Review our startup - Taxi Mogul, a persistent browser game
trevelyan: I signed up and it dumped me on a page that looked like a blog. Lots of buttons I could press to do things but no idea what they do. And this page was clearly not fun. Why does it look like a bad blog and why aren't I doing something fun at this point?So I disable the tutorial because it's the most prominent button on the page (I'm thinking that maybe it gets me into the FUN part faster, although if I need a tutorial it isn't a good casual game). Aha - now I see that activation is required. Genuine wtf moment. I can take a tutorial without confirming my account but nothing else? Honestly, if you are going to insist on email confirmation, do it BEFORE you show people your actual game page. Right now you are making a bad impression and then pushing people away.Review: I need to give you my email address. Then you want me to LEAVE YOUR SITE and go to a more addictive site. Now I am wondering why you need to verify my email address at all? If you really need it and I gave you a bogus one then give me a way to change it. Have I just signed up for daily spam? Trust meter starts tilting downwards.If you have a free service it doesn't matter if your users are anonymous. Why harass them? And if you ARE monetizing traffic you STILL shouldn't worry about authenticating email addresses. Not unless you want to send a lot of email, in which case you send the authentication note but don't send anything else until they've confirmed. It's a tinyint field in your database (email_authenticated). If people have fun they will do it.We run a paid site where authentication actually matters and don't care as much. Every now and then we have a payment come in from someone who is not in our system. It is sort of a problem, so we write the person who pays and say, "which account did you want to upgrade?" Email authentication is a good way to prevent yourself from spamming innocent third parties. That's about it.All that said, I think this could be a cool service. The concept is fun. I want to like it. But I have no idea what I should be doing after signing up and you are pushing me away from your service and haven't thought through how to get someone INTO actual gameplay. Instead it is WALL, WALL, WALL. So I leave. I've got about 6 tabs open and when you sent me away to Gmail I didn't come back.