There are a lot of reasons - but primarily, we wanted to try something different. Heck, in part it’s inspired by PA’s user-supported model from the mid 90’s.

We think Word Ace is awesome. Rather than playing the insane App Store pricing lottery, we’re going to give players the option to pay whatever they want for the game, from $0 on up.

If you want extra chips, they’ll be available (in addition to the 1,000 you get every day for free). If you want to just help support the game, we’ll have donation options available, and we’ll give you a star by your icon for the next 30 days to show other people you’re helping support the game.

The whole idea is basically that you can play as much as you want, and pay whatever you want. We think Word Ace is the kind of game that people will love, and we hope they’ll choose to support its continued development.

*facepalm* re: dates. Of course. Mid-nineties? What am I, some sort of old fogey? Bleh!

How are you going to offer these extra chips (for money)? Will you be able to do it through microtransactions? I was under the impression only paid apps could offer such services. Will you have to re-route through a website?

The game looks great btw. It’s obvious you took a lot of care in the design of the game and the UI.

Dude, cool game. But its annoying waiting for other people to bet.

You should check out Uniwar - they have a great way of handling turn based games on the iphone. Basically, you get a timer on your turn, of anywhere from 1 min, all the way up to 3 days, and you can play about 10 games at a time. This way, you’ve always got something to play, but you don’t have to wait for the other players. Run your turn, and kick it off to them for more. Like play by email/post.

Yacine - for the Pre, it’s simple - we’ll have our own gateway for purchases there. On the iPhone, it’s a little more complicated. As you say, free apps can’t have in-app purchases. That’s the law of the land from Apple, and there’s no way around it.

So for Word Ace, we’ll have a link within Word Ace to buy Word Ace Pro. Word Ace Pro will cost $1, and in exchange for that dollar, and the hassle of having to download a new app, we’ll give you $12,000 chips, a shiny gold icon, and the ability to buy stuff from within the application itself.

Its’ inconvenient, but unfortunately, on the iPhone, it’s our only option.

Thanks!
seppo

Derek - thanks for the feedback. I’ve played Uniwar (though only the single player game so far), so I’ll check out how they deal with multiplayer. For us, our focus was to keep the game live, and face-to-face. We could conceivably do a similar game that is more play-by-mail style, but we’d have to probably change up a reasonable amount of stuff to make a really kick-ass play-by-mail game.

We’ll keep it in mind, though. In terms of speeding things up, we’re also likely to have “expert tables” with shorter time limits. Some of the length of a turn is required to deal with latency issues when playing online, but it can be shortened to speed up the game for expert players.

Cheers!
seppo

What dictionary is Word Ace using? I’ve just had couple of “not a word”s that are.

Seppo, that’s a quite reasonable solution. And since all your profile data seems to be stored server-side, there shouldn’t be much of an inconvenience for the player. I like it.

Wow. Thanks for a great game. I just started playing on the iPhone and I can’t put it down!

Handheld crack. More fun than humans should be allowed.

I’ve noticed a couple of iPhone achievement oddities. Posting here in case others have seen similar issues.

1) The in-game pop-up for the Terminator achievement has the name Governator instead. Funny and possibly intentional.

2) I was awarded Inconceivable on a losing 5-letter word (I think the winner was 6 letters). I won the previous hand with a 7-letter word, beating 3 other players with 7-letter words. Unusual enough that it could be related.

Thanks for the info, RolandHTG! We’ll look into the bugs!
(Terminator -> Governator = bug, but part of it is actually still intentional. You’ll see, eventually. :D)

I correlated the two because I didn’t remember having terminator already, but it’s possible they were separate events. The code will tell…. Thx for the quick response.

Any chance for a forum to report and discuss bugs on iPhone? I’ve had a couple more.

A split pot had 2 winners when there should have been one. The player who was all in had a 10 point word while the winner had a 16 point word. Instead of being eliminated the all in player was also a winner and got a portion of the pot.

I have also had 2 times where I locked in a 7 letter word with plenty of time left and had it reset to no word when timer ran out and results were shown. This last time there was a more than 2000 chip pot. of which I put in 700. Sigh I haven’t broken out my sniffer yet. Does the app use TCP or UDP to submit results? If it’s UDP with no app-level ack at all then there will continue to be problems. One other player on iPhone claimed to have had the same happen.

Still a great app. I’m having a blast. Just give us a bug reporting forum on the site so we can help make it rock solid. I realize some of it may not be the app but may be underlying iPhone OS 3.0 platform instability instead.

two suggestions:

A) Have the game remember what type of table you want to sit at.

2) Have segregated tables designated as dictionaries not welcome and dictionaries welcome. One is like a game of poker with known cards and the other is the game you intended

1) Agreed. While the Select Table option is labeled as a preference it isn’t sticky between games. Perhaps use a checkbox to choose if it should be sticky or a one time selection.

2) A fine idea in theory but probably meaningless in practice. I have recently won hands with the following words: mesclun, hadjee, yodlers, xylems, vichy, gypsum, wadies, soutane, zarf, qoph. I was accused of using a dictionary on all of them. Half of them I learned by 5th grade (yes, Jeff Foxworthy).

I love words. I read more than is reasonable, do crosswords, and have over 20 years of Scrabble and Boggle experience. Hadjee is just one of a half dozen variations/extensions of haj. How many different ways can you spell aerie? Do you know words that use ‘w’ as a vowel? Words where y and i are interchangeable? Words that use q without u? How many types of foreign currency do you know?

Specific to the game itself: Have you memorized the letter distribution? Have you figured out which hole cards are the most valuable? Can you predict which single letter can beat your word? How many 6-letter combinations do you know that have a better than 50% chance of resulting in a 7-letter word on the river?

Also, do you use a dictionary as a learning tool to see what you missed after each hand?

The point is, excluding dictionaries won’t produce a pleasant experience for all players. People have widely different levels of experience and knowledge. Some will have a distinct advantage even without a dictionary.

Soapbox on

I believe there is a greater schism and cause of ill-will developing than the one between players who do and don’t use dictionaries. I believe these player behaviors change the game even more detrimentally from the one that is intended.

There are players who have what I consider to be a more professional hold-em style of play. They place bets based on the merits of their cards and the odds that an opponent will have better or worse options. The more information (ie. the hand proceeding to flop, turn, river), the better decision can be made. There is still room for gut feeling and bluffing. I definitely favor this style of play.

There are two other play styles that in my opinion are less “genteel”.

First is the blind all-in. This is when an amount on the order of the table buy-in is bet after the deal of hole cards but before the flop. Some people love the thrill / risk of betting it all on the luck of the deal. I can understand that and after all it’s just play money. However, it eliminates most of the hold-em game strategy except private hole cards and otherwise reduces the hand to a game of best word Boggle.

The second, and truly harmful play style, is the pot buyer. This player builds a stack to about 3 times the table buy-in, usually via blind all-in. From then on, the player uses large raises to buy the blinds and calls or to force all other players to bet a large portion of their stack every turn of every hand if they want to stay in. Few hands if any progress past the flop unless the opponent risks going all in. Players leave in frustration. Unsuspecting new players get suckered in. Perpetuating this grind takes NO SKILL whatsoever.

Using stack leverage is perfectly fine in a real tournament setting but again this is just play money people. I don’t mind being short stack and I don’t mind being put all-in and losing when I decide my cards are worth taking the risk but I don’t like facing a high-stakes blind luck decision every single hand. There are other games made for that.

Soapbox off

All that having been said, I encourage people who have these types of issues to keep their heads and use the features that the fine people at Self Aware have provided. You can politely leave a table at any time if the play style isn’t your cup of tea.

I am also using the opportunity to ask for clarification on social features. It would be nice to be able to maintain an anti-friends list. A player would not be assigned to a table where an anti-friend is already playing. On that note, what does the ‘block player’ feature on the friends list actually do? Does it just prevent them from sending invites? Also, are private tables invite only or can somebody use the friend list ‘join table’ feature unless they have been specifically blocked?

Roland - just so you know, we’ve seen your comment. Will respond in more detail shortly. For now, food acquisition calls.

So, from a completely personal perspective, I share your frustration with people who are constantly either using their stack size to bully other players, or people who are constantly going all-in before the flop.

re: stack size - we’ll be expanding our options at some point to allow for variable buy-ins, which should help people at least fight these players on fair ground. But in the meantime, I’d simply recommend avoiding tables where one player has 5x the buy-in, when you can see they’re using their stack size to push other people around.

The thing is, that is a legitimate aspect of poker strategy - so it’s not an issue so much of not allowing that to happen, it’s making sure there are fair and reasonable ways of countering that when it does.

re: People going all-in before the flop - I’ve got more to say about this, but for now, what I’ll say is that it’s bad strategy, in general. I’ll say more when I can.

re: Anti-friend list - we’re working on it.

re: Block Player - it keeps them from sending you invites.

re: Private Table - only players who are actively on your (or anyone else at the table’s) friend list can join the game. So they’re not invite-only, but they are “friends” only.

Hope that helps!
Thanks!

First off, love your work.

I don’t know if it’s an iPhone thing, or an Australia thing, or neither — but this excellent game is virtually unusable for me.

I’m playing with a 2G iPhone with OS 3.0, via wifi with a strong signal, to good residential DSL. Ping times ~300ms to the USA, with no packet loss.

Despite that, my connection to the table drops on average about once per hand — it’s seriously unusable. And even when the connection remains up, the lag is tremendous. If I leave a bet until the bottom 1/3 of the bar, I probably get folded.

I’m usually playing during the Australian arvo or early evening, which I wouldn’t expect to be a particularly high-load time for your servers. Have you heard of anyone else having this issue?

The connection issue aside, it seems an extremely well-done app.

Cheers!

We’ll look into it, and see if there’s something we can do. If you can e-mail your user info to the support e-mail on the site, that’d help us take a look and see we can see anything unusual in the user logs. Thanks!

Variable buy-ins are also the best idea several players came up with to combat bullies. (tip of the hat to AD). Looking forward to it.

The social dynamics of the game are genuinely interesting. Ad hoc community SWAT teams have been appearing where several players work together to discourage a bully. All players call the bully’s pre- and post-flop forcing raises to increase the chance of the bully losing. Usually doesn’t take very many hands for a bully with a 40-50k stack to leave or be eliminated. It hasn’t completely discouraged the worst offenders but it has quite clearly slowed them down.

Another thing that would make the game more enjoyable for some people is to have limit tables as an alternative to the current no-limit tables. Those who are frustrated by the crazy betting or who want a change of pace can then concentrate on their word munging.

Thank you for fixing the split pot bug. Haven’t seen any occurences since shortly after I reported it.

Thank you also for the clear explanation of the block player and private table features. The Self Aware team have been wonderfully responsive to suggestions, concerns, bugs (god forbid!), etc. Keep up the good work!

[...] been playing a lot of Word Ace lately on the iPhone. Actually, Tracy’s been playing it more than me and she’s better [...]