Carla S.

This site/business is pretty darn good. You can sift through their site and check out what's offered, but the best page is their "popular" page because it lists all the prizes. They offer great prizes from $25,000, $15,000, and more cash prizes (those are the biggies) along with grills, lawnmowers, washers... the list goes on. They did offer stock options to Amazon, Apple, and Tesla, to the tune of $300 but those are no longer available. As with any sweepstakes, your odds of winning get better the more you enter. Spoiler Alert: While it's very easy to enter each offering, it does take a moment or two to complete the entry. This makes it rather time-consuming if you wish to enter every sweepstake.

There's still time to enter for the big money sweeps so bebop on over to PrizeGrab.com and check it out. If you dig entering sweepstakes, this is the site for you!

Everyone knows how flakey Facebook is and that their gaming system blows chunks more often than not. Anything on FB these days is questionable, but the games tend to be just downright annoying. However, the game I will review here is not the fault of FB, unless one faults them for greed... which is a valid fault of Mark Z's, but that is another story for a different time, my friends.

Review:

After another fruitless appeal to the game designers to fix yet another bug in their system, I've decided to give the review that I've been threatening said designers with. I regret that it has come to this, but I warned them... repeatedly.

The game I speak of now is called Royal Story. It has nice graphics and the original premise of a "free" game always draws players, so there are always some active gamers playing it. It's a world-building scenario (I guess) where you start with a couple of buildings and learn the game as you go along. Not so bad so far, right? Yeah, I thought so, too.

The game is loaded with bugs, glitches, and suffers from serious lag issues. Although the designers claim to be "working on these issues", there hasn't been any significant change in over a month apart from "events", which screw with things even more.

Players post on the fan page, but it seems to be the consensus that those posts, if read at all, are largely ignored. If there is a problem with features of the game that result in either the replacement of purchased but not received items or a refund, the designers demand endless screenshots of payments made, account numbers, etc. For some of the game's glitches, the game conveniently "forgets" that a player received a reward prior to a page freeze requiring a screen refresh. The player comes back to the game and all evidence is gone... now how does one take a screenshot of that kind of mess?

All reasonable requests... the first time. Apparently, it takes them about a week before responding and they don't pay attention until you bombard them with multiple emails and start posting their lack of cooperation on their page. Then comes the back and forth. I've never experienced such poor customer service skills. It took me over two weeks to get them to straighten out just one issue they caused.

I don't recommend this game. If you have limited patience for this kind of service or the lag issues, avoid it, it isn't worth the aggravation. If it was just once, it wouldn't be so bad, but it happens regularly. The game itself rolls out so many animated parts, that it adds to the lag. In addition to the game itself, it has side games, events, and 'offers' until the whole thing is a snarled mess.

Let's discuss costs. The game itself is free... sort of. There's an option for a subscription to the tune of $15/mo. The currency for the "good stuff" is rubies and they are expensive for what little you get. By estimation, at least one-third to one-half of the options and quests in the game require rubies... go figure. You can play a less entertaining game without them, but it can be a little frustrating.

I have decided to give up on it since the designers and mods are oblivious to the concept of keeping their players happy through excellent customer service. We're not asking for much, just asking for what is due when it comes to good faith purchases and refunds, that the game works well, and no one is cheated out of a great time. I have patience and I will tolerate a certain amount of sluggishness out of a popular game, but not when it comes to having my money taken and getting nothing in return. I have NO patience with businesses that make customers jump through unnecessary hoops to get what they purchased. That's just bad business practice.

Too much to ask for? I think not. So, my friends, caveat emptor--let the buyer beware. If you can hang with all the nonsense, it's an okay game. If not, if these same instances bother you as they did me, avoid this game like the plague. Your blood pressure will thank you for it.

I like the premise of the site and for the most part, it delivers, but it still has some issues to address. They may think they are clever with the whole "magic receipt" thing, but I can guarantee that more than half the site users don't use that function. Putting it into the daily list just means that more than half the site users who do this activity don't get to complete it. My advice: don't be so "clever". For one, they aren't being clever, they are being obstructive. If they don't want people to complete the list, why bother with it at all? They don't think things out. They don't think like their customer base.

Now, let's talk about the change of "reward" options from cash to gift cards. Why the change? Everyone was quite happy with earning checks. They took that away without even asking the customer base. Now it's gift cards, which is 'okay' but isn't the same as cash in hand. Some folks really count on the cash and have no real use for gift cards. Then there's the selection of gift cards they offer. Again, they don't really think about their customer base when choosing what kind of gift cards to offer.

Overall, it's the same as the other sites that do the same thing like Swagbucks, etc. You dull your brain with their ads that you have to review and surveys to take. The surveys are endless, time-consuming, and give you little for your effort unless you are fortunate enough to complete a survey. Most of the surveys are geared toward incompletion. "You don't meet the survey requirements" gets you another shot at a scratch-off ticket and your time has been wasted. Completing a survey is great, but the odds of completing one are slim at best.

Sometimes it can take several months just to get to $10 because the reward for reading the ads is only 1-2 cents. That's $. 01-. 02 for reading a bunch of advertising that is uninteresting. If you are quick with your mouse, you can bypass most of the ads without actually having to read them. Some few are relevant to what I'm into but most aren't and involve spending a LOT of money on the advertised item. I use the site to earn money, why on Earth would I want to spend even more money on some of the stuff they are peddling?

I'll say the same I have said before: Caveat Emptor y'all. You get what you pay for. In this instance, the currency is time vs the almighty penny.

Proof of purchase doesn't apply here. It is a review of a "free" website. They pay me, I don't pay them. Caveat emptor... nothing in life is free.

Your option for logging in with FB doesn't work anymore. You may want to look into that.

Cheers!