Words with Friends just played an unskippable video ad on my android.

The BBQ Pit
1

Fuck. This. Bullshit.

I just switched from an iPhone, where I gladly paid the cost of the game to remove ads, to an Android phone. Of course I redownloaded this game as it’s one of only a couple I play. I was looking for a regular version to buy but the only one in the marketplace was the free with ads version. If the pay version of the game is out there I cannot fucking find it.

I was prepared to deal with forced ads after my turns until I can find the pay version but then, after playing a word against my wife, a fucking VIDEO ad for the Oscars popped up on the screen. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t mute it. I couldn’t do SHIT with it except sit there like a chump watching until about 10 seconds in.

What the fuck is this bullshit? Who wants to play an ad supported game that takes over your phone with a fucking video commercial??? I couldn’t even mute the fucking thing!

My wife loves to play this game so I can’t just quit or she’ll be disappointed because I’m one of only like 3 people she plays with but I’m fucking irate as hell over the intrusive video.

2

I don’t have an Android but I did a little Googling for you. It seems that on the Android version of WWF, you have to buy 23 Zynga coins and then exchange them in the in-app store for the “no-ads” version. So somewhere inside Words with Friends, there should be a link to the store, and then just follow the instructions to buy coins and exchange them.

3

:smack:

:smack:

Thanks. I swear I googled it and didn’t see that. I seriously don’t know how I was supposed to figure that out, or maybe they don’t want you to.

Oh, but look, I get to pay $3 for it on android instead of the $1 I paid on the iPhone.

Either way my gripe still stands. It’s one thing to hijack peoples computers with video ads but it’s another to do it unannounced and unmutable on someones cellphone.

4

Same thing happened to me yesterday with the Headspace meditation app for the Android. It launched a 5-fucking-minute introductory video that I could not do anything about. I couldn’t go back to the app’s menu, nor could I kill the app, because I couldn’t get back to the desktop. I couldn’t fast-forward to the end because even though it showed the progress bar, every time I touched the screen a padlock icon appeared at the top-right of the screen. I ended up hard-stopping the phone and deleting the app.

I love my Android in many ways, but fuck that shit. The O/S should simply not allow an app to do this. Massive fail.

5

That sounds so fucking stupid.

6

That’s a general price increase. It’s $3 on iPhone now, too (well, $2.99.)

7

Yes. If I wanted to pay for something in coin tokens, I’d go back in time to 1983 and head for the Pac-Man game at the arcade.

8

I paid for the iPhone ad free version. All it means is “free of non zynga ads”.
There are 3-4 buttons of “try this game!”.

There are too many scrabble games out there to bother.

9

There’s some kind of irony in there somewhere.

10

You are, after all, dealing with Zynga—the entity largely responsible for inflicting the brain-gelatinizing societal scourge"FarmVille" onto the world, whose informal corporate motto is “Be Evil,” and whose official slogan is “No Seriously, Be Evil… HAIL SATAN!”

You’re fortunate to get off with a few obnoxious ads and dipshitty tokens. They could have stolen all the apps off your phone, appended -Ville to the names, and sold them back to you.

11

I was going to put just that on their review page, but I can’t find where to write a review. :smack: Sooooooooooo stresssssssed!!1!!one!!

12

That blew my mind the first time I got one of those. I thought, “What about people who don’t have unlimited data? They’re going to end up paying for that video stream.”

What I do is immediately hit the home button. Then I go to the app that shows all running apps and kill Words. Then I relaunch it. A bit of a pain, but better than watching the video.

13

It wouldn’t even respond to the home button.

14

I don’t get the love for WwF. Like someone else said, there are plenty of other scrabble games out there.

15

I always play on mute, so while some videos are skippable, others aren’t, and for those, I just put my phone down for 10 seconds and then it’s over. No biggee.

16

I don’t play games on my droid X but god damn, that’s unacceptable.

17

The reason everyone plays WwF instead of one of the dozens of other scrabble-ish games out there is that everyone is playing WwF. It’s not that it’s a better game, it’s that if you want to play with everyone you get the game that everyone is playing.

18

Try Wordsmith instead. No ads.

19

Bingo. I hate the fact that WWF is run by Zynga, and the interface annoys me, as does the fact that the board is not a standard Scrabble board. I would much rather play Scrabble. But all of my friends have WWF, and nobody has the real Scrabble app, so I play WWF. Because solitaire Scrabble is lame.

20

Are you sure it wasn’t unskippable? I had one play that appeared to be unskippable, but there was a little “MENU” button next to the progress bar that when I tapped it, an “X” button popped up and I could close the ad.