UPDATE April 23, 2009: After getting the inappropriate comment on this article from Slide this morning, my wife and I have decided to quit the game. It’s over. Any links to our SuperPoke Pets sites are no longer active and should be considered dead. Why should we pay for that sort of attitude from a company? We’re voting with our wallets and the answer is “No thank you.”
I enjoy playing Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets and I’ve raved about SuperPoke Pets and ranted about SuperPoke Pets. Today, I am enraged — not by the game I have come to love — but rather by the lack of an artful and loving Slide.com technical response to what should have been a simple problem to solve. This is the story of a false accusation — an unfair incarceration of character if you will — and its ultimate unraveling in the light of indisputable, human, facts.
SuperPoke Pets is a child’s game that many adults enjoy playing.
The object of the game is to build a habitat for your Pet by purchasing things in the pet store. You can spend real money on Gold items or you can spend “coins” — fake money that you earn by playing with your pet and your friends’ pets — to decorate your Pet’s living space.
SuperPoke Pets relies on lots of intensive database storage and retrieval for each player and, sometimes, thing go amiss and items you purchase go missing. The SuperPoke Pets technical forum is filled with lots of horror stories of mysteriously losing purchased items from habitats.
I’ve been playing SuperPoke Pets for two months now and I was recently burned by a Slide.com database meltdown when I lost over 1,500 of my hard-earned SuperPoke Pets friends. It took a lot of muscle, and a little yelling, to get that “database glitch” resolved and I thank Elin at Slide.com for helping restore my status in the game.
My wife also enjoys playing SuperPoke Pets, but she doesn’t play as much as I do — every coin she earns has value to her as a new player.
A couple of weeks ago or so, my wife “purchased” a “Star Pets” Plushies pack for 3,000 coins. You get 20 coins for every pet you play with, so you can imagine how long it can take to earn 3,000 coins if you’re the only one doing the playing.
My wife received acknowledgment from the SuperPoke Pets system that her “purchase” was successful and 3,000 real fake coins were debited from her account.
The Plushies Pack did not show up in her habitat inventory.
She wrote a note to Slide for help in either getting the Plushies delivered or in getting a refund of her 3,000 coins.
After answering a slew of questions about the missing purchase, my wife was told to wait.
Finally, today, she contacted Slide customer support again and was told she “gifted” a 3,000 coin Plushies Pack to another player she did not know.
Huh?
Not possible.
My wife only exchanges “gifts” with me and nobody else. She told Slide.com that there had to be a mistake and she received this reply:
My wife has never been “friends” with that person Slide.com named and you can’t give a gift to someone if you haven’t each accepted a friendship invitation.
My wife told Slide.com there had to be a mistake and she asked for her 3,000 coins to be returned and here is Slide.com’s response:
There is definitely something fishy going on here over a measly 3,000 coins and that database exchange Michelle J. at Slide.com claims to have proof of taking place, never took place.
We know that exchange never took place — anyone can copy and paste a bunch of gibberish in an email message and call it “proof” even though nothing is proven — because my wife wrote to the woman Slide claims my wife gave her Plushies Pack to and that woman confirmed no such transaction took place.
So now what?
If what Michelle J. claims — that a transaction took place even though both parties deny it because they were never “friends” so the exchange could have never taken place in the first place — then my wife is a liar, but she is not, or the woman who “received” the Plushies was in on some scam that involved the forging/breaking into of my wife’s SuperPoke Pets account to “gift” the 3,000 coin Plushies Pack to the woman.
Those scenarios do not make sense and none of it passes the giggle test.
As Judge Judy says, “If it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true.” None of what Michelle J. claims makes sense.
We need to keep in mind that Slide.com deleted 1,500 of my friends from their database with no interaction from me. We need to remember gold and coin purchases are missing from SuperPoke Pet habitats right now and in an ongoing, daily, basis as reported to Slide by end users in their online support forum. We need to recall the forgery scam of a few weeks ago when nefarious players were somehow copying expensive items in the SuperPoke Pets store and “trading” them with other, honest, unsuspecting players.
In each of those cases, Slide tried to slip in and do the right thing — but why are they now denying basic, human, decency in this new instance of thievery and deception — and why are Slide.com putting faith in a proven corrupted database setup over the incorruptible reputation of my beloved wife and this “other woman” that neither of us know or ever befriended on their service?
When we choose machines over people, we are beginning a dangerous slide into the ether of nothingness where fake coins become more valuable than the beating hearts of the players earning them. Honestly, 3,000 coins is nothing in the SuperPoke Pets world where 25,000 coin habitats are for sale.
Slide could have easily put this matter to rest by becoming the verifying third party between my wife and the other player by actually asking each side what happened instead of navel gazing into a corrupted database.
Instead of playing the kind negotiator, Slide.com chose to become a cruel accuser and, in that role, they strangely revealed the identity to us of the “other woman” in this mess who has now been unreasonably and unwittingly involved.
Slide should never have broken her privacy by giving us her identity. Slide should’ve erred on the side of caution and kept each side’s privacy intact and separate from the other just in case their database findings happened to be wrong.
Let us not forget one important nugget of information — Slide is a $550 million dollar company even in this rotten economy and, yet, they’ve done a very cheap thing:
Slide, the maker of applications for social networks, has raised another round of funding – $50 million from the private equity funds at Fidelity and T-Rowe Price, two major Wall Street investment houses. The firms have taken a 9 percent stake in the three-year-old, 64-employee Slide, valuing it at $550 million.
It’s yet another start-up valuation that takes one’s breath away. Investors are being sold on the idea of social networks as the new operating system and apps-makers like Slide as the next Intuit. Last year, Microsoft invested $240 million for a 1.6 percent share in Facebook, betting that the rapidly growing social network could mint the next Web platform. Now investors are trying to peg the next Adobe or Electronic Arts.
Max Levchin, Slide’s chief executive, trumpets the comparison to previous iterations of the technology cycle. “It’s impossible for social networks focused on scaling the network itself to build all the niche applications that bring people and keep people on these sites,” he said. Just as consumers bought Windows to play games, organize their taxes or create documents, application makers like Slide “add the bulk of perceived value to the consumers of these Web platforms,” Mr. Levchin said.
You would think Slide could afford to do the right thing and return 3,000 “fake money” coins to my wife and offer up an invaluable apology for doing the wrong thing.
We’ll let you know what happens.
lol
Liron –
I see you’re coming in on the IP address: 208.76.69.126 and you’re at Slide.com:
IP address: 208.76.69.126
Reverse DNS: nat3.slide.com.
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Verified]
ASN: 13949
ASN Name: SLIDE-INC
IP range connectivity: 2
Registrar (per ASN): ARIN
Country (per IP registrar): US [United States]
Country Currency: USD [United States Dollars]
Country IP Range: 208.76.64.0 to 208.76.71.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Unknown
Country (per outside source): — []
Private (internal) IP? No
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 208.76.69.126
What’s so funny?
What is your Real Name?
Why did you fake your email address as “a@b.com” and do you have any solution to the problem addressed in the article — or did you just take time to come here and laugh at us?
WOW! That’s harsh! Instead of refunding your wife her 3000 hard earned coins … it sounds more like she got the “brush off!”
This situation has been handled in really “bad taste” and “character.”
Perhaps, if you and your wife persist you can warrant a deeper inquiry as to what happened and why? Maybe, someone from slide will listen … hopefully.
Hi Kimberley –
After getting that “lol” comment from a Slide employee this morning on this article, my wife and I decided we were no longer interested in playing their game or in spending lots of money a month on buying Gold items.
We deserve to be treated better by a company we pay, and so we’re going to find something else to do with our free time since Slide prefers to laugh at our situation instead of solving our problem.
We’ve already deleted our SuperPoke Pets accounts and applications. We have no interest in going back.
We aren’t giving away any of the junque we bought with real money because we no longer support Slide or their mission and we will no longer propagate or promote them.
I’m closing comments on this article in case any other Slide.com people have more “funny” thoughts to share.
sorry to hear of your troubles… It seems that more than a year later, similar issues are happening still with Slide… which is what brought me to this article…
Hi Paige –
What’s happening with Slide now? Can you give us details on your experience?
sorry i know im not paige but yeah stupid things like banning people for NO REASON are happening, they took gifting, trading , recycling away for a week or so and there are still people not having them back , and most people tht dont have them back are the ones getting banned, isnt it just crazy stupid …. and many of the coins being taken away, missing items, and such are happening more often :\
Thanks for that detail, Jenny.
It’s too bad things have devolved so quickly and so fast.
I deleted my SPP profile on Facebook, but it seems my account/pet is still active and visible — but I can’t login to it! So Slide still has all my paid-for stuff that I cannot access or give away. It still burns.
Slides has restricted 1,000′s of account due to a glitch in their own system. Forums are flaring…. My gifting pet was banned but they wont call it banned, they are calling it restricted, they say you can still buy gold but no one can play with you and you cant chat on any forums or send note, gift or trade.
They put the blame on so many who did not know they was doing wrong by their system.
Come and take a look around forums, SPP wont tell us a thing what went wrong. Telling us to contact feedback but feedback dont give us any feed back. Only a few has heard from them and they are saying restricted for life for duplication their items.
You could send gifts but they would not leave your storage and they would be sent also. Some took advantage of this and made 1,000′s of fake items and sold through paypal. But others who did not know this was happening got blamed also. Found guilty before we had our say in this matter.. So sad, lot leaving and lot no longer buying gold. So bad on spp part for the way they are handling this issue.
Hi possoms –
That’s definitely a big problem and there was a similar “glitch/scam” of the same nature back when I was playing! Slide cannot blame their end users for exploits that Slide allows and creates! You cannot punish everyone who was bitten with a blanket ban — even though that’s what they’re doing.
After they treated me so terribly about my missing coins — I knew I had to put down my gold and walk away because there was no hope that I would ever be able to convince them of my truth against their “database facts” — that were entirely wrong.
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Hi,
I see you saw a small bit about what is going on with SPP.
What is going on is horrible. They have been glitch city for a while now but in the past couple of weeks they had a glitch in which..if you sent anything over 2 items you would not lose your item they would just send the number you requested and only take one away from your inventory. People told them and they shut down gifting and trading. The people who had dupes in their inventory (which was A LOT of people! anyone who gifted or traded over those couple of days) and even people who told them were banned! It wasn’t their fault it was spps! They don’t care. They say if you had multiple of these items you were abusing the glitch and are banned. The worst part about it is during the “lock down” they told us no one was being punished so people who ended up banned bought gold including mps for 50 dollars!
so many people are upset and don’t know what to do or who to contact about their thousands of dollars of stuff…..today they have new posts that people are finding dupes again in their account…..
Thanks for that detail and insight. What does “mps” mean?
I enjoyed playing SPP a lot — loved designing the habitats and I even wrote glowing reviews — but when the company you are paying to play rips you off and then accuses you of lying… welp… I refuse to be treated like that as a consumer and I will vote with my wallet… against them as often as I am able.
I hope they get their obvious database problem fixed — but I’m not hopeful — there are clear signs something is wrong on their end for a long time now, and yet they still blame the players for their errors.
Mp is Masterpiece. It is a piece of spp art.
Right! Thanks for that reminder. I always tried to buy one of those, but they were always, perpetually, sold out. There was never a fair way to universally provide fair buying access to those special pieces.
wow that is the same thing that happened to me it happened alot but this happened two times this week i lost 50,000 today and a couple of days ago i lost 40,000 what is wrong with spp?
Wow! Those are a lot of losses, michelle.
Have you contacted Slide? Are they helping you or blaming you?