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[mrkgoo]

True. There have been many occassions where for example I made a four-letter word using my two letters and two letters from the general stack; while another player made a five-letter word using just the 5 letters from the general stack, beating me in the process.

Yeah, I know, I was playing you for a considerable amount of time last night (early morning -> so tired).

One I saw was communal tile = A,L,G,E,D or something, and you came up with "GLAD", and someone had "GLADE".

Funny when it happens though, you kick yourself!

Love this game.

One thing I thought was hilarious, I had basically given up since I had NO VOWELS, but the remaining player was checking, so I checked as well.

I had NO WORD used, but I still won, because he tried to submit a word that failed. :lol

 

[jessecuster]

Hey, Jesse - Scrabble tiles would get you close, but the points/letter are slightly different. Since you don't have multiple turns to use a letter like Q, it becomes much harder/less likely that you'll be able to use it, so it's worth slightly more...

Still, you can get close.

seppo

Yeah, I figured that, but assumed the whole set of tiles goes back in the bag each "hand". I think I would just have to mimic your letter frequency.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make my own playing cards?



Anyways, thanks again for the game, I am in love.

 

[Gunstar]

Yeah, I know, I was playing you for a considerable amount of time last night (early morning -> so tired).

One I saw was communal tile = A,L,G,E,D or something, and you came up with "GLAD", and someone had "GLADE".

Funny when it happens though, you kick yourself!

Love this game.

One thing I thought was hilarious, I had basically given up since I had NO VOWELS, but the remaining player was checking, so I checked as well.

I had NO WORD used, but I still won, because he tried to submit a word that failed. :lol

Yeah I saw you dishing out major ownage with the word 'cuirass' I think. Brilliant play. :lol

I wasn't really kicking myself since I'd never heard of the word glade before. It was more like "What the hell!!??.... aww crap".

Another game I had no vowels as well, but since everybody kept checking really fast I suspected no one had vowells. So I just raised with a large amount and everybody left immediately for me to take the blinds.

 

[jessecuster]

I forgot to mention, I think I have begun to rank high starting hands.

EA
ES
ER

I think the most words that can be made have to have at least these tiles in the player's hand.

 

[mrkgoo]

Yeah, I figured that, but assumed the whole set of tiles goes back in the bag each "hand". I think I would just have to mimic your letter frequency.

I wonder how difficult it would be to make my own playing cards?



Anyways, thanks again for the game, I am in love.

His point was that a Q in Scrabble can be held round after round, waiting for a U if you don't have one. There's no such luxury in Word Ace - every round is new. This makes Q much harder to utilise, and thus worth more points.

And I gave my theory on vowels; the decrease in vowel frequency is to do with communal hand.

 

[mrkgoo]

Yeah I saw you dishing out major ownage with the word 'cuirass' I think. Brilliant play. :lol

I wasn't really kicking myself since I'd never heard of the word glade before. It was more like "What the hell!!??.... aww crap".

Another game I had no vowels as well, but since everybody kept checking really fast I suspected no one had vowells. So I just raised with a large amount and everybody left immediately for me to take the blinds.

Yup, that's what Texas Hold'em is all about! The timing for bidding is important, and represented well in Word Ace.

I was just thinking 'everglades'.

As disclosure (and sport of ashamedly admitting), I actually had a dictionary on hand last night to look up words, though I didn't always use it (Dammit, I thought "Scrye" was a word!). I won't always have access to one, however, and the dictionary wasn't TWL compliant, so the accepted words don't necessarily match up.

But playing copious amounts of Dungeon Scroll and Twisty Text help. Actually, while I'm here, just a pimp for both these games, which are 99c, I believe, and a lot of fun. Good proactive for Word Ace, which is like the 'real deal'.

 

[jessecuster]

His point was that a Q in Scrabble can be held round after round, waiting for a U if you don't have one. There's no such luxury in Word Ace - every round is new. This makes Q much harder to utilise, and thus worth more points.

And I gave my theory on vowels; the decrease in vowel frequency is to do with communal hand.

Oh yeah, I can see that. As far as vowels, I would just have to mimic his frequency, it would take a few sets of Scrabble tiles to make the right frequency.

 

[mrkgoo]

I forgot to mention, I think I have begun to rank high starting hands.

EA
ES
ER

I think the most words that can be made have to have at least these tiles in the player's hand.

And why these are some of the most common tiles in Scrabble. T also. Note that cards like "J" are very powerful. That letter alone is more powerful than a 5-letter word made from common tiles.

Also, there are some 100 legal two letter words in Scrabble.

 

[jessecuster]

And why these are some of the most common tiles in Scrabble. T also. Note that cards like "J" are very powerful. That letter alone is more powerful than a 5-letter word made from common tiles.

Also, there are some 100 legal two letter words in Scrabble.

Yeah ET and AT would have to be lower on the list, just for the number of words that end in -ES or -ER.


J and similar letters are definitely powerful, but, when you get 6 or 7 letter words, you negate any power the player will get from a high point individual letter.

 

[centracore]

So, who's in for WORD ACE WEDNESDAY™ tonight? We'll have to get some full GAF games happening.

 

[jessecuster]

Ok, MRKGOO, we are live!

 

[mrkgoo]

I'm in, if I'm not doing anything else.

Man, I don't know if it's my wifi, but I was getting dropped connections. Tried to come back to the same table, but it was full...so just joined a random game and it sent me back to the table with my money and everything. I guess trying to reestablish or something.

Great game guys - that was fun (no dictionary for me that time ).

 

[Meatpuppet]

Another feature that I'd love would be if it could show you the best possible word from the legal dictionary at the end of each game.

 

[mrkgoo]

Would probably slow the game down too much - If I recall, thebest word search in Scrabble took a bit of processing, but of course that had to take into account placement and multiple words. Maybe it could be done.

 

[viralmarketeer]

I'm loving this game. I have a few questions, though.

What does level do? I'm Level 3, but I have no idea what that does for me.

Can you get achievements and xp from playing practice games? (... I ummm... don't get cell reception in the bathroom at work)

What's the business model here? Everything looks so great and polished and worthy of a commercial game, I don't understand how you're planning to make money with it, though. I'd love to believe that you could rely upon people just sending you money, but I don't foresee that really being a viable option.

 

[kaizoku]

I'm on at the moment, can't stop wanting to play it whenever I stop.

funniest game for me must've been when a friend and I both had lame hands, I didn't even have vowels and we expected a 3rd player to win, but they failed to submit anything and I beat my friend with 'brr' which I submitted almost by accident :lol

 

[mrkgoo]

I'm loving this game. I have a few questions, though.

What does level do? I'm Level 3, but I have no idea what that does for me.

Can you get achievements and xp from playing practice games? (... I ummm... don't get cell reception in the bathroom at work)

What's the business model here? Everything looks so great and polished and worthy of a commercial game, I don't understand how you're planning to make money with it, though. I'd love to believe that you could rely upon people just sending you money, but I don't foresee that really being a viable option.

At a guess, the level is just an indication of experience.

The money model comes in with the pro version, which allows buying more dollars.

I was thinking it could be a huge money spinner, but then the most die hard players are probably doing really well and don't need a lot of cash.

I guess having more money allows you to push your weight around more - are matchups based on level or money? It would suck for this to go downhill if a bunch of people with a lot of chips just push newbies out. I'm confident that SelfAware have considered all this, however - they seem to have considered a lot of other stuff

 

[The Elite]

This game is epic!!

Friend Code: 56197

 

[kaizoku]

At a guess, the level is just an indication of experience.

The money model comes in with the pro version, which allows buying more dollars.

I was thinking it could be a huge money spinner, but then the most die hard players are probably doing really well and don't need a lot of cash.

I guess having more money allows you to push your weight around more - are matchups based on level or money? It would suck for this to go downhill if a bunch of people with a lot of chips just push newbies out. I'm confident that SelfAware have considered all this, however - they seem to have considered a lot of other stuff

they give away free chips everyday and the default is to go to each table with only $400 no matter how big your stockpile is. I haven't felt the poker like skill factor when it comes to betting and reading someone's game or using your bigger stack. maybe that will come with familiarity with people I don't know.

 

[CharminUltra]

I wonder what this game's iPhone to Pré ratio is.

Awesome game btw.

 

[mrkgoo]

they give away free chips everyday and the default is to go to each table with only $400 no matter how big your stockpile is. I haven't felt the poker like skill factor when it comes to betting and reading someone's game or using your bigger stack. maybe that will come with familiarity with people I don't know.

Yeah, I noticed the $400 thing, but I'm thinking there MUST be bigger tables, as what's the point of having a huge pile of cash otherwise?

I've only played poker a handful of times, but it's definitely there. Pumping in $1-200 makes any one with only $400 think twice about calling, and you do develop a feel for people's style, like whiter they are bluffing. In addition, you can tell how good their vocal is based on the words they choose from their wordpool.

 

[Flunkie]

My code is 57242.

Everyone add me. This game is fantastic.

 

[mrkgoo]

they give away free chips everyday and the default is to go to each table with only $400 no matter how big your stockpile is. I haven't felt the poker like skill factor when it comes to betting and reading someone's game or using your bigger stack. maybe that will come with familiarity with people I don't know.

Ah, I just noticed that they have multiple tables - $400 is the default, there's a $40 $1/$2 table.

I'm guessing higher tables are determined by your stockpile/level.

 

[Flunkie]

Nevermind, might get banned. :lol

 

[helava]

I wonder how difficult it would be to make my own playing cards?

Not hard.

This was what we prototyped Word Ace with:

seppo

 

[helava]

I'm loving this game. I have a few questions, though.

What does level do? I'm Level 3, but I have no idea what that does for me.

Can you get achievements and xp from playing practice games? (... I ummm... don't get cell reception in the bathroom at work)

What's the business model here? Everything looks so great and polished and worthy of a commercial game, I don't understand how you're planning to make money with it, though. I'd love to believe that you could rely upon people just sending you money, but I don't foresee that really being a viable option.

XP doesn't do anything yet. It will eventually. In the short term, it'll unlock extra "gifts," which you'll be able to purchase in-game. In the long term... well, that's a secret.

Practice Mode gives you NOTHING. No achievements, no XP, no $$, nothing. It's practice mode for a reason. We're looking at extending it into something we could call "Single Player" or "Offline Mode" to provide the Word Ace experience for offline users, but we have to polish up our AI before we can do that. We have a really unique AI scheme for word generation, but betting-wise, our AI is not as advanced as it should be.

The business model is that we're planning on selling additional chips, via in-app purchases, as well as letting people simply donate a couple bucks if they want. For donations, we'll give you a little star by your avatar for 30 days, to show people you're helping support the game.

Will it work? I have NO IDEA. I really hope so. But the other aspect of it is that with our first game, Taxiball (get it here), pricing was a nightmare. What's the right price? How do we price the game so that its value, and its ability to climb the charts balance out? It sucked. People would wait for it to be $0.99, but even at $0.99, we couldn't do enough volume to crack the top 25. It was a horrible nightmare. People seemed to really enjoy the game, but almost no one bought it, and traction and awareness are EVERYTHING on the App Store.

So, with this, Word Ace is as cheap as it can possibly be. We think it's good enough that if you really like it, and you want to support games like it, maybe people will buy some chips, or throw a couple bucks our way. We're literally relying on generating enough good will that we can pay the bills. Again, will it work? Don't know. Am I worried? You bet your ass. But I think we got the hard part right - we got the game done, and response so far has been great. We'll see where it goes from here.

seppo

 

[helava]

they give away free chips everyday and the default is to go to each table with only $400 no matter how big your stockpile is. I haven't felt the poker like skill factor when it comes to betting and reading someone's game or using your bigger stack. maybe that will come with familiarity with people I don't know.

New tables with higher buy-in/blinds will unlock over time. We crossed 50K downloads, so we're going to be opening up the $4,000 tables soon. When we get to ~100K, and we launch chip purchasing, we're going to unlock the $40K tables. We're also looking into tables with different options - an "expert" word distribution, or faster time requirements, etc. But yeah. More stuff is coming. The new tables are unlocked server-side, so we don't even have to wait for an update.

seppo

 

[mrkgoo]

New tables with higher buy-in/blinds will unlock over time. We crossed 50K downloads, so we're going to be opening up the $4,000 tables soon. When we get to ~100K, and we launch chip purchasing, we're going to unlock the $40K tables. We're also looking into tables with different options - an "expert" word distribution, or faster time requirements, etc. But yeah. More stuff is coming. The new tables are unlocked server-side, so we don't even have to wait for an update.

seppo

You really did think of everything

I wonder how much stuff you can put server side to get past Apple's update process? For example Flashback is a ROM you download and the app is an emulator that plays it.

 

[helava]

Holy crap.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/9/2/word-ace-out-iphone/

wow.
seppo

 

[Flunkie]

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The application crashed just as we were going to duke it out for that big pot, whoever "jonathans" was. Foob was there too, be he folded. :lol

 

[Foob]

i'm kind of a coward...

 

[mrkgoo]

i'm kind of a coward...

Here it is. I never bluff. NEVER.


I haven't had this itching to play a game, that I just want to go home early to play it in sooooo long. They've really done well in making your stockpile a resource to be proud of, such that when you DO bid a lot, you ARE concerned (well, a little). Unlike some other gambling games, it's like "Bah, who cares -it means nothing". This is like gambling with your gamer score.

Holy crap.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2009/9/2...ce-out-iphone/

wow.
seppo

Because you are awesome.

 

[garrickk]

GarrickK - 56644

 

[Flunkie]

i'm kind of a coward...

"Crimes" and "Mick" got beat by one point. I'm not having a good day. :lol

 

[Foob]

also fun to discover you have a 15 pt word during the word assembly part...

after you checked the whole game into a 60 dollar pot holla

 

[mrkgoo]

also fun to discover you have a 15 pt word during the word assembly part...

after you checked the whole game into a 60 dollar pot holla

I had a 30 point word once, and I got so excited I overbid, and everyone folded. Oh well, I got my Strategist Achievement that way.

So basically, if you raise, and everyone calls, then you can't raise again, right? You can only raise if someone else raises? What is the raise limit number?

 

[Chris R]

Doesn't really make you a cheapskate, but increasingly, that $10 upgrade will become something you need to keep up with the software.

That said, I have an iPod touch 1st gen on 2.2, and it runs more smoothly than my iPhone with 3.0. 3.0 is pretty laggy. I can live with it, it's like clicking an app or screen and waiting a few seconds for it to load.

I doubt I'll ever upgrade my touch, but if/when I get an iPhone I'll be able to enjoy this game. I know it needs 3.0 for the wireless multiplayer, but it still would be cool to have a 2.0 version with single player action only. 10$ is just too much for the 3.0 upgrade to me :| Oh well.

 

[mrkgoo]

I doubt I'll ever upgrade my touch, but if/when I get an iPhone I'll be able to enjoy this game. I know it needs 3.0 for the wireless multiplayer, but it still would be cool to have a 2.0 version with single player action only. 10$ is just too much for the 3.0 upgrade to me :| Oh well.

This game is probably worth $10.

That said, it's not so much for the multiplayer, I don't think, as it's for the in-app purchasing, which is a feature of the 3.0 firmware.

Probably more to it than that, however.

 

[Foob]

I get so fucking excited when I win a big pot that I have to bail out immediately

 

[helava]

If you're enjoying Word Ace, it'd mean a lot if you could take a minute of your time and either rate or write a review on the App Store!

Thanks!
seppo

 

[Ferrio]

So I'm playing but how do you see people's hands at the end? (if everyone doesn't fold that is)

edit: NM

 

[Stumpokapow]

59016 (username hotdog, playing on an iPhone)

 

[mrkgoo]

lol, won a hand using only the communal cards, and to top it off my opponent had the same private cards. Stuff like is pretty funny, and you kick yourself when you do it yourself

 

[Barrett2]

If you're enjoying Word Ace, it'd mean a lot if you could take a minute of your time and either rate or write a review on the App Store!

Thanks!
seppo

Just rated the game via iTunes. Great stuff, can't believe its free.

 

[Stumpokapow]

If anyone is looking for a full Word Ace wordlist, I put one up. I just took the official Scrabble TWL wordlist and then filtered to include only words between 3 letters and 7 letters as well as removing any word that has a letter distribution that's impossible based on the letter distribution given on the blog (so "ZZZ" is not included, for example)

http://pastebin.com/HXih6sWj

 

[jessecuster]

If anyone is looking for a full Word Ace wordlist, I put one up. I just took the official Scrabble TWL wordlist and then filtered to include only words between 3 letters and 7 letters as well as removing any word that has a letter distribution that's impossible based on the letter distribution given on the blog (so "ZZZ" is not included, for example)

http://pastebin.com/HXih6sWj

You know this is cheating, right?

 

[helava]

Oh - and I suppose I should just throw in a shameless plug - if you haven't already picked it up, our other game for the iPhone, Taxiball, is available here.

Word Ace Pro, which enables in-app purchases (starting out, I think it's just going to be chip packages), will cost $0.99, and gives you 12K chips and a shiny gold icon to boot, will be available on 9/8.

We wanted to make sure that for the first couple days, no one could spend any money on the game, 'cause we didn't want to take anyone's money until we knew everything was stable and smooth. Since we had a couple kinks in the works last night, I'm glad for that. But starting on the 8th, Word Ace Pro will be live.

Thanks!
seppo

 

[Flunkie]

I'll definitely be buying that.

Good games tonight.

 

[helava]

You know this is cheating, right?

The problem is that there are wordlists and anagram-generators all over the place. Having the wordlist available isn't cheating - using it in-game is. Right now, we're relying on people to play honorably, though we're adding in various anti-cheating measures in coming updates. We're also logging all the words that get played on the server, so we'll be able to look at long-term trends. So players who are constantly using the highest-possible-scoring word will be observed closely, and we'll have the data to back it all up. We'll have a number of other measures that we implement, but for obvious reasons, I'm not gonna talk about them. Just be aware if you're planning on cheating, we'll be able to see if you are.

In the meantime, the Friends List acts as a good way to filter out cheaters, because you can consistently play with people you like playing with. We'll also have ways to report or avoid players you don't like playing with (for whatever reason), which should be out in 1.1 or 1.2.

Thanks!
seppo

 

[Stumpokapow]

You know this is cheating, right?

I think it's cheating if you consult the list in order to boost your score. I don't think it's cheating at Scrabble to have a Scrabble dictionary, and people have already complained in this thread that words that they knew were words were rejected, and it's because of a discrepancy between the words we know and the words on the TWL list.

What helava says there makes perfect sense to me. A word list is not cheating; using a word list to game the system is.