Not fair
Missing the blitz
Creative
Where have all my materials gone
Jill Wigney
Was fun
redecor
I love it, but…
Good and bad
Awesome
Repetitive, boring and annoying
Overstimulating
Expensive
Redecor
User Foibles & More & More Gen-AI
However, over the last year, the app has been adding more and more pay-to-progress options including a ridiculous $18/mo. premium subscription, while simultaneously using more and more gen-AI visuals to replace artwork. The descriptions are all in ChatGPT-ese. They’re clearly cutting their costs and team needs while trying to tighten the thumbscrews for more money. And the gen-AI visual elements are obviously lower quality, especially the “painted portraits” that all have the same teenage-ish wide-eyed AI look. I logged on excited to pay for a monthly pass for the current art deco/nouveau theme, but it’s more Gen-AI theme than anything else. I’m not paying to support that.
For a long time the only problem that kept me from paying for the premium pass for months on end was the user base and their unrelenting addiction to beige or grey minimalism. It made every single themed challenge or prompt very frustrating to compete. Consider a recent room whose design title was “Pink to the Brink,” premised on doing room design for someone who loved pink. However, all of the top voted rooms were entirely white or cream or light beige, while rooms that actually featured pink colors tended to score dramatically lower. I’m not sure if the problem is that users simply don’t read, people’s aesthetic sense is horribly bland, or this has something to do with the “uncluttered” look of a bare room on a small screen. I feel for the app team because I think they were trying to gently guide against this - many challenge descriptions will include language like “please include a pop of color!”. But if users /do/ include a pop of color, voting scores are always lower. The only way to keep users who don’t always produce all beige rooms from being frustrated into app vacations, I think, is to add tighter requirements to designs that actually go with the description. This problem has worsened now that voting turnaround is shorter. The reuse of room layouts encourages this bc people approach them the same way every time when they don’t read the description.
