This is the Complaints Department. Please Hold.

You don’t have to be a Facebook user to appreciate this.  Somehow, I was selected as one of the users who would test a new Scrabble board on Facebook.  I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t even want it to change.  But there it is, in all of its annoying glory.  

The old board was a traditional Scrabble board, albeit online.  The new board has a motherlode of crap around it including the faces of friends who are playing other Scrabble games in case I want to invite them to play, all of the statistics of my previous games, a list of every move I and my opponent have made in the current game and a list of all of my current games and whose move is next.   Everything is in full colour, like the board, and in 2 cm squares.  It is one of the most irritating things I have ever seen on the Internet.

Adding to the fun of the new board: sometimes when you arrive, up pops an overlay that tells you to invite friends to play! Usually when that happens there is also an X you can click to close it or a button you can click that says “no thanks”.  Not on this one.  You have to press the button to tell all of your friends to come join you in hell.  Then you can click cancel.  And then it pops up again.  After doing all of this twice it finally goes away.

So I sent the game maker a note telling them that a) I never consented to be a tester for them and b) I don’t like it!  In recent days they’ve put up a notice saying “Don’t worry – your friends will soon have the new Scrabble too!”  So it seems to be a fait accompli.  Oh did I mention that before I could send my complaint I had to register on the site? Yeah.  They’re like that.

Here was the reply complete with misplaced apostrophes:

Hello Lisa,

Thank you for contacting Electronic Arts.

I understand that you don’t like New Beta Scrabble. I appreciate your ideas and suggestions to improve our games. Our valuable player’s feedback’s and suggestions help us very much to make our games more interesting. I have forwarded your suggestion to our development team for their review and discussion.

You can also post your suggestion/feedback in our forums, which are regularly visited by our game developers to view our valuable player’s feedback and suggestions.

Thank you for being a part of EA games.

Translation:  Take your feeble complaint and go to our swimming pool of opinions in the faint hope that someone might see your musings.  We are all under the age of 20 and are just pushing this game until Apple or Microsoft come along and pay us millions for it.

Yes I’m willingly on Facebook and yes I know that  my info is gathered for Facebook marketing purposes.  I don’t remember ever agreeing to be a guinea pig for a third party who runs the Scrabble game though.  Harrumph.   What will I do about it?  Well it depends on the letters I get…