In the world of greed Zynga has now taken it to a new level with their new pay for the app and now pay to play scam with Scramble with Friends. In the game you get 15 free tokens and a token replinishes every 10 minutes. You can use 1 or 2 tokens per turn in a game so if you run out of tokens and don’t want to wait, you have to buy more. You paid for the game and now are being asked to pay to play. However, Zynga doesn’t stop the scam there. In an effort to greedily bilk users out of every cent, they have devised the token system to utilize your paid tokens first over your free ones. So if you have 15 free tokens and 15 paid tokens Zynga will take the paid tokens first.
Why does this matter? Unless you’re playing a lot at one time you don’t need the paid tokens. If you check your phone and have three or four turns to play you can use your free tokens to play and they will replenish. However, Zynga scams the user by taking your paid tokens to play first instead of the free ones and now you’re paying to play a turn that should be free. You have just paid to play not because you want to play a lot at one time but because Zynga has decided to further scam their users by taking paid tokens over free tokens first.
So what happens when you want to play a lot? Well you’re out of luck or need to buy more tokens because Zynga has been bilking you out of your paid tokens when you didn’t need to use them.
I have no qualms with a company making a profit but scamming users, fans of Zynga games, out of money is over the line. Especially since there is no disclosure by Zynga prior to purchasing these tokens that this is how the token scam works. If you have money to give away AND like being scammed, purchase Zynga’s tokens today. Better yet don’t play the game at all or any of Zynga’s games as they have adopted the antithesis of Google’s mantra of “Do No Evil”.