monkeydog

I disagree. Any good poker player will tell you that when one player has significantly more money than the others, he has a distinct advantage. Leaving and rejoining the table levels the playing field. Besides, we're playing with funny money, so there's really no such thing as winning your money back.

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selfawaregames

Hey, all. So, cheating is something we're keenly aware of, and we're looking at a variety of ways to deal with them.

Right now, the best way to ensure you can find a good, honest game to play, is to "friend" people that you enjoy playing with. Once you build up a repertoire of friends, joining their game is as simple as clicking on the Friend button from the title screen, seeing who's online, and clicking "join table" when you select an online friend.

It's not ideal - we're aware of that, and we're working on things both for the next update, and what we can do on the back-end side. While it's impossible for us to distinguish between an extraordinary word game player and someone who's cheating, there are definitely things we can do to make it more difficult for blatant cheaters.

We're working on it.
Thanks.
seppo

02589

I can explain splitting with the 0...sort of. It just happened to me.

In my situation, it me against one other person in the end. His word was a fail, so he lost automatically. In my hand, I somehow missed to "use this word". Therefore my score was zero...aka 0.

So MAYBE there are other situations, especially on split pots, all ins, etc, you did indeed split a pot with a 0

vga4life

Replying to myself now that the card distribution is published on http://selfawaregames.com/blog -

The lowest scoring word has to be SEES with all-backwards cards, for a score of -8.

EDIT - According to seppo, Word Ace uses the Tournament Word List used for Scrabble tournaments in the US and Canada, so the highest scoring word is WAXWORK, for 49 points (29 for the letters + 20 point bonus.)

vga4life

Yes, I could stay at the table and play Bully Big-stack but other decent players tend to shy away from tables with someone so far ahead of the buy-in - I know I do. Knowing when to walk away from a table is part of the game.

selfawaregames

Haha. Awesome. SEES is certainly the lowest-scoring word, but we're using TWL, not SOWPODS, so SQUAWKY, unfortunately, isn't in the dictionary! Great to see a post like this, though!

Our current highest-scoring words are ASPHYXY and JAWBONE, both at 42 points, so they're pretty close to the max.

Cheers!
seppo

selfawaregames

Like someone else said, you can split the pot with 0 if the other player also has 0, which means neither player spelled a word. If someone spells an *invalid* word, they automatically lose, and *can't* split the pot. So a 0 is a better play than a garbage word.

Thanks for keeping an eye out. If you do see a case of a 0 beating a valid word, if you can get a screen of it, that'd be super-helpful.

Thanks!
seppo

vga4life

Yeah, those aren't far off - using TWL, looks like the ultimate word is WAXWORK for 49 points.

selfawaregames

Looks like Word Ace is the exclusive domain of Pre owners for only a few more hours. It's officially been approved by Apple, so if you wanna defend the Pre's good name, you're gonna have to start taking down iPhone owners!

seppo

planetdaz

One suggestion for dealing with cheaters would be for the authors to have an annagram solver in the back-end that keeps track of how many times a user wins with the best possible word in the dictionary for their given letters.

Combine this with other pattern based statistics and a cheat-ranking could be established for each user which would give the admins an idea of who the possible / likely cheaters are so that they can keep an eye on them and issue warning messages etc.

02589

I had jawbone once.

02589

I just put it on my old iPhone...which has the phone deactivated, so I use it kinda like an iTouch.

It's a great program. I noticed it has help cues. A really nice feature is that it virbrates when it's my turn.

Thanks, You guys rock!

jhoff80

I guess I'm in the minority where I find it much more fun to battle back against someone who's got a huge chip lead.

And the part about a poker player having an advantage with more money doesn't apply so much when you pretty much have a steady supply of money when you hit $0. Besides that, while I love the game, I feel that it's much less strategic than actual poker. 9 times out of 10 the best strategy in this is to see all the cards and then decide what to do, because even if you have an awesome word with 6 cards, it might be horrible compared to the 7 card word.

selfawaregames

Heh. I get what you mean. It's definitely more to your advantage to see the flop, or see the cards through to the end, if not everyone's "betting strategically," but as you play more, and you start to really get a feel for what hole cards are strong, and which ones are weaker, betting strategy starts to be more important to racking up chips or not losing your stack.

If you're playing against a lot of skillful players, I think it's every bit as strategic (and occasionally really terrifying) as poker.

But it's definitely a different game, and you take different things into account. Poker's almost all about the betting, while in Word Ace, it's more like 60% word, 40% betting.

But when my wife & I would play, she'd beat me word-wise, but I'd wipe the floor with her 'cause I'd bet smarter.

seppo

Templarian

Some of the words people use in this game are hilarious. I swear they are sitting there with a dictionary opened some times then others are just messing around.

It's all good till one gets all vowels. Kind of funny watching the AI fail with "not a word" in practice mode.

vga4life

FWIW, table talk has gotten a bit nasty. The last few days I've seen some ugly sexual harassment going on at several tables I've joined. A mute player option would be nice.

02589

Personally, I wish there was a higher priority on dumping people who take too much time.

(on a regular basis)

Zyphlin

Why a dictionary. You have a multi-tasking phone with a browser that can surf to Dictionary.com

selfawaregames

Hey, all - I know it's a little silly, but I did want to say, "Thanks."

You guys were among the very first to play the game, gave some really excellent feedback, some of which is already being incorporated into the next update, and have been a really great group to interact with! I hope you're still having fun with the game! It's live on the iPhone, now, as I'm sure you can tell.

Oh! And we just did an interview about Word Ace & the Pre, though I'm not sure I should link to another Pre-related site from here! :O (Happy to talk to precentral folks if they want to talk to us any time!)

Anyway - thanks again, and see you online!
seppo

selfawaregames

Oh! A non-platform-related interview was also put up last night here:

Developer Interview: Self Aware Games of Taxiball and Word Ace « The Current Gamer

If you're interested in a little bit of the development of Word Ace, it's worth a read (I hope!)...

Thanks!
seppo