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Scrabulous Is Dead, Hasbro's Version Brain-Dead
eldavojohn writes "Sometime this morning, Facebook shut down Scrabulous to American and Canadian users. Scrabulous, we hardly knew ye." This is sadly unsurprising, now that Hasbro's finally taken legal action against the developers, after quite a few months of letting it go unmolested. Seems like they waited until there was an official Scrabble client available (also on Facebook), while the snappy and fuller-featured Scrabulous kept people interested in a 60-year-old board game. The official client, which is at least labeled a beta, is a disappointment. This is not a Google-style beta release, note: it's slow to load, confusing, and doesn't even offer the SOWPODS word list as an option, only the Tournament Word List and a list based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary. (Too bad that SOWPODS is the word list used in most of the world's English-speaking countries.) It also took several minutes to open a game, rather than the few seconds (at most) that Scrabulous took — it's pretty impressive, but not in a good way, that the programmers could extract that sort of performance from the combination of Facebook's servers and my dual-core, 2GHz+ laptop. The new Scrabble client has doodads like 3D flipping-tile animations, too, but no clear way to actually initiate the sample game that jamie and I have attempted to start. I hope that once we get past that obvious hurdle, we'll find there's a chat interface and game notebook as in Scrabulous, but my hopes are low.
My god! It must have been a heroic effort to somehow drum up interest in something that ancient! If they could do that for Scrabble, imagine what they could do for chess, or go, or even poker!
"Copy our game and do a better job than us, and we will pay you for it rather than making asses of ourselves"
Fixed that for you.
Badass Resumes
When Newton said "if I see farther than other men, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants" (and he wasn't the first to say that)
I totally agree. Someone really should have sued Newton for copyright infringement for that quote.
If these guys can do Scrabble so well, why not encourage them to do other Hasbro games in a way that makes Hasbro money?
Stop making sense.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
My mom was kicking my butt, 306 to 278, with just a few tiles to go. I guess I should consider this a reprieve. If you can't win, hope for a tie due to complete system shutdown, right?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I recommend a guerrilla trademark war: we simply need to decide what STD now gets the street name of "scrabble".
Real Slashdot nerds don't social network, we just use Cowboy Neal.
Pride goeth before the fall. And that's what this is: hasboro saying "Mine! My game! Not yours! I do with it what I want! You dint ask purmissin!"
Has there ever been a poll about which social networking sites people on Slashdot use?
/. is my social networking site. :-)
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
new meme.
FYI, my lawyer friend says you can't patent/copyright/trademark game mechanics. So, just rename it to "Scandalous" and let's get playing again!
And why would that in any way affect their choice of dictionaries? Are some dictionaries illegal in the US?
No, the whip company is finding many new potential sources of revenue on the web.
--The FNP
HIV. It's about as active as scrabble and gets just about as much attention from the general populace. A ton of people have it but nobody really talks about it anymore.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Especially if you're a lion.
Wouldn't that be more of an anti-social networking site?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
They are finding it difficult to toe the line.
Infuriate left and right
Can't resist:
http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c192/twinop/cant-have-a-pony.png
That's awesome! I've often thought that there would be this thing, I don't know, like a website. Where you could search for stuff and then FIND it. Kinda like a library card catalogue but for the ENTIRE internet. Wouldn't that be great? Then we wouldn't have to wait years to find stuff out - we could just do a quick search and have the information we wanted. Oh well, maybe sometime in the future.
...$45 for the deluxe version (prices from Amazon). It is risky starting out, but once you have something popular it's easy to put out the same product year after year and rake in the money.
I'm sorry are you talking about the board games or the computer games?
No, the whip company is finding many new potential sources of revenue on the web.
And it sounds like Hasbro picked up the buggy part...