Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Conclusion?

Yesterday I got an email from someone at Ludia which appears to be the Quebec based company that developed the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Facebook game. It was in response to my complaint about feeling like they tricked me into giving them 5 of my Facebook credits with sketchy button changes. In a nutshell the response said that Facebook lets an app take credits for minor purchases without confirmation. Everything in this game is a 'minor purchase' so they don't have any reason to confirm anything. It was made pretty clear that what happened to me wasn't an accident and they intentionally set things up to make it very easy to get your credits.

He then apologized if I was confused but claimed to be unable to refund credits. The claim was Facebook handles everything to do with credits and gave me a link to complain directly to Facebook. He said the only thing he can do is give me a free play, which he did. Huzzah? Having never used the limited number of daily plays as it is this doesn't really help me out at all.

I went to the Facebook link he gave me and it's solely for troubles with _buying_ credits. Once Facebook has your money they don't seem the least bit interested in helping you out. It doesn't even seem like there's a way to contact anyone at all for other reasons. I just ended up in a help file loop which was relatively unhelpful. On the plus side I did find out how to make Facebook stop caching my credit card information!


In conclusion there doesn't actually look to be any way to dispute a Facebook app taking your credits. What's to stop me from writing an app that just steals credits from people without notifying them? (Morality aside that is.) As long as it falls under the 'minor purchase' category it doesn't seem like there's anything at all requiring the app to tell you what it's doing. Even if you noticed it doesn't seem like there's any way to actually complain about it!

Part of the problem is certainly that you're required to buy Facebook credits in large numbers. You can spend $5, $10, $50, $100, or $200 at a time. So if you legitimately wanted to buy something in a game for $2 you're stuck with at least $3 of credits just sitting around. Where my evil app could siphon them off slowly... Of course Facebook wants it set up like this because they get the full $5 up front and if I never want to buy again they just get to keep the extra $3 forever without splitting it with any apps.


Now there's still a part of me that wants to keep making a stink about this. Yell at the guy from Ludia. Go up the chain to their manager. But it's only 50 cents and my outrage levels are rapidly waning. Frankly I'm not even sure the problem really lies with Ludia. They have a sketchy UI but one that seems to be completely kosher as far as Facebook is concerned. I think the real solution is to uninstall this game in particular and scale back what I may play on Facebook in the future. I'm fine with paying for games but I don't think I want to pay Facebook anything anymore which means not playing new games on there enough to like them enough to pay for them. There are certainly plenty of other games to play elsewhere!