Monster Cache reviews

We finally made it to the point of having a somewhat significant number of reviews for Monster Cache.  A few are from people we know. of course, but most of them aren't.  After 21 Google Play reviews, here are the results:

# of Ratings
21

★★★★★48% of ratings are for 5 stars10

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 4 stars3

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 3 stars3

★★★★★10% of ratings are for 2 stars2

★★★★★14% of ratings are for 1 stars3

 Average Rating

3.71

On Apple we've only had 4 reviews.  I don't know why so many less than Android.  Of those 4, we only know one person.  All 4 are 5 star reviews.

An average of 3.71 on Android is okay, but I would have liked it to be over 4.  3.71 is kinda like a B+, I guess.  It's great to see when people love the application, and of course its a bummer to see the bad reviews.  As I mentioned when I posted about Hawaii, one of the 1-star reviews was because someone from Hawaii installed it and I never generated monsters there. I only recently discovered that I could reply to the reviews if they had a comment. When I generated monsters in Hawaii and responded to that review, the person increased their rating to 3 star, that was good to see.  I just replied to the other 1-star reviews today.  Here are all the reviews I've replied to:

★★★★★ ALCATEL ONE TOUCH Fierce (Rav4)

Maddie Linsacum on Apr 5, 2014 at 10:46 AM They make u pay!!!!!! Got the app so exited left it on while in the car I have no friends= no money= no nets=no more monsters :'( You replied on Jun 8, 2014 at 2:59 PM Hi Maddie, Many free applications rely on advertising and/or In-App Purchasing to generate revenue. We chose not to use advertising in Monster Cache, so once you've used all your free nets, you can get more through In App Purchasing or by referring friends. We're sorry that neither of those options will work for you.

★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 Galaxy S5 (klteatt)	steven mills on Jun 7, 2014 at 9:31 PM This sucks All of the "monsters" are on private property, behind gates, and places you don't need to be. And when you do use all of you nets, you have to buy more? It's free to geocache, munzee, ingress, I'm not paying to drive around just to look at all the monsters you can't get. You replied on Jun 8, 2014 at 2:54 PM Hi Steven. Although some of the randomly placed monsters end up on private property, certainly not all do. Also, the net's long range often allows a monster that is in a residential or commercial lot to be caught from the sidewalk. We're sorry that you didn't find any yet that were accessible, but there are millions out there so please try again. Edit your reply
★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 Nexus 4 (mako)	Lance Shimabukuro on Jun 6, 2014 at 10:09 PM Ok, no monsters in Hi fixed, will try later. Got the apology email within a day, tried briefly but @ work, so will look again later. Revised rating up already and will adjust again after I give it a real tryout. You replied on Jun 5, 2014 at 8:10 PM We are sorry for the inconvenience. You are correct that monsters had not made their way to Hawaii...until now! Now there are thousands of monsters all over the islands, so we hope you will try the app again, catch many monsters, and reconsider your rating. No need to re-register, the account you had made before will still work. Thank you!
★★★★★ App version 1.2.1 htc one (M8) (htc_m8)	Kelli Deems on Jun 1, 2014 at 3:14 PM Love the idea! Caught one monster. So many more are out of reach. I seriously cannot go walking into a freshly planted corn field, and that seems to be where they like to hide. There is no way to reset the map, so that is where they stay. I haven't seen new, more accessible ones appear. Nice idea, but not working out very well. You replied on Jun 3, 2014 at 5:30 PM Sorry that many monsters in your area were out of reach. We agree that you shouldn't try to catch monsters on private land without permission. If you can find more Level 1 monsters in a more urban or suburban area, then you'll gain access to the Level 2 monsters, and hopefully more of those will be in accessible areas near you. Good luck!

Azure osFamily="1" discontinued

As I mentioned in my last post, we had one technical issue to overcome last week.  The server for Monster Cache is hosted on a Windows Azure server.  I set that up when we first started testing, around 2 years ago. At that time, I had a 6 month free trial, or something like that.

It was probably a couple months ago that I got my first email form Microsoft warning that Guest OS 1 was being retired.  That was totally meaningless to me.  I've never heard of "Guest OS" of any version.  Later, they sent more emails saying things like "You *may* be affected by the retirement of Guest OS 1".  So I kept the emails in my inbox and thought I'd look into it more later.  The day I looked into it happened to be Sunday June 1st.  I opened the email again, and noticed that coincidentally the OS was being retired that day,Sunday June 1st.  I followed the instructions to determine if my server was affected or not.  Sure enough, it was.   Uh oh.  The site hadn't stopped working yet, but it was time to get to work.

I had no idea I was using Guest OS 1.  What determined that was a simple attribute in one of the configuration files that said osFamily="1".  It seemed it might be as simple as changing that to osFamily="4" to sue the latest version, but not quite.  The different osFamily version required a different version of the Azure SDK, so I would have to download that.  The new SDK required that I use Visual Studio 2013 instead of the Visual Studio 2010 I had always used for my Azure project.  Thank goodness I had only recently purchased Visual Studio 2013 for the sake of a different project.  So I installed the new SDK, opened the project in Visual Studio 2013, let it perform a migration, then tried to run it locally.  It failed.

When I tried to run the project locally with the debugger, the emulator would just hang.  So I started doing some research for the status messages I was seeing.  Found lots of posts of people saying that happened with the debugger, but not if you ran without debugger.  I found that was true for me too, but it didn't make me confident to release it that way.  I eventually found it was an emulator setting.  More details are in an answer I posted on Stack Overflow.  Then I got another error on my static pages after that, which required more research and another change to one of my configuration files.... so 3.5 hours later, I finally had everything running again with the debugger in Visual Studio 2013.

As it turned out, Microsoft extended the cutoff date for Guest OS 1 to September 1st.  So the server never went down, and I released the changes with plenty of time.  But just one more example of hours of work needed for a Google or Apple or Microsoft upgrade.

Monsters in Hawaii!

With all the activity these past 3 weeks, we had one technical issue (with Azure) that I'll describe in another post, and one non-technical issue.  The non-technical was that someone  in Hawaii posted a one-star review on the Play store, saying they installed the app, saw no monsters, then uninstalled.  Its true, I never generated any monsters in Hawaii.  The reason I never generated any there is because I had to do separate boundaries and generating for that area, and I wasn't sure the small area and population were worth it.  I told Kathleen this, and she said she'd sent emails to geocachers in Hawaii too.

So I quickly started generating monsters in Hawaii.  Using my new monster viewer, I could see the ones I was generating.  Of course, I'm bounding the islands with rectangles, so many are ending up in the water.  And many more end up in huge areas of forest, since that's what most of Hawaii is.  I started focusing on Honolulu then.  My initial numbers weren't making as many there as I hoped so I kept increasing it.  After a couple hours of testing and generating, I had the islands pretty well covered.  I then replied to the one-star review with:

"We are sorry for the inconvenience. You are correct that monsters had not made their way to Hawaii...until now! Now there are thousands of monsters all over the islands, so we hope you will try the app again, catch many monsters, and reconsider your rating. No need to re-register, the account you had made before will still work. Thank you!"

No adjustment to the review yet though.  But I also emailed all users in the database with home state of Hawaii to apologize and tell them the monsters were there now.  The good news is someone found one the next day and posted a message on the Facebook page!  That was good to see.

Second Facebook Ad

Tried some new things in the new ad.

• Separated mobile and desktop for US.  Appears that for desktop we were getting clicks for less than half the price, $.09 / click instead of $0.22
• Made a US and non-US add that include people who like Pokemon

I don't like the fact that I had to continue my old ad "Campaign".  Campaigns, I guess, are defined as who you are targeting rather than a span of time.  Anyway, here were summarized the stats for the last time I ran the ad:

WEBSITE CLICKS?

291

REACH?

15,931

FREQUENCY?

1.75

TOTAL SPENT?

$94.35

AVG. COST PER WEBSITE CLICK?

$0.32

-----------------------------
UPDATE
-----------------------------

The Facebook ad has been running for two weeks now.  Splitting the ad didn't seem like it worked well, the mobile was costing $0.35 / click, and Desktop one by itself wasn't doing much at all.  So I went back to the old one and its been doing great!  The average cost per click went down to $0.25, so we're getting a lot more volume of clicks each day for the same daily price as last time.

Spring Promotion Push

Although we're back to getting sub-40 degree nights and frost advisories in Kansas, the weather was really nice last week.  With the nice weather coming, we're doing a Spring push on the promotions.  Kathleen is contacting a lot of geocaching club presidents to ask them to try it and send out an email to the their members and/or post on Facebook.  And I'm going to run another Facebook ad with a budget at least as big as our last one, maybe $150.  So we'll see how much those help in the next few weeks.

Here are some benchmark stats:
Apple downloads: 653 lifetime
Android downloads: 189 current / 633 lifetime
# "active" (not test or failed registration) users in database: 917
# on Legends board: 261
Monsters found: 3726
Vimeo video views: 579
YouTube video views: 470 (in Eric's account: 48)

------------------------------------------
UPDATE
------------------------------------------
As I mentioned in the UPDATE for the Facebook ad, its been doing better than last time. Plus Kathleen has talked to many cooperative geocaching club leaders too.  I'm not even sure we've seen results of those contacts because a few leaders said they would try it and then pass on to the club, or review with leaders, or whatever.  And some have *thousands* in their clubs.  But still, lots of activity in last 3 weeks.  Here are some updated stats:

Apple downloads: 775 lifetime
Android downloads: 329 current / 820 lifetime
# "active" (not test or failed registration) users in database: 1117 (increased by 200, over 20%)
# on Legends board: 343 (increased by 82, around 30%)
Monsters found: 4139
Vimeo video views: 720
YouTube video views: 498 (in Eric's account: 59)

That's all only translated to $16 worth of purchases so far, but more could come in later as people run out of free nets. (2ND UPDATE: The day after posting this UPDATE, 4 purchases came in for $17.99 each! So make that $88 gross that the ad has brought in, minus 30% for Google and Apple)

Re-Reclassification (Troll Reclassification Reversed)

That was a bummer.  I didn't do enough (any?) testing before I did the troll reclassification several weeks ago.  But finally decided I wanted to run a test this past week.  I created a new account and went out and found a few Level 1 monsters so that I progressed to Level 2, which was now the hybrids.  I went to the Level Details page, and there they were...the Trolls.  I had thought for sure that everything related to monster levels was driven from the server, so I thought the reclassification changes I made on the server would be enough.  I forgot that on the Level Details page I had hard-coded the levels for each monster in order to show all the monsters for that level.  I guess I was just trying to avoid making one more server API call.  That's what I get for taking shortcuts.

I thought about posting an announcement to Facebook that the reclassification was being reversed, but I decided just to keep it quiet since most people won't notice.  It appears that there were only two people who were Level 2 and had found reclassified monsters.  I just promoted them and then made the database changes to assign the new levels back to what they used to be.

Latest benchmarks: 892 active accounts, 254 on the Legends board (including my new test account)

  BACK TO LEVEL 2 :-(

BACK TO LEVEL 3 :-(

Troll Reclassification

When looking at the legends board, I noticed that we have a whooooooole lot of people who don't get past level 2. That's not a big surprise. People only start off with 10 nets, and you need at least 8 monsters to make it to level 2, so some people will run out when they're on level 2 and stop there. And others will lose interest before that. The thing that bothers me about it though is that some of our favorite monsters are on Level 3, particularly Octogirl and Taroostula. That means a whole lot of people never see those.

To change that, today I swapped level 2 monsters -- the Trolls -- with the level 3 monsters -- the Hybrids. Of course this only affects people at Level 2. I figure that if someone got to Level 2 but never found a troll, it doesn't really affect them either. All the trolls will disappear and all the hybrids will appear, but they've still only found Level 1 monsters.

The people really affected are Level 2 who have found a Troll, and therefore were progressing to Level 3. Now they're count of Level 2 monsters will start over. That's a little unfair. At first I thought I'd just promote all those people. There are 79 of them. But I know that many are not active, and I thought it would look strange on the Legendsd board to have so many Level 3, and many that haven't even caught the required 8 monsters. So I decided to just promote those people to Level 3 if they request it. I made that the sole Message of the Day for a while, and posted it on Facebook. I doubt there will be many requests.
  NOW LEVEL 3

NOW LEVEL 2

Google's Pokemon Challenge April Fool's joke

Today Google published a video that was a half-joke.  It's April Fool's Day, and the joke is that they are hiring Pokemon masters who can prove their skills at catching Pokemon.


 The non-joke part of it is that they actually put a mini-game in Google Maps so that you could see Pokemon in Google Maps, tap on the monster, and catch it.  The big differences are that

1. You don't have to physically go to the location the monster is to catch it.  You can just scroll your map wherever you want.  
2. All their monsters seem to be centered around Google headquarters

We're going to post a few comments on blogs, and on YouTube, to let people know that Monster Cache is a real game that already does this.  We'll see if we can generate any traffic.  As of today, we have about 800 accounts in the system and 235 players on the Legends board (making 29% of registered users who have ever found a monster).

Learning about App Annie (via TechCrunch and Flappy Bird)

This past week, TechCrunch had an article about the Flappy Bird developer removing his app from the App Store.  As a game developer, the whole Flappy Bird app story was very interesting.  It was a simple-in-concept game that was very difficult to play.  Apparently, people found this very addicting and it became the #1 free game in the App Store.  It did have ads in it, and supposedly, at one point it was generating $50,000 of ad revenue a day.  But the developer found that it was a lot of pressure to deal with the popularity, so he took it down, and a bunch of clones appeared in its place.

But anyway..... the article referred to some statistics found on a site called App Annie.  I'd never heard of the site, but it compiles statistics about iOS applications.  It does that for free for every app, including Monster Cache.  It seems it can also do the same for the Play Store, but only if you sign up for an account and then tell them your Google Developer Console password.  I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that, but I did already learn some interesting things from the free data about the iOS version.

At one point, the iOS version of Monster Cache was in the top 500 grossing Adventure and Family apps in the United States.  And more recently, it was in the top 500 overall Adventure and Family app downloads in Ireland and the Czech Republic.  Based on the dates, the United States grossing ranking came after we got the good response from the Kansas geocaching club, even though that was only about $60.  The Ireland and Czech Republic rankings came after our international Facebook ad.  (That ad cost $100 and brought in about 100 new users, so it cost about $1 / new user). I don't know where App Annie gets this ranking data, since gross revenue and specific # of downloads aren't publicly displayed in the App Store.  But since TechCrunch references them,  I'll believe it.

(Current # players on Legends Board: 202)

High cost of developing for Apple

You could say that I am biased because I do all my daily development work on a Windows machine and use a lot of Google tools.  But I've been very frustrated by how much money it costs to develop a phone app for Apple platforms.

First of all, you HAVE to have an Apple computer to develop for the Apple platform.  The converse is not true for Android, you can develop for Android using a Mac.  But Apple forces you to have an Apple computer in order to produce a testing profile through their development environment, XCode.  So when I wanted to develop Monster Cache for iOS, I had to go buy an Apple computer that ran a certain version of  XCode, which translated to needing OS X 10.7 (Lion).  So I got a used iMac for about $400.

Next cost is the fee for a developer account.  For a Google Play developer account, there is a one-time fee of $25.  For Apple, its a YEARLY fee of $100.  I just had to pay for my second year.

After paying for both of those, I was able to develop Monster Cache for iOS and make updates for a little over a year.  Then iOS 7 came out.  Developing for iOS 7 requires the latest version of XCode, XCode 5.  XCode 5 requires that your Mac's operating system be at least OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).  Apple no longer distributes version 10.8, so if you want to upgrade through the App Store, then you have to upgrade to OS X 10.9 (Mavericks).  Of course, my older iMac does not support 10.9.  So I will have to buy another Mac, which means another few hundred dollars.

The last Apple-specific cost I've been seeing is far less significant, and may not even be Apple's fault exactly, but its just a little salt in the wound.  When people make In App Purchases, Google and Apple transfer the money to my bank account at the end of the month.  Apparently, Google's transfer is a domestic one, but Apple's is an international transfer.  My bank charges me $3.50 for each monthly transfer that Apple makes to my account.

Facebook Ad

Back in March of 2013, I ran a Google ad for Monster Cache.  I had a $150 coupon if I spent $50, or in other words, $200 worth of advertising for $50.  That $200 only got me about 20 signups as far as I could tell.  So roughly $10 per signup, which is horrible.

A couple weeks ago I got a coupon from Facebook for $50 advertising credit without having to spend anything.  So I started a Facebook ad yesterday.  It works very similarly to a Google ad.  You set a daily budget, you give it keywords and other parameters to target your audience, and it charges you per impression based on how "valuable" your target audience is, or something like that.  I set my daily budget at $10/day, which I think is considered laughably low :-)  But I'm not in a hurry and I want to see how it works before spending a bunch.  So far I have spent $18 and about 16 people have signed up.  That's just over $1 per signup, or about 10 times better than Google!  Its' also resulted in 3 Facebook page likes, and 18 people who like my Facebook advertisement itself, LOL.

I'm also finding that the Facebook Ad Manager is easier to understand and navigate than the Google ads.  I originally uploaded 2 images.  It created 4 separate ads: one for the News Feed and one for the Right Column for each image.  Of those original four ads, only one seemed to be getting many clicks -- the one with the large image in the News Feed.  The others had used up $2 with no results, the large image in the News Feed had used up $16.  Surprisingly, most of the signups it generated were in our European countries, not the US.  So I took the good ad and split it into two more -- one for US only and one for Europe only.  Now I want to see if the European ad clicks might be cheaper, so maybe I can get the price down to less money per sign up. (UPDATE: Turns out the European ones were more expensive).

Here's a screen shot of what my ads look like now:

Azure CPU spike all Sunday afternoon and evening

The Monster Cache server is hosted on Microsoft Windows Azure.  I made that decision for a few reasons:

1. Initially I was just going to use my existing Lanitek server, but I have another important web site running there, GPRA Upload.  Once I had an issue on Monster Cache where I wasn't closing some database connections and it brought down not only Monster Cache, but GPRA Upload too.  That convinced me to get Monster Cache its own server.
2. At the time, I had just recently attended a seminar on Windows Azure, so I guess I was curious to try it out.  And they were offering a 90 day free-trial (or maybe it was 180 day?), so that was good since we were several months away from being ready to launch.
3. I had, and maybe still do have, a hope that if Google or Apple ever promote the game then there will be a spike in traffic, and then I could easily increase the server capabilities on a short-term basis, if needed.

I haven't been super happy with Windows Azure for these reasons:

1. Its more complicated to use than a normal web server.  Some things that took extra time that I can think of off-hand are web Sessions, file uploading, and making backups.
2. They keep changing the features. When I signed up, they had pretty decent tech support.  Now you have to pay extra for tech support, with the minimum plan being an extra $29 / month
3. It hasn't worked perfectly, I've had a couple instances of long down time that I consider their fault.

One instance of down time was yesterday.  I noticed in the afternoon that my Monster Cache app wouldn't log in, but I thought it was my phone's issue.  When I tried the web site at 9 pm that night, I found the web site wasn't even coming up, but just failing to respond.  I started looking for support options, and that's when I found that  I no longer had tech support, just billing support.  So then I looked for a way to "reboot" the app, since there isn't really a lone server to reboot.  That's when I found the CPU monitoring tool.  It showed that Monster Cache had been using 86% CPU since mid-afternoon.  Here's their chart:

That was very strange since I know that our traffic is VERY low, like only dozens to hundreds of hits per day.  There was an option to reboot an instance of a role.  I only have one instance, so I rebooted it at about 10 pm.  You can see that the CPU went back down to 0% and its been working fine so far today.

Monster Cache European Launch

Once Apple approved the latest Monster Cache version on iOS, we were ready to launch in Europe!  I'd already generated all the monsters a couple months ago or so.  I tried to use about the same monsters / square mile proportions as the U.S..  But when using the monster viewer, it still seemed like there were too many empty patches, so I added a lot more level 1 monsters than my initial calculations (And around the same time I generated another million level 1 monsters for the U.S., to try to reduce empty spots in U.S. as well).

To do the launch, I just went into the app configuration areas in both Android and iOS and selected all the new countries in which I wanted to release.  It was pretty much that easy, after all the other preparations had been made in the application itself.  Oh yeah, I also had to add the new countries to our "Supported Countries" table in the database so that they would show up on the registration form for people to indicate where they are from.

Next was promoting it.  I only had two leads there.

1. When we first made the beta and the Vimeo video a year ago, a German blogger had found Monster Cache and blogged about it.   Unfortunately, Monster Cache wasn't ready for Germany at that time.  Now that it was, I tried to comment on that blog post to let them know, but the comment never got approved.
2. As a result of that post, 3 German people had signed up a year ago during that beta.  I had had to email them to tell them we weren't ready for Germany.  So now I was able to email them again and let them know it was ready!  But I didn't hear back from any, nor did it seem like any started playing.

Even though both of those ideas seemed to fail, we started getting sign-ups from Germany and the UK.  As it stands now, we have 9 German players on the Legends board, and one from the UK.  Current Legend board total is 172 players with 2693 monsters found.  And we got our first German In App Purchase too.

Here is the full list of European countries for which I generated monsters and released the app, along with their approximate square miles, which I think I got from Wikipedia.  The countries I chose were essentially based on wanting to get the biggest Western European countries and then including other countries that fell within the large box that bounded all of those.  Not sure why Apple did not provide the capability to release in Boznia and Herzegovina.

UK	94060
Ireland	32595
Spain	194897
Portugal	35655
France	211209
Germany	137847
Belgium	13120
Netherlands	16485
Switzerland	15943
Austria	32383
Italy	116304
Slovenia	7819
Croatia	21829
Czech Republic	30365
Boznia and Herzegovina	19741	Android only