EA's New Scrabble App Causes Kerfuffle

[Frostbite3789]

A Stark? Figures... Well, young Stark, when you learn to see the world as I do, you understand where to look when the puppet speaks. The message was heard quite clearly, as was the one doing the actual talking.

What you meant to say is "When you see the world as I do, you look for anything to get enraged over and ignore facts whenever possible."

 

[NerfedFalcon]

A Stark? Figures... Well, young Stark, when you learn to see the world as I do, you understand where to look when the puppet speaks. The message was heard quite clearly, as was the one doing the actual talking.

What you meant to say is "When you see the world as I do, you look for anything to get enraged over and ignore facts whenever possible."

And what you meant to say is 'Insulting people is the same as arguing with them properly.'

Captcha: zig-zag
That seems relevant. So yeah, they're kind of not doing very well here, but Mattel should definitely get more balls and out EA as the ones that messed up the move.

 

[FalloutJack]

A Stark? Figures... Well, young Stark, when you learn to see the world as I do, you understand where to look when the puppet speaks. The message was heard quite clearly, as was the one doing the actual talking.

What you meant to say is "When you see the world as I do, you look for anything to get enraged over and ignore facts whenever possible."

A Stark? Figures... Well, young Stark, when you learn to see the world as I do, you understand where to look when the puppet speaks. The message was heard quite clearly, as was the one doing the actual talking.

What you meant to say is "When you see the world as I do, you look for anything to get enraged over and ignore facts whenever possible."

And what you meant to say is 'Insulting people is the same as arguing with them properly.'

What he said.

You see, Frosty (You are reported, BTW), we've already been through the whole 'Can EA be trusted to allow the people they work with to speak properly?' thing and the answer came back 'No.'. This, plus seeing this happen before, is what we would call a predictable pattern, because we read in between the lines. It's not even paranoia, because I'm sure we can peel back the many PR disasters we've been entertained with here to find a parallel or even linking event or announcement. In short, my fine freezing friend, we have evidence, not heresay. Now, I have responded with kinder words than thee, so you will do me the courtesy of not addressing me in such a manner again.

 

[Starke]

"We are sorry we weren't able to please everybody," a Mattel Spokeswoman said. "We produce the board game but we're not experts in electronics."

*Spoken as Tyrion Lannister*

"Pardon me, but you ARE called Electronic Arts, correct? That would imply that this is your TRADE. Now, far be it for a man of my stature to complain, but it would seem that you have admitted to being utterly worthless and incompetent. How exactly do you account for that?"

The quote's coming from Mattel, not EA? So while EA are the experts, Mattel can credibly claim incompetence?

A Stark? Figures... Well, young Stark, when you learn to see the world as I do, you understand where to look when the puppet speaks. The message was heard quite clearly, as was the one doing the actual talking.

No, Starke. Wrong spelling, wrong franchise. Move along.

Re-EDIT: You know, I'd think the irony of botching spelling on a post about a game about spelling... -.-

>_> I did it on purpose. It was funny.

Oh, yes. Hilarious. :|

Funnier if someone else I knew named Jack (who's only seen the TV series), and my girlfriend (who's actually read the books), hadn't both misspelled it as "Ned Starke" since the wedding episode aired. But, you know, credit for effort, and alleged humor, or, you know, stuff.

 

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

Oh no, I can't show my friend my 1337 Scrabble score, and they're using a slightly different wordset. Clearly this is important front page business.

That would be the equivalent of Sony and Microsoft both wiping their gamerscores after all these years. Although you and I might not personally care for those scores you would be naive to think that no one cares. There would be a massive outcry.

I would say it would be like FIDE dumping your chess ranking data (including number of games played, wins, losses, accumulated points, time spent and so on) when that is your hobby.

Scrabble tournament players are very serious about Scrabble, and the dictionary choice is also serious business, because people memorize the word lists (or part of them) in order to fight for championships.

I learned the lesson some years ago when I suggested that they revise the letter spread (as they did with Super Scrabble) to suit the emergent strategies, and the contemporary language spread:

Nobody fucks with Scrabble.

238U

And PS: Since origin is required for the PC version I won't be getting it, as I won't put spyware on my system to play a game.

 

[Starke]

"We are sorry we weren't able to please everybody," a Mattel Spokeswoman said. "We produce the board game but we're not experts in electronics."

*Spoken as Tyrion Lannister*

"Pardon me, but you ARE called Electronic Arts, correct? That would imply that this is your TRADE. Now, far be it for a man of my stature to complain, but it would seem that you have admitted to being utterly worthless and incompetent. How exactly do you account for that?"

The quote's coming from Mattel, not EA? So while EA are the experts, Mattel can credibly claim incompetence?

They gave the responsibility to the 'electronic experts'. Whoever this was should have said "We're not the tech experts, but they are. We thought that they would have been better suited to handle something in their area of expertise. Clearly we were wrong." My guess is that they're too terrified of EA to complain themselves.

And yet Mattel have released 2 game consoles the Intellivision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision_II#Intellivision_II)
and the Hyperscan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperScan) so it's good to know they aren't experts in what they sell.

Well, the Intellivision was back before the crash, and almost literally everyone was making consoles back then. The Hyperscan was an utter failure, so it's not saying much about their technical skill either.

I mean, the point is a good one, but, I'd be somewhat surprised if anyone from the Intellivision is still in the company in a technical capacity, and the Hyperscan (from what little I just read) reeks of poorly thought out tech implementation.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Well since the Xbone has finally stopped finding new ways to fail I guess EA wants the "Can't Do Anything Right" crown back.

 

[Wuvlycuddles]

Wow, I'm 27 years old and I only just realized that more than one group make dictionaries thanks to this article. Either that's a massive brain fart on my account or the Oxford English guys are just that good.

 

[Ngwenya]

@ J Tyran: believe me, no Scrabble player is upset about being able to play in 6 langauges. that's practically the only thing the new app offers that no-one has questioned the value of.
Not being able to choose your opponents - that's an epic fail. Really. For so many reasons.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

For serious Scrabble players, I imagine this would be like erasing all of my Dark Souls characters and changing all the scalings on the weapons. Which would be terrible.

No but seriously, how does one fuck up Scrabble? All the people want is exactly what they have. Couldn't have been that hard to buy it and leave it alone, now, could it? Especially manual matchmaking, that seems like almost a necessity.

 

[SonofaJohannes]

What's that you say? Collins dictionary? Another excuse to get mad at EA? Get me my soap box, it's rage time!

 

[Something Amyss]

I know casual gamers are considered not to be dedicated to their gaming but lots of these people who play social scrabble really take their stats hard. This will not go over smoothly for people that have spent (no joke) thousands of hours collecting their stats to be wiped.

This is one of the reasons the casual/hardcore divide is kinda stupid.

Oh no, I can't show my friend my 1337 Scrabble score, and they're using a slightly different wordset. Clearly this is important front page business.

People are freaking out over something slightly different than the usual freak outs for gaming news! Let's talk crap about them because their interests are slightly out of alignment with our own!

I'm actually sort of curious now.

Is there anything EA can do right? Because it seems like they're actively doing everything they can possibly do to make their customers mad and piss them off. And statistically speaking, there's no way that should be possible. They'd have to do SOMETHING right, even by accident, at some point in time. It's like they actually want people to hate them.

....is EA trying to pull some Zero Requiem shit on us right now?

They're dropping online passes and offering OP content free. While this is technically "correcting a mistake," I consider making something right doing something right.

...Unfortunately, that's the only one I can name. Which makes me suspicious. WHAT ARE YOU UP TO EA?

Everyone says this, but nobody ever really means it.

Because of a simple, tried and true belief: things that don't happen to me don't matter to me.

I do wonder how he'd react if his stats were wiped. Everyone I've seen lose their stats has lost their head. That's obviously not including people who voluntarily wipe their stats in a game that allows it.

People are always unflappable when it's hypothetical.

"We are sorry we weren't able to please everybody," a Mattel Spokeswoman said. "We produce the board game but we're not experts in electronics."

*Spoken as Tyrion Lannister*

"Pardon me, but you ARE called Electronic Arts, correct? That would imply that this is your TRADE. Now, far be it for a man of my stature to complain, but it would seem that you have admitted to being utterly worthless and incompetent. How exactly do you account for that?"

That was a MATTEL spokesperson, though. They were the maker of the game up to this point, so it's not quite the same deal.

 

[Something Amyss]

But yet you have touted the virtues of steam more than once on these boards. Stop being a hypocrite just to earn internet cool guy points and actually think for yourself. The world will be a better place for it.

americans only care about being spied on by people they don't like.

 

[Something Amyss]

True, though it should be pointed out that their decision to get rid of online passes is timed rather coincidentally with the reveal of the Xbone's "publisher-based decision making" in regards to how much DRM the games have. So it could very well be that they simply said "fine, we'll get rid of online passes, they're outdated now that we have a console which fully backs DRM".

No way to ever be sure of that, though, it's just suspicion and nothing more.

"Publisher-based decision-making" is what we already have. It'the "you need to check in every day/hour" and "you need special permission to sell your own property" that's suspicious. However comma, Sony's DRM policy will be the same as this gen, which means they can't drop online passes and hope to pull that with the PS4. It only works with the One.

 

[The Funslinger]

"We are sorry we weren't able to please everybody," a Mattel Spokeswoman said. "We produce the board game but we're not experts in electronics."

*Spoken as Tyrion Lannister*

"Pardon me, but you ARE called Electronic Arts, correct? That would imply that this is your TRADE. Now, far be it for a man of my stature to complain, but it would seem that you have admitted to being utterly worthless and incompetent. How exactly do you account for that?"

That's a spokesperson from Mattel, the company who created Scrabble, and gave its electronic version rights to EA. Not an EA spokesperson.

Apologies if someone's already talked about this.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I'm actually sort of curious now.

Is there anything EA can do right? Because it seems like they're actively doing everything they can possibly do to make their customers mad and piss them off. And statistically speaking, there's no way that should be possible. They'd have to do SOMETHING right, even by accident, at some point in time. It's like they actually want people to hate them.

....is EA trying to pull some Zero Requiem shit on us right now?

Did you read the part where Mattel said it was their fault?

OT: While its EAsy to blame EA, is it always right? I mean sometimes when you acquire something from someone else, it isn't always in the best shape. Maybe EA fucks up a lot, maybe they just buy a lot of things that look good on the outside but are rotting from within.
Its hard for me to believe that EA is such a failure as a company because somehow they're still in business. Whereas THQ, a company who looked like they had it together suddenly goes tits up in a matter of months.
Why is that? Because perception isn't reality folks.

 

[FalloutJack]

Bingo

Bongo

Boop

All of you are taking this far too seriously when I was obviously being humorous. One of you is being exceptionally rude and that will stop now.