Fixed

I have too much time on my hands. I know this. When I'm not farting about in the garden (project) or recording vlogs on the beach, I'm pretty much doing nothing practical apart from cooking - and to be fair, I've had so much time to practice cooking I'm even better now than I was! The thing is as I have still to find a job, I am filling my days with anything I can to procrastinate from doing something pertinent.

Anyone who knows me well will know that I love playing Scrabble and fancy myself a reasonable player. I used to play it a lot more than I do now, even though I have far more time. Games of Scrabble on a board were often like binge drinking; getting as much in because you don't know when the next session will be. Then I discovered an on-line community - long before Facebook - which had its own area to play; there were tournaments and your stats were all important. This was a place called the PixiePit and one day they started to charge players a subscription fee and being someone who suffered at the hands of people not subscribing to my own innovative on-line things, I was going to be fucked by a buffalo before I was giving anyone my money...

Anyone who knows me well will know that while I often have referred to myself as a journalist in the past, many people would argue the validity of that statement based on what I journalised in... Innit? The thing is, you don't regurgitate press releases for a decade without starting to see things - patterns, correlations, clues to something else. My role was both to regurgitate and to investigate and despite having not done much for a decade, the inherent ability is still there to spot something a bit off.

When I started having to play Scrabble on Facebook, it was being run by (I think) Mattel and was essentially a social media housed version of PixiePit. Then EA Sports bought Mattel, therefore bought the game and the uproar over it even made the mainstream press. People who had been playing the original version, far longer than as a Facebook game, were seeing a decade of stats wiped out; they were seeing a variety of things within games disappear (speed scrabble, force passing and the ability to choose who you played rather than randomly be assigned any Tom, Dick or Ahab) in favour of what appeared to be some chess rating system, adverts, paid for speed games and no way to reconnect with players who shared the app but not Facebook friend status. EA listened to all the complaints, and there were literally millions of them, and they did a massive fuck all (and there still are people who post to their page complaining today, who don't seem to realise that EA doesn't care about anything but profits).

As with all changes to the way we do things on line, there is no choice. You get changes foisted upon you that you simply have to accept or go without and these platform dealers know that for every person who gets pissed off with their changes, another two or three will emerge in the next few days to overfill the gap - it is the nature of having the world at your fingertips; fuck the non-conformers.

People who know me will also know that I have 'Bill' the legendary alter-ego based on a long story about mispronunciation which we don't need to obfuscate this any more by repeating. Bill is 'used' to play games because Bill's details - from friends to personal details - can be shared with Facebook because there's fuck all there apart from the people who think being friends with me and Bill is going to yield some insight or hilarity or even insanity...

I have never wanted to share my details with Facebook. I've known for yonks that Facebook is a data harvester and therefore I don't tend to have much information on it and quite wonderfully it thinks I live in a village just near Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumbria; so I'm kind of on the radar in a very pointless way. This was why Bill was created and Bill has played Scrabble for 9 years. He's got a 73% win rate and that makes him (me) a reasonable player. However, it wasn't until I moved up here that I started to notice something that kind of takes all the fun out of playing EA's on-line Scrabble...

The biggest complaint you hear from people is that people cheat and use word generators - yes that happens. I have used them. I sometimes use them to check the spelling of a word in my memory that won't quite appear and the EA Scrabble has a word checker so you don't just stick any old shit down; except it doesn't let you put any old shit down. If you put 'SPANGLEWANK' down, not only would you be a genius, but it would say 'Invalid word' and wouldn't let you do it; which of course takes challenging out of the equation - something you could and often had at the PixiePit. So people use word generators and the only skill that remains is how and where to place your go for maximum scores and future opportunities. It's a valid complaint, but you're not going to stop people and if, like me, you know obscure words, you're always going to be accused of being a cheat by whoever you're playing, even if you're not and especially if you're hammering someone obviously of sub-par intelligence.

So EA Scrabble is about positioning rather than skill; however it has a skill rating, which is called an ELO rating. Essentially, the higher that rating the better the player you are and that, theoretically, trumps everything. The problem is over the last six months I've grown to think that's bullshit. I think EA have turned Scrabble into a video game, or have tried to incorporate bits of 'playability' like Candy Crush has into it, albeit more surreptitiously rather than secretively, that won't bother good players, will infuriate not so good players, but will likely as not be picked up by anyone and because they are who they are; good players will think they have good games because they're good players; the same for average players and average players won't think why 99 times out of 100 they get stuffed when they play someone the ELO claims is better than them. The reason for this is both subconscious and also a case of if someone like me said, "They [EA] all fuck cats!" even if they do, you're not going to believe me; you're going to think it's a sour grapes issue, or I don't like changes EA have made or anything because I'm most likely a mad swivel-eyed conspiracy freak/Right/Left wing fake news bastard and EA are a large computer game conglomerate... What's not to believe about them? Eh? EH?

Because I've had a lot of time on my hands I started to play a bit more Scrabble and for the first couple of months I was here, Bill fluctuated between a 73 and 71% success rate and then something started to repeat itself and you could say that the law of averages, physics and games theory make this a non-story and it probably is unless you like playing scrabble on Facebook and don't mind being dicked about?

I was losing consistently to players with a higher rating. People with 75% or 80% ratings, or ELO ratings higher, weren't just beating me, they were crucifying me, much in the same way I would annihilate a player with a less than 50% rating. Now, these people who beat me had high ELO ratings as well, so theoretically they were much better than me and obviously had better vocabularies and could see words in jumbled letters better or ... um... word generators; you can't escape them, so word skill tends to go out of the window, as I said. Yet, these players with 10% high ratings than me weren't just butt-fucking me, they were doing it with 6 or 7 bingos (a 7 or 8 letter word) while I toiled trying to make fuck all out of 6 consonants and a U or an I...

So, back in July, I disconnected from and deactivated all of my bogus Facebook accounts, I mean, who doesn't have at least 15 each? But in December, I reactivated one of them - 'Barry' - and started playing Scrabble. This time I was doing it as research rather than fun and some of the things I discovered were very alarming to me. The first thing I did was have Barry play Bill 10 times. Bill (at the time) had a 2025 ELO rating and Barry had a 1800 (apparently where it starts... I dunno, go figure?). Bill annihilated Barry 10-0. I was playing myself, but one of me consistently had far better letters and combinations for TEN straight games - Barry never stood a chance; it was like I got to pick my letters from a plastic bag.

Barry then went into the big world and started playing others; all with piss poor ratings. Barry went from a 0% win percentage to 75% within 100 games. In fact at 100 games, Barry had only lost 18 games - 10 of those to myself and five because the internet was down for nearly a week and I'd been 'force forfeited', so in actual terms I'd only lost 3 games . I occasionally got beaten by a player with a similar ELO rating, but put that down, rather conceitedly, to bad moves or judgements by me rather than skill of my opponent.

Then Barry played Bill again and got thumped.

Over the last two months, Barry plays people of a much higher standard to his rating and 99 times out of 100 he gets his arse handed to him on a plate; once in a blue moon, he'll beat a player who is better, despite having shit letters, because *I* know how to play when someone is screwing you over and that is to shut them down as best you can. The thing is Bill and then Barry both get consistently shit letters when they're playing someone 'better'.

Barry has now played Bill 20 times. The score is Bill 20 to nil. I played two games yesterday, now that Barry's ELO rating is 1950 (Bill's is 2030) and Barry lost both games by over 150 points. Barry's letters have again consistently been shit when playing Bill; and Barry's letters are consistently shit when playing any one with a +2000 ELO rating. Bill's (2030) letters are always considerably better than someone with a less than 2000 ELO rating and constantly shit when playing someone with a higher than 2050 rating. Across 6 months of scrutiny, I have absolutely no doubt that the data I've accrued proves that EA on-line Scrabble is unfairly weighted towards the better players; the letters are not random; they're influenced by the game provider towards the player with the higher ELO.

You can't get a straightforward game like you can with a board and a bag of tiles; it can't do that because it wants to encourage people by helping them or hindering them depending on the standing of the opposition.

EA Scrabble is fixed and I have six months worth of data to back it up. The sad thing is it is neither important or likely to be discussed by anyone - stick a link to this blog in the Scrabble FB page comments section and if it isn't deleted by their rabid moderators, people won't bother or if they do... please see the comments above about my credibility against an honest and decent megacorporation like EA; which is fair enough, but it does show you how everyone has allowed themselves to be subtly manipulated by computer companies... To believe everything the screen tells you and to be so ... zoned out, that you accept it as normal so don't really see how you're being used to ensure your patronage and if just one percent of one percent of the 7 million users spends $25 then everyone gets to buy a house in Bali.