I worked on a similar project in my last company, we made the decision to port the game to run without flash (Unity, WebGL). You face so many problems, and I get why Zynga made this decision. First of all, it's a tremendous amount of work. The code base for a game running for 10 years is huge. You'll have to basically pay for two teams, one maintaining the old game and adding content, and another team that catches up with the flash version. All while new content is being added. We're talking about years of development.

Second, the ecosystem. Yes your mobile can run quake 3. But considering the target group for such games, expect old hardware, and I don't mean just 5 years. Some users run hardware from 2005 to 2010 . While such a games works on flash, new technology stacks are much more demanding. Running the same game on a new tech just needs much better hardware. Flash was written to do 2D very effeciently. You change tech, you loose users because their machine just can't run the game. Don't think you'll get new users for such an old game.

All in all, your is is probably better spent on developing a new game, which comes with a big risk. The gaming industry is largely luck-driven. When you start developing a game, there's no way to tell if it's going to be a success.

Did anyone else misread?

Sorry, but this can't be generalized. I do work in the games industry as a Lead of programmers, mostly men but some women. I can speak for our whole game team to say that there is no such harassment. Those cases are very bad indeed, but it's not like this happens everywhere in the game industry on a regular basis. In our company, this kind of behaviour would get you fired for sure.

Some advice for programmers trying to do interface design: Don't. Leave question like this to an interface designer. If you can't afford one, or you want to do it anway, a good book for starters is "The Design of Everyday Things" by Don Norman, it's not even expensive. Further, stop treating users as a problem in the system. Every user has his own model on how the system works. This model is very likely very different from the programmers model. Your task as an interface designer is to teach the user enough about the system (or it's model), so he can use the system successfully. Error messages don't help very much, as you've figured out, users don't read them. The lesson is, don't try to force the user to read error messages, instead find other ways to communicate the model. Often, it's a good idea to think about the problem in an abstract way. For example, we have a similar problem at the place I work. There are two doors next to each other, one you should use, the other one you mustn't because it triggers the alarm. They tried to fix it by attaching a sign saying not to use that door. Needless to say, it didn't work, because noone read the sign. Just like your error messages, this sign was completely ignored. It's not wrong of the users to ignore the sign, quite the opposite: We have to filter out information to survive. If you pass through your environment, you too ignore information, i. e. I don't think you read every sign in your proximity. I have no idea why they couldn't come up with a better solution for the door: Locking it would be very easy. Even better, by removing the door handles it would be very clear that the door can't be used.

One major problem of captchas is that usually blind users can't solve the captcha. So you effectively lock out disabled persons from your website, a fact that is rarely mentioned in association with captchas. I think disabled people have enough problems already, there's no reason to further annoy them with captchas (I'm even annoyed by them as a not-disabled person).

Although it's not about programming, I'd recommend "The design of everyday things" by Donald A. Norman. It gives a good idea on how to design user interfaces (including, but not limited to software). It's really well-written and nice to read, wether or not you know something about user interface design.