In Reply to: alphadoc's Dealings with Hasbro posted by maureenkennerk (Gold Member) on February 06, 2001 at 21:42:51:
Sorry for the double post, I hit submit too fast. I ran into alpha at the zone, she asked me to post this here for her.
Lori
Original email :
I am speaking for a small community of 250 or more individuals who have been using and patronizing your Mplayer internet scrabble gamesite. They are all outraged as to the sudden and virtually without notice dismissal and dissappearance of their playground in which many of whom have relaxed and played after a hard day's work for five years. As you can imagine this has lead to the social interactions and freindships created and nurtured by your product. Many have been singing your praises for many yearsabout that and now, without ever having been able to express that to you we must express our deepest regrets for your contractual breach with mplayer.
We are talking people's lives that have been profoundly affected first by your implementation of this community and and then now by the restraint od trade/antitrust agreement.
The legal implications here are the last thing on anyone's minds right now. The utmost and foremost regard is for the loss of their community.Friends unable to contact friends, lovers unable to contact each other, I know of at least two marriages that were resultant of this little mplayer community and countless other lives that have been thrown together and flourished under the nurishment and support of their "buddies".
Another very important factor is the "Tournament" equation. You may think that the NSA (National Scrabble Association) wgich holds tournaments all over the country and has memberships of thousands of people has nothing to do with the manufacturing and distribution of Scrabble CDRom, but the fact is that at least 20 people have joined the NSA from your Mplayer gaming site through the mentoring within the community and countless others continue to take this "game" as seriously as the NSA members themselves.
There are doctors, lawyers, Counselors, and many different occupations among your patrons and they are all distressed over your decision to end the contract with Mplayer. If you go to the ladder site at Cases and read the message forums you can see the angst in the posts. After the initial shock wears off I am certain that they will all be very angry and looking into the legal ramifications.
I would just like to be able to tell them what their options are. Would you please give this your immediate attention and look into what other options are available to them or how long it will take to renegotiate a contract with Mplayer?
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter.
1st email reply after speaking to Jayson this morning andf calling his attention to my email complaint i files this weekend.
Gloria:
The bad news is that it was our doing that the contract with MPlayer was
allowed to expire.
The good news is that matchmaking for Scrabble will be done on our own
gaming portal GAMES.COM. We'll be using this portal for all our games in
the future.
Sorry. This is probably not what you wanted to hear, but as we have our own
gaming portal it makes no sense to pay someone else to host our games.
Hope you like GAMES.COM.
__________________________________________
Jayson Hill
Manager of Public Relations
Infogrames
jhill@us.infogrames.com
Below you will find my reply and then his 2nd email response.
At this time your only recourse on the Games.com site is to provide feedback for them to improve the site. It is new and open to change.
I can't offer you much hope on either MPlayer or The Zone hosting Scrabble in the long run. The portal that hosts a game does receive benefits for that hosting. (Ad revenue sharing, etc.)
As we own a gaming portal site, the decision was made to use that site for our games and thus not to pay another site. As it stands right now, that is what we are transitioning to for all games past and future.
We have been recently acquired by another company, so this situation could change.
__________________________________________
Jayson Hill
Manager of Public Relations
Infogrames
50 Dunham Road
Beverly, MA 01915
(978) 921-3882
jhill@us.infogrames.com
/|\
-----Original Message-----
From: ALPHADOC29@aol.com [mailto:ALPHADOC29@aol.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 06, 2001 4:50 PM
To: jhill@us.infogrames.com
Subject: Re: Scrabble on MPlayer
Jason:
If you read all the posts in the message forum of the Cases ladder then you
know that this is very important to many many people and that they do not
like the games.com site for many reasons. For one thing there is no way to
set the timer and everyone plays scrabble within a time limit. People playing
on the zone use the tournament method of 25 mintes per person time limit for
the entire game and mplayers use the 30 second a turn time limit. The
graphics on the games.com do not allow for the entire board to be seen at
once unless you minimize the board thereby making it visually unfriendly for
us over 40 year old baby boomers who have to wear glasses for the first time
in their lives. And there isnt anything like the pager on mplayer that allows
for the free moving and confidential chat between buddies.
Is it possible for you to bill the mplayers for the amount of the contract so
that we may pay for the site to play on mplayer?
Please let me know what the possibilities are for that since the alternative
site which has been tried out is not to the liking of our players. This is
not to say that games.com is not a great place for other games and board
games but just to say that there are important factors that appeared to have
been overlooked by your company. It is pretty obvious that whoever put
together this scrabble site was not familiar with the type of serious gaming
that the mplayers and NSA players are used to.
And if I may, would you please reassure me that the Zone is not going to have
the same contractual problem that mplayer had?
Thank you for your prompt attention and all your assistance in this matter.
Laughter and Scrabble,
Alphadoc