Tiki Bros. Talk – Badge Icons, Promo Puzzles & Backgammon Bots

Green: Good morning, afternoon, evening or good night, whatever the case may be. And welcome to Tiki Brothers Tip Talk for May. I’m here again with my overly-fussy brother Red Tiki. Say “Hi Red”.

Red: Hi Red!

Green: Hey that’s my trick!

Red: But you lost Roshambo, so you get to do the introduction today. Maybe next time Green. Let’s dive in. How is our letter basket looking today?

Green: Coming right up Red. It’s feeling pretty heavy. I’ve got a good feeling about today. We’re really gonna “park this one out of the smack”. Oops! I mean “smack this one out of the park”! Uh… I’ll just read the first one.

Can you please tell me how to delete all the wallpaper and screen savers I have on my account. They are a real pain when trying to register for the Daily Drawings. I would be very grateful for some help.
-Imbobiann

Red: Glad you asked this question Imbobiann. I see you have noticed that we made a few changes to how the Pogo Prizes Page works. There are plans to change how this page looks and there is not really anything you can do to fix this until we make those changes on our end. It could be a few months before it gets fixed, so in the meantime just hit the little x on the yellow area of that screen and the list of prizes you have won will temporarily disappear until next time you visit the page.

Green: Want to know a little known fact? Screen savers and desktop backgrounds are the only prizes Pogo employees like us can actually win! How sad is that? Fortunately Red and I are just here for the games. Right Red?

Red: What? No, we are not here to play games! We are here to help people like our next confused player!

Since Easter I’ve tried to change my icon badge to a different one but am unable to.
-Cda

Green: Hi Cda, it looks like you might have chosen to display your Pogo Mini’s face instead of your Badge Icon. We’ll have you fixed in a jiffy. The first thing you’ll want to do is visit your “See My Badges” page. You can get there from the Pogo home page. Just click “See My Badges” in about the middle of the page to the left of your Mini. A screen will pop up with all the badges you’ve won.

Next, scroll down for about 10 pages (because I bet you have over a thousand badges huh?) At the bottom you will see a little radio button that says: “In the Who’s Here list, show my” and a little radio button that says “badge”. Put a dot next to the word “badge”. Close that window and when you visit a game room… bam! Badge Icon instead of your Mini’s face. Cool huh?

Red: And of course. At that point you can also click on any of the badges you have won and use its Badge Icon instead. Very cool, and just one of the many perks of Club Pogo! Speaking of perks, check out the next question.

Hi, I just was wondering why you don’t change the puzzle on the promotions page? It’s been the same one forever and yet you give us 10,000 tokens each time to “solve” it. Not that I’m complaining, but that’s a lot of tokens to keep giving away for the same thing over and over.
-clfplyr1

Green: Well, getting 10,000 tokens every time isn’t really supposed to happen as you might have guessed. While it is possible that on the day’s you visited it was mis-configured, the current puzzle lists that it will only be available until Saturday May 7th.

And… *click, click click* Yup! When I tried to win it several times in a row, I noticed that it only gave me the tokens the first time, dang! So, the current puzzle looks like it’s working as intended. If you ever have that issue again, send us an email and we will have someone take a look.

Red: Our next question is crazy… crazy like a fox… crazy like a Firefox that is.

A while back when I updated my Firefox to 3.6.16 some games would not work. Is this corrected now? My Firefox needs to be updated for security. I have Windows Vista. Thanks for your help.
-robwj4

Green: Hi robwj4! Actually go ahead and update your Firefox now. It seems the bug that was causing games to not work was only a problem for about a week and now the newest version of Firefox is back to normal. It looks like we did a good job of telling everyone that there was a problem, but when it was time to tell everyone Firefox was “OK” again Red Tiki blew it!

Red: What??? That was your job!

Green: Oh sure pass the blame haha! We’re not passing the blame on the next question though:

I bought a download game and even got an email from Pogo acknowledging the purchase, yet I can’t play as it wants me to buy again.
-Helen

Red: Good question Helen. If you are being asked to buy a download game again this means the game you have installed needs to have its registration key restored. Fortunately this is easier than it sounds. Open up the email that Pogo sent to you when you bought the game and you will see a section called “Game Registration Key” with a long code with letters and numbers after it like this: 5740-2fAA-47B3-A7A5-4B1R-BAFT-DF9E-FEBE-8C5D-0FC8-FD99. (Do not bother punching this particular code in; it is an invalid code heh!). Copy the code from the email then try to start the game. Under the big “Buy Full Version” button you will see a button that says “Unlock it”. Click that. A window will pop up that asks for the code and the email address. Put in the code and your email address from the email you got and hit the OK button. Bingo! Your game is re-registered and you can play without paying again. More info can be found here:

Green, may I have another question please?

Green: Oh I suppose so. Here you go:

I want to learn how to play Backgammon, but I can only play with another player. Why can’t I play with the computer player to learn?
-Barbara

Red: Hi Barbara. Thanks for the question. The quick answer is that Backgammon does not have a computer opponent or “Bots” (as in roBots). And while it is true that many other Pogo games have Bots, what you might not know is that Bots are actually special computer programs that are designed to play a specific game. It is not a one-sized fits all situation. And for whatever reason, when Pogo created Backgammon, we did not create bots for the game. So, your best bet is to find a friend that you trust to “play nice” with you that will help you learn Backgammon without trouncing you! Or just find someone really bad at the game. Like Green Tiki for instance!

Green: Oh! I see how it is! Now you’re commenting on my Backgammon prowess. That’s just low down dirty! You’re letting me read the next one, you pill.

Red: Gladly Green, here you are:

I can play some games, but not all my favorites. MONOPOLY slots is one I can’t play. Is there an app I can download that will enable me to play all the games or at least a few more. Let me know.
-Rachel – Sent from my Verizon Wireless Device

Green: Rachel, the reason that only a few games work is because Pogo is only officially supported to work on Mac and Windows PC computers. It is not designed to work on any tablets at this time. But, you should consider yourself lucky! You actually got some Pogo game to play on an unsupported device! That’s pretty amazing! I wish we could give you some tips to make other games work on your tablet, but we don’t have a tablet to try any tricks out on! Our suggestion would be, try every game and see what works and let us know. Who knows? Someday even more might work.

Red: Another thing you might try is contacting the manufacture of your tablet and seeing if it supports web-based Java content, flash content, cookies and pop-up windows. If it supports all these things, it *just* might run Pogo. Good luck Rachel. Here Green, I will do you a favor and let you answer the last question.

When I play Everyone Wins Bingo my computer’s clock jumps ahead. Why is that happening?
-Herman W

Green: To make a short story long, there is a bug in certain old versions of Java that cause this to happen. It doesn’t play nice with your computer’s system clock. I think one of the Sun engineers forgot their coffee the day that bug got programmed! Your best bet is to get the very latest version of Java and uninstall all previous versions of Java. Another method would be to try the Google Chrome browser. It conveniently comes with the latest version of Java. You can get it free at http://www.google.com/chrome.

Phew! Great set of questions this month! We want to see more of your great questions though. Red and I have an extra large bin for your emails for next month!

So Red… about my Backgammon skills.

Red: Oh! You are so going down! BYOB. (That means bring your own board!) Bye everyone! See you next month. Send us your questions.