Happy Birthday, Wordabble. It’s been one month since the launch of our first iPhone application and we’re having a great time. Purchased now from more than 20 countries, more than half of our users are playing the Puzzle of the Day across 13 different timezones! Only about one third of our daily puzzle players submit their score but they’ve spent a combined 1,499 hours playing in just 30 days.

With any success — you run into users who try to push the limit or test the rules. We’re now getting a taste of that:

Several users have been solving the entire puzzle of the day in an extraordinarily short amount of time. This can be very frustrating for our users who spend quite a bit of time trying to solve the puzzle. Believe it or not, some users will spend upwards of five hours trying to solve a single puzzle. That’s incredible!

With fans that dedicated, you can bet we are contacted when something seems awry.

We’ve spent a lot of time discussing the appropriate response, whether responding is appropriate, the motivation for someone to complete or nearly complete a puzzle using a word list, how often someone might be motivated to do this, how people are accomplishing this, and finally, what we consider abuse.

Ultimately, the decision of who is abusing is very subjective. We can’t ever be sure of a person’s capability. And anything we do to prevent this in the future can be circumvented unless everyone has the same concept of how the game should be played.

I want to be clear that despite the complications, we are working on solutions that will make the game more enjoyable for everyone:

• We implemented a system to disable scores that are clearly abuse last Thursday, 9/4.
• We’ve contacted individuals whom we feel quite certain have abused the system and asked what they enjoy about the game, how they feel it challenges them, and their input on the situation.
• We’re considering placing those who are gifted in completing the POTD into a separate class, thereby playing against the clock with others who play the game in a similar manner while not affecting casual players.

One proposed solution by quite a few of our casual users was to remove the “End game and view summary” feature. I must stress that this is not the only way someone could abuse the system and was the most requested feature after our 1.0 release went public. While abuse clearly started after we released the updated version with this feature, removing it would do no good. People will still find a way to abuse the system if they want to. I believe we simply hit a tipping point in the user base where we finally had enough players for people to be interested in completing a puzzle. Or perhaps people got bored not finding all the words and wanted a new challenge (or wanted to learn words!) and have chosen to use a variety of tools at their disposal to complete the puzzle.

Ultimately, our goal is to listen and accommodate all sides of our customer base. Alienating a user for enjoying the product, regardless of how they’re enjoying it, would be a terrible thing to have to do. We’re here though, we’re listening to everyone, and we’re doing everything possible to resolve this situation.