2021-01-05 21:04:22

TLDR: A long life description in bitlife and some questions and ranting at the end.
Hey there,
I just started playing bitlife again cause the mafia update, one of my recent lives went like this: 1-18 years: Not much happened, except i started shoplifting at the earliest age i can because i wanted to work myself into the italian mob. Keeping up appearances is important, so i was a good kid at home and at school. I joined a baseball team out of chance, i was like 97% athlete so i thought why not, noone would expect the star player right? Years flew by and i'm out of high school, with a chance to be drifted in to a pro team, and by a surprise me option, i got drifted. Then my view changed, let's be the baseball god! 19-49 years old or so: Played pro baseball in two teams, the first got championship once, the second went into the top ten before i was too old to continue playing. Got lots of awards, the golden glove i got 8 times. Got married to a nice girl, had a kid too. Did the resolute challenge, which is running now, i hated it, reading books with the new mechanic is ugh. Then the 50 year mark comes, and i'm out of the team, with like 700000000 dollars in my pocket. My fame was still like 80%, so i thought okay, athlete career over, let's go actor! I kept my actor career and fame right at the top till an event comes up that i'm gay. It was like at year 65 or so. I thought what the hell now? Dumped my wife and kid, got right down nasty with everyone, and got fired from the lead actor position which i was occupying. My money got down to like 300 million, because the judge who conducted the divorce divided everything equaly. My fame declined, and at like 75 or so i'm completely ordinary. The mafia still remembered me it seems because when i asked, they granted entrance into the italian mob. Remember, i'm like 75 at that time. Began to conduct auto burglaries, and built a nice extortion racket. At 90 years, i'm still living with everything at least in the 90's. Got accepted into the family, took the omerta, oath of silence for you who is not addicted to mafia stuff, basicaly you can not leave the family and if you do you'll get killed. At 97, some unfortunate events appear and the soldier of the italian family gets killed by a bullet to the  head. I was sooo near the 100 year mark!

Now, questions: Can anyone of you contact the bitlife devs? I tried facebooking, tweeting, and emailing them but got no answer at all if they'll make at least a toggle for us blinds who want to have a chance of escaping prison? I completely understand that they don't want to redesign their minigame, but now that the mafia update is out i think we need to have some way of escaping too, sometimes you get life sentences or like 40 years and that's that. And yes, i know you can close and reopen the app, but to me that feels cheating.

Alternatively, do anyone of you have humorous or unexpected bitlife situations?

Hail, Daughter of Hatred. Creator of Sanctuary. Hail...Lilith.

2021-01-06 07:17:31

Personally, while I really do appreciate what the developers have done for accessibility I think the interface needs a major rewrite. It is not comfortable to use at all. I’m talking about VoiceOver specifics here. You’ve always got to look around on the screen for what you need.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-06 07:39:12

The interface is kind of clunky, but it seems like a change that would be pretty difficult. So it will never happen because the blind playerbase is small enough that it wouldn't be worth the time investment.

2021-01-06 11:13:04

They did say they were going to do it though. But then they released that first challenge that required you to escape from a max security prison, and that just annoyed me. If they were really going to fix it, why didn't they wait with that one? My philosophy was "complete all the weekly challenges or none of them." So I uninstalled it.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2021-01-06 15:06:24

they never fixed it as far as i can tell, and the interface is just good for me as it is, i kind of grew accostumed to the stuff. I'm trying to see any optimism here, but my polite questions they just ignore, and no, i don't mean i pestered them on every platform, send them one polite letter on all of them to hopefuly get a response, they seem they don't care anymore, i don't know what to think here.

Hail, Daughter of Hatred. Creator of Sanctuary. Hail...Lilith.

2021-01-06 15:11:19

Well, others report the same thing as well. Anyway, the fact that the game displays some advert every few turns and social media posts are actual social media posts do keep me away from that one.

Greetings moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2021-01-06 15:12:53

Whenever I try bitlife, I always find the just general reading of stuff clunky, having to poke around the screen, find updated entries and navigate the overlays, then I'll run into something like the prison minigame, get frustrated, put the game down for a few months, hear about a cool update, try again, and the hole thing starts up the same.

Again, if people are prepared to literally learn which bits of the screen to poke rather than navigating by normal Vo commands, that's fair enough, but last I checked, even bitlife's standard interface was more like usable but annoying, than truly accessible.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2021-01-06 15:19:12 (edited by Kitsune 2021-01-06 15:19:35)

what's the bit life's twitter?

I am a divine being. I can be called a primordial deity, but that might be pushing it, a smidge. I am the only one of my kind to have ten tails, with others having nine. I don't mean to sound arrogant, but I have ascended my own race.

2021-01-06 17:08:39

I do understand how the interface is clunky and do agree that it could be much better, but I work around it because I love the game so much. Touching around the screen is the most convenient way to get things done, but you can do without if you avoid the log. To do that, you have to come at it from the top or the bottom of the screen depending on where the button you need or whatever is located. I know the game well enough that I know how the overlays for each screen are usually layed out and where the log generally inserts itself, so I can avoid it.

2021-01-06 19:51:58

@BitLifeApp if they haven't changed it since I stopped.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2021-01-06 20:26:10

they did not. To be honest, if they won't do anything to at least answer me, even if in the negative, i'll stop, too. It is my favorite passtime, from time to time i can play four or five lives a day, and i love the randomness and stuff, but this support team kind of angered me. My idea was that okay, if you don't want to provide a playable minigame, then please make a toggle which we could toggle to like get out from prison based on your stats or a random 50 50 chance or whatever. To say the least i don't like support teams who won't answer you, at least they don't have an automated we received your message email, i hate those even more. I'll stop before saying anything which i shouldn't, i'm extremelly disappointed in Candywriter now, they seemed a nice bunch.

Hail, Daughter of Hatred. Creator of Sanctuary. Hail...Lilith.

2021-01-06 21:21:57 (edited by Lucas1 2021-01-06 21:24:21)

Unfortunately, being nice does not give you karmic bonuses while trying to run a small business supplying a game to 500k plus people, maybe 2000 of whom are blind and that's probably a liberal estimate. Spending the two hours to add a check for the prison minigame, and an hour testing, might not even produce enough money to be worth it. How you guys feel about Bit Life is how I feel about mainstream games that are far more inaccessible than BitLife ever was.

2021-01-06 21:59:02

I have sent several tweets to the developers over the past month. Guess how many responses I received? None. They are busy re-tweeting peoples bitlife accomplishments and photos, but they can’t answer support messages. I find that completely unacceptable. Again, there are no words to describe how much I appreciate the work and effort they have put in, but that effort won’t go a very long way if you can’t answer support questions. There are also reports that the android version has not been updated since the first politics update was released.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-06 22:05:12

I think I may have been wrong, but here’s a tweet. G2 Shakespeare. LAST update Android got was in November. AND it was a small update covering a few bugs. It's a shame, really... I know it's a free to play game, but there are many users who paid for Bitizenship like me, and/or stuff like God mode. 2 days ago. 1 Reply. 7 Likes

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-06 22:23:33

I'm kind of half agreeing with lucas here, but i indeed recall that they said they're going to do something about this. Don't you find this a bit let's say interesting that whenever we ask about it they just ignore us? I think if they don't want to do stuff about accessibility anymore, they should at least say this to our face, i don't like this disapearing business thingy, considering the fact that i bought bitizenship the moment it came out, and the only thing why i didn't buy godmode is that i don't care about editing stuff, i'm all for randomness. I'm just curious on why they do not answer me, they're tweeting all over the place, my phone tells me every two hours a new bitlife tweet has arrived, i'm always hoping against hope that they answered to me but no.

Hail, Daughter of Hatred. Creator of Sanctuary. Hail...Lilith.

2021-01-06 22:24:40

Alright, so here’s what we need to do. I think a whole bunch of us need to tweak the Twitter account calling for a response.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-06 23:34:10 (edited by Dakonna 2021-01-06 23:34:24)

It's so weird though. They've done voiceover fixes in the past, like labeling the buttons on the main screen and making all the progress bars accessible. So they obviously know blind people are still playing. this is why I don't get why this minigame stuff isn't happening. And their pr people must be pretty on top of things from the amount of tweets they send out. But I think most of the time it just works this way: You send them a pretty picture of you playing, and if they like it enough they'll throw some sparkly little emoji your way and that's all you'll be getting out of them.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2021-01-07 00:47:14

Hi,
I have a question for those of you who use twitter. Do you have pictures on your profile? Because if your profile has no picture and you're just the twitter egg, it is very likely that they might not be getting your tweets, as some accounts have now set themselves to automatically mute accounts with no profile picture, to prevent trolls.

2021-01-07 00:52:49

Yes, I do.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-07 05:04:30

To be oneste i  really wanna play. but i  have no idea how. do i  just spend time in the app? there's not alot of stuf i  can do as a  baby so i  don't no.

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvelous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man."
― Frederic Chopin.

2021-01-07 10:52:51

If you're younger than 3 years old, you can only age up. From 3 and on, you can talk to or spend time with your immediate family. You start unlocking a lot of things when you start school, and even more stuff in the next few years. At the age of 18, pretty much everything will be unlocked.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2021-01-07 16:41:33

What about the driving test mini game thing? That is also not the most accessible part of the game.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.

2021-01-07 16:52:45 (edited by Lucas1 2021-01-07 16:53:02)

Does a driving license actually matter for anything though? You can get cars yes, but I don't think it actually reduces any costs, for example going to work or anything, does it?

2021-01-07 16:53:34

It's not a big hazard though. You're always given 3 answers. One of them is absolute rubbish all of the time, so you've got a 50/50 chance of hitting the right answer. Even if you don't, all you have to do is close out at the fail prompt and reopen the game. You'll end up at the age you were before and can try again. You can actually do this with almost every scenario in the game, except casino games.

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2021-01-07 20:55:27

It probably doesn’t change too much, but let’s be honest. It feels really cool to have a driving license, doesn’t it? Another minor complaint I have is that the game is not very representative as far as South African names are concerned. Let me explain. There are many different ethnic groups in South Africa, both black and white. To this day, I have never seen any non-African names if you know what I mean. I really do feel that this should change. Again, a very minor complaint but anyway.

Hopefully, we'll get a fully accessible open world game someday.