Beyond Classic DOS Games

I’ll admit, I’ve gotten addicted to Scrabble. I had trouble getting into the game a few years ago because it’s a bit frustrating to have to memorize “words” that aren’t really words in the sense of actually being used by speakers of the English language. But then someone told me about Facebook, and soon after I discovered Scrabulous. Being able to play my friends made it worth suffering through that difficult initial stage of memorizing lists, such as words with a Q but no U.

So, a friend of mine recently invited me to play Scrabble on isc.ro. ISC is a Scrabble server. I took up internet chess in 1998, so I’ve been to a few servers in my time. Some of them were empty, or had bad customer service, but none of them have left half as bad a taste in my mouth as ISC.

First, the good. You connect to the server with a Telnet-based client called WordBiz. WordBiz is a clean, simple interface that does everything you could expect a Scrabble interface to do. WordBiz is a lot like Blitzin, the client for ICC (the Internet Chess Club), which includes the way Blitzin creates a hyperlink out of anything inside quotation marks. This allow you to link to a help file by typing “help channels” (inside quotation marks), or link to an external website. I’ve often wondered why they couldn’t have chosen some other character, like asterisks or something. You have to train yourself to use single quotes when you want to, you know, quote something, to avoid creating hyperlinks within mundane conversations. That’s a bit annoying, but ICC started it, so I can’t blame ISC for that.

And the members? Talk about friendly! A nicer group of people you will never meet. In fact, civility is strictly enforced. More on that later.

The first thing you’re likely to notice when you’re new to the server is that there are no Helpers or Admins online. There are certain times of the day when a Helper is there, but most of their answers are sarcastic and insulting. Don’t bother using the “ask” command, unless you want a stupid answer. Just ask in one of the chat channels. The fellow who runs the server, a man named Carol, supposedly is reluctant to add more Helpers and Admins because he doesn’t trust the membership. He apparently prefers that customer service be non-existent, and the lucky few who get to volunteer their time seem to have contempt for the other members. Perhaps their limited membership creates a culture of entitlement and elitism.

But let’s get back to the “ask” command. If you really want to be made fun of, there’s a command called “ask” which sends your question to the Admins and Helpers. Just type “ask <your question>”. This is similar to the “assist” command on a chess server I used to frequent. There’s one critical difference.

If the Helpers choose to ignore your question (as they did with mine), or if there are no Helpers online, your question will be stuck in the queue. You can’t ask a new question while you have a question pending, and there is no way to rescind or expire your question! If the staff ignores your question and you want to ask a new question, you’re screwed! You can’t clear the old question to ask a new one. No more questions for you, sucker!

The “assist” command on the chess server I was referring to was a bit more sensible. You could cancel your request, or it would expire automatically if you left the server. Assuming that there would be no reason for anyone to answer your question after you log off, I logged off. Then I logged back on, and my question was still pending! “Yes”, the other members confirm, “they will sometimes answer your question after you leave.” Why would do they that? What possible sense could there be for a question not to expire after you leave? So you can’t even clear your question from the queue by logging off and logging back on. Is there any point to that at all?

Anyway, everyone has a “Number of unfinished games” ratio. Mine is “very low”. A person with a higher ratio might be losing connection on purpose to be a bad sport. This is actually a useful piece of information. But sometimes you start a game and the other person isn’t at their computer. After it becomes obvious that they aren’t going to play, you can abort the game and it has no effect on your rating. But it does affect your unfinished games ratio. How does that make any sense? I mean, if no moves were made, then a game didn’t occur. If a game didn’t occur, how can it affect your unfinished games ratio? It just punishes you for aborting the game, when it’s really the other person’s fault for walking away from their computer while they had a pending game request. One of the members asked why ISC would do such a thing, and got a typically sarcastic response. It was pretty obvious that they were simply refusing to acknowledge that the member was right. Then the Helper logged off to avoid having to answer any further questions. Nice.

So, I decided to ask the members about their customer satisfaction. I used the Helper’s poor handling of the question as an example. One member said that the Helpers are just volunteers with no special powers, so there was no point asking them to fix something that they have no control over. Fair enough, but I’ve volunteered on chess servers before, and when a member had a concern that I couldn’t handle, I would escalate it to someone who could. I assume Helpers on ISC would do the same. “That’s an unwarranted assumption,” another member tells me. I replied that I was only assuming that if the membership had a concern, the site operators would be interested in hearing it and make some attempt to resolve it. “Go to a better server,” says another member. (more…)