Words with Friends - New Gradient Board Brightness

[jdag]

The Words with Friends app was updated recently (today for me), and now the board shows a gradient brightness. See attached screenshot.

The upper portion is dark. The middle to bottom 1/3 of the board much brighter. And then the last row or 2 dim again. It is even more pronounced when the iPhone screen dims because of ambient lighting.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Does the brightness level represent something about the game such as where recent words were played? If so, I can't figure out any pattern.

I think it is horrible. It makes the board terribly difficult to read, and it is difficult to concentrate on the whole board as your eyes get drawn to the brighter areas (at least mine do). I cannot find any way to turn it off.

 

[mikefeuer]

It's an app issue

Thanks very much for your post.
This has been an annoyance since I got the iPhone 5. I was becoming convinced that there was a 'hot spot' on the phone. Any adjustments to brightness (auto on, auto off) etc., did nothing to help.

To allay my concerns, my son directed me to your post. There clearly appears to be areas of light and dark and while I thought there was something to a vertically placed word compared to a horizontally placed word, I have not found any consistence to that.

Images on my son's phone, and on my wife's phone also appear different, but those are different games, different screen shots. (Apples and oranges?)

Frankly I have spent more time trying to figure out this issue than actually playing. I find it so annoying I have slowed down my play.

Hopefully some correction is on the way.
In the meantime, I'm trying to "get over it"

 

[jdag]

Well, this definitely seems to be a "feature"...have no idea what the developers were thinking as it really is distracting and makes the game board much more difficult to read. Oh well...

 

[mikefeuer]

"Feature" indeed. Fortunately your post threw some cold water on me and saved me a trip to the Apple store to see a genius where I may well have embarrassed myself complaining about a 'hot spot' on the phone.

 

[curmudgeon32]

Looks like they ditched this at some point. Thank god.

 

[jdag]

Looks like they ditched this at some point. Thank god.

Yes...back to normal after some recent update. Much better now!

 

[curmudgeon32]

Yes...back to normal after some recent update. Much better now!

WWF is SO frustrating, though. They spend their time adopting and abandoning some god-awful gradient color scheme when there are many missing features:

- more than two players/game
- word stats, leaderboards, etc.
- offline play

I'd love to know something as basic as my ratio of wins:losses, or my friends' points/word average.