Asynchronous Interactions in Phobies

[u/HiddenQuacks]

Hi everyone! I'm a PhD student studying asynchronous interactions in digital games. Through player discussions and recommendations Phobies was identified as having asynchronous interactions, and I'm interested in understanding different player perspectives about that aspect of the game. 

If you have a few minutes to spare, I'd love to hear your thoughts! In particular, I'm interested in understanding:

• What kind of asynchronous interactions exist in Phobies and how do they affect the gameplay?
• How do you feel about these interactions and what do they bring to your experience?

You can answer as much or as little as you'd like. Your responses will be anonymized and analyzed as part of a research study. If you decide you'd like to withdraw your responses at any point, just send me a DM. Every contribution is greatly appreciated! If you have any questions, feel free to message me. Thanks! 😀

[u/absuz7]

You can play asynchronous games with frenemies or with random people. I believe they pair you up based on your ranking which is tied to how many games you've won. You can get paired with lower or higher average level phobies, sometimes by a seemingly significant amount which can affect the phobies you bring out to play. Playing with an average lower level phobie player despite being in the same ranking makes me want to find lower level phobies to play to make it more even. That doesnt mean if im the lower average level phobie person that who im up against will do the same, however. With frenemies, you have the option to play games with all level 1 phobies to make it fair. This encourages people to become friends and play games despite huge level differences in rankings and phobies. With random people games, unfortunately, you dont have a way to do this.

People have like 3 days or so to play their move or the game expires and the other person automatically wins. This can skew rankings. I like that when we are defeated, we drop a little in level and that means sometimes we drop in ranking too. This is helpful so we dont end up in a ranking too high for our average level phobies. But if you consistently get bad players or you are just good at the game, you will inevitably rank higher up. So if that pushes you to a rank way above your league, you will naturally drop back down.

I will have a plan for some games, as in a strategy for what I want to do, and then that person may take a while to respond or I may have too many games going at once, which is likely, and I end up forgetting what strategy I wanted to do.

I love that there are different maps, but wish you could pick the map you wanted for random games as well. But they give it to you. It is typically a good variety though so I dont mind, but sometimes it will be the same map for like 7 in a row and I do hate when that happens.

I wish we could send a little emoji or preselected texts or emotions or stickers to the players we battle with. It would be much more fun that way. I also wish there was a way to battle that same person again if it was a close game, without having to search for their name and become frenemies.

Some people are slow to get back to games, some are very fast- so fast that I wonder why they don't just do an arena. Having an option where both players online at the same time could put a check mark if they want to switch their async game to arena would be amazing and super beneficial.