limit on how many gifts you can send a day. Cafe World has a limit of 30. Now, I don't need no stupid ass popup to tell me to use my fucking 30 gifts if I want to ever see people giving me stuff back. After you use all your gifts, getting this "Time to Give Back" popup only painfully reminds you that you're out of gifts.

Point at hand? Be obnoxious for no reason. A few good ideas is to remind your user to use a mouse to click, eat food daily and perhaps block their view with a lame popup reminding them to breathe.

As you can see, employing The Easy Three-Step Annoyance System™ I've just described, you can annoy your users enough that they will bother to write a page like this; effectively, spreading the word about your awesome game even further!

• Anaconda

  Wed Dec 22 11:06:00 2010

  Worse than useless Popups... where you're trying to focus a click... OK, I just queued up 17 commands... now, everything's lost cause I just decided to ... "invite friends"... who are all already a member.. and I've already ran out of application send options.
  
  Repeat process for mafia wars, frontier ville, etc etc etc etc etc etc..
  Hmmm /block application???
  

• Dude

  Sun Jul 25 10:40:13 2010

  You forgot something.
  Step 5)Add completely useless items as reward (mafia wars and farmville)
  
  Step 6) Promote the game the user is already plying through a series of popups to slow gameplay so the user doesn't realize there is less content than what you make it out to be.
  
  step 7) put the same information in so many places that the user begins to ignore all of it (again mafia wars: sends email, and gives you alerts redundant in multiple places)
  
  step 8) offer items (most being completely useless) for real world currency. If any user finds a way to get those items without paying for them, label it as cheating and roll back or ban their account.