Jason DeFillippo

I know this isn’t going to be one of those posts that gets me onto the homepage of Techmeme but I need to vent here. The addiction inducing game Words with Friends by Zynga that causes havoc on domestic flights has crossed the line and I’m done with them. I’ve been getting a metric shit-ton of Facebook notifications with friends I play with that no one can figure out whence they came and how to stop. Today I got the screen you see at the right and all became clear. It’s a notification box to send my friend Ron a note that it’s his turn (something I’m assuming they’re trying to implement because the lag on their iOS notifications has become so long it’s unusable) through Facebook’s message system. The unbelievably EVIL part is they pre-checked the “Oh sure, just do this every time I make a move” checkbox for me. If you’re just clicking through and don’t pay attention your friend just got an inbox full of fuck you. The rub is that you CAN’T DISABLE IT AFTER YOU SAY YES. Well actually that’s not true. You can delete the game and never go back. Hence my blog-fodder for today. Don’t spam my friends by employing sneaky tricks or even not so sneaky tricks and then not give me a way to shut it off. But that’s only part of the story…

I’ve noticed a lot of people I play with (you know who you are) getting a LOT better recently. I mean like “Flowers for Algernon” better, overnight. I figured some of them were cheats already but lately it’s gotten out of hand and I found the answer. It’s called Cheats with Words (click the thumbnail to see the iTunes store page) and it’s EVIL. I downloaded it to see what it could do and was floored. You take a screenshot of your game and with one click it will import that into the app, OCR it and then show you the best possible word placement using your current tiles and the current board. You can then scroll through all the possible options and see words with diminishing point values. This I assume is so you can pick words you might think you can get away with without arousing suspicion. This is some military grade cheating right here. I can’t waste my time with something that’s so easily gameable. In the old days if someone busted out a word that they couldn’t possibly know it was from spray and pray. We’ve all done it. It looks like it should be a word so you try it and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. When it happened we OWNED IT. We joked about it. That was the fun part. But with wholesale cheating going on at this level it’s just not fun anymore and I hate knowing that some of my “friends” are totally scamming me. It’s like playing Quake 3 Arena without bot protection for crissakes!

So there. I’m going to finish my current games and WwF shall be no more. I’m moving onto the other wildly addictive Zynga game, Scramble with Friends! Have you played that yet? Damn it’s fun and totally skill driven. My only complaint so far is what’s up with that lame ass token system? I paid for the app goddammit! I should be allowed to play all I want! And with that said I’m jpdefillippo on there so come play with me :-) At least until I find some bastard has learned to cheat there too!