EA's New Scrabble App Causes Kerfuffle

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Can someone explain why it matters what dictionary the game uses? Do different dictionaries have different spellings? Or is it an American/British spelling thing?

At the risk of making myself look like an ignoramus: I don't get it.

"Who wants to play it in six languages?"
Anyone who is not a native English speaker maybe? Or just anyone who isn't fluent? Sorry, there are some reasonable complaints in there, but that is just petty.

 

[saintdane05]

Scrabble really is serious business.

 

[Amir Kondori]

""Who wants to play it in six languages? I've been playing for over four years, I had 5,000 games on my statistics, I'd won 71% of them, I had my best scores recorded - and now it's all lost.""

Don't ever get too attached to any kind of leader boards or statistics held on servers and not your local machine, because those things are transient as the wind.

Sucks that manual matchmaking went away, I am sure a lot of people want to play with their friends and family.

 

[Amir Kondori]

Because that would imply that they bought all of those games for absolutely no reason, and played them for absolutely no reason,

That sums up the hobby pretty well.

There was a time not to long ago when people bought games so they could play them, not so they could show off their high scores. I know what was going on during the arcade days, but that was a more personal connection since you lived nearby and possibly competed with your friends. This is just showing off to people on Facebook how you choose to utilize your spare time.

Also, it's scrabble.

Since the first mainstream video game, Pong, people have competed and the competition has been part of gaming. You are really stretching to try and make a point that does not exist.

 

[Naqel]

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

I had this same exact thought a while back.

Microsoft seems to be in on it too, seeing how they mess up all they can with the Xbone, and invite EA to be their biggest partner.

 

[Something Amyss]

You're mixing up different time periods here.

Originally when the Xbone was unveiled, it was pretty clear that EA was ready to be a one-console lady. They made a point of publicly burning their bridge with Nintendo by withdrawing much of their support on the console, and have been promising much of their "exclusive"/"timed exclusive" content on the Xbone.

But with all of the very visible backlash against the Xbone, EA's been pulling back and is now trying to pretend that it actually wants the competition between the two consoles. In reality, EA would enjoy nothing more than to see the Xbone win, so that it can utilize its SimCity-esque DRM on more of its games.

In other words, the decision to remove online passes was originally motivated by their wishes to get in bed with Microsoft....but now that they see potential problems with that, they're trying to play the middle-man and act like they want competition. They couldn't be rooting for the Xbone more clearly if they were all wearing foam fingers to its press conferences.

I'm not mixing up time periods so much as you're mixing up what was going on, period.

I think you missed one of the crucial issues with the online pass: it was costing them money. Hell, it could have saved Microsoft some hardship if there actually was an interplay between them and Microsoft, because their policies have actively harmed them. EA were even pretty open about this.

Anything else is just a conspiracy theory.

 

[Something Amyss]

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.

Personally, I took it as a joke that was harmed by the inaccuracy of the matter. I would have found it far funnier had it come from Electronic Arts, but the fact of the matter is it didn't and it was an easy catch. I know humour is subjective and the variations of observed humour are hard to categorise, but I feel I was taking it just as seriously as was appropriate.

Yes, someone talking about going "full retard" is too serious. Pointing out why a joke doesn't ring true really shouldn't be. Sadly, this is a far more serious post than I'd like, so I'll leave you with an amusing video.

 

[Something Amyss]

Because that would imply that they bought all of those games for absolutely no reason, and played them for absolutely no reason,

That sums up the hobby pretty well.

There was a time not to long ago when people bought games so they could play them, not so they could show off their high scores. I know what was going on during the arcade days, but that was a more personal connection since you lived nearby and possibly competed with your friends. This is just showing off to people on Facebook how you choose to utilize your spare time.

Also, it's scrabble.

High scores have been a part of video games since pretty much day one. To downplay the "arcade days" is to ignore a good chunk of gaming history. Which is fine, but only if you're not going to lecture people on the way things used to be. Gaming never stopped having high scores even when games started moving into the "more story" department.

This becomes an even worse point when brought up talking about Scrabble. Scrabble's been serious business for a lot of people since well before I (and presumably you) was even born. Tournaments and scoring are a big deal to the "hardcore" culture that exists within the game. Has been for a long time. Back in the old days, before GameFaqs and YouTube, they had walkthroughs for games like Scrabble called "books," and you could study to try and become the best at the game, even possibly on a national level.

So we take two competitive cultures and merge them into a digital version of a game that's often treated as competitive and...What? Looks like talking down to people to me, but maybe not. Whatever.

Still, with the purpose of Scrabble, it's even more baffling. It's not like you play Scrabble to enjoy a narrative or experience kickass visuals. The goal of Scrabble, the stated goal is to get the highest score. You can play it socially or with family, but even then you're playing for score.

Honestly, it comes off as "stop doing things different from me!" And I see no reason for it.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I'm glad to see EA really spreading its wings as an entertainment developer and branch out in a way that pisses off more people. Honestly though, I feel kinda bad for the Scribble-players who have lost stats...I've lost many save files in the past myself.

The first time I saw an EA logo on a box of Scrabble (and Monopoly) it blew my mind a little bit.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

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?

EA CEO: We will change the world... All eyes will be on EA. The name EA will be despised by all. And when the time comes...
EA Executive: And that's...
EA CEO: Yes... That is the EA... Requiem

 

[Something Amyss]

The point is that it's a facebook app. You're not going to put anything like that on a resume.

You're nto going to put any of this stuff on a resume, so that's hardly a point. So I see we're back to trying to use the venue to determine the worth. Oh dear.

 

[Clovus]

Can someone explain why it matters what dictionary the game uses? Do different dictionaries have different spellings? Or is it an American/British spelling thing?

At the risk of making myself look like an ignoramus: I don't get it.

The American/British/Australian thing is part of it. I think most Americans use an "American" Scrabble dictionary.

The immportant thing is that it's a different set of words. There are a lot of words in English, and learning huge lists of them is really important to Scrabble players: especialy 2 or 3 letter words. It's like if you were a LoL or DOTA2 player and they made major changes to something like last hitting. Switching dictionaries makes a big difference.

So, it doesn't matter so much about the nature of the changes to the word list, but rather that the word list has changed significantly.

It seems a reasonable complaint to me and I don't play Scrabble that much.

It's easy to trivialize something that someone else thinks is important. Imagine if tommorow it was revealed that Dark Souls II will feature a minimap. Players of that game would go absolutely crazy. People who don't play the series would just be like, "Lulz? The game didn't have a minimap before? Fake difficulty. Getting mad about this kind of thing is dumb. Get a life!"

 

[BlazeRaider]

Just don't tell me that your score on the leaderboards is linked intrinsically to your quality of life or that you are unable to enjoy a game unless there is a giant number that can be placed in a tag in your sig so that everyone can see. It's terribly depressing and really narcissistic.

I'm saying a healthy human mind does not form emotional connections with user stats.

I strongly disagree, it's perfectly reasonable for people who play games to get attached to their game stats. People take pride in their accomplishments, and symbols or reminders of things they've done act as nice manifestations of those accomplishments, think of the importance placed on trophies, medals, diplomas and certificates, pictures, even scars. These scrabble players got their stats through a lot of playing, it meant a lot, maybe not to you but it did to them, and it cannot be replaced easily.

I find your inability to understand people can become emotionally invested in representations of their accomplishments very depressing and really narcissistic, because viewing items or words solely at face value, purely based on what they literally mean with no emotions whatsoever seems like a cold way to look at things, and because it sounds like you think something cannot possibly have value unless you, personally, feel it does.

So yeah, getting your stats reset sucks.