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ABC Bingo Co Uk - Playing Bingo Review

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It's Not As Easy As ABC at ABCBingo.co.uk

ABC Bingo Co UkVisit: www.abcbingo.co.uk

Site rating: 3 / 10

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First Impressions & Ease Of Sign up

The site greets you with a lot of stuff to look at, and some bright and cheery colour combinations. It feels a bit cluttered, but it didn't take me long to get to where I wanted to be. The sign up was straight forward enough - you have to validate your account by clicking on the link in the email, which will also award you the free sign-up bonus.

The site is on the Globalcom network and platform, which can go one of either ways - mediocre or poor. Some suppliers put a bit of effort into skinning and implementing the platform with interesting community features and extras. Others just run with the bog standard layout and none of the thrills. Unfortunately ABC is one of the latter.

There are a number of layout issues with the site - headlines on some of the pages are positioned over graphics and text (poor CSS implementation maybe?) and from homepage, large areas of promo which look like you should be able to click them to get to the info, isn't clickable. It all seems a bit rushed.

Sign-Up Bonuses

The earn themselves some brownie points on their sign-up bonuses, taking a step outside the usual Globalcom set-up of 100% on a minimum of £20 deposit. They offer a match bonus of 100% on a fiver, up to £100. That was a nice surprise - and welcome as a method of reward tentative and nervous new players who don't want to deposit a large amount of cash at the off.

You also get the standard 1000 loyalty points on sign up, which you can convert to a free £1 worth of Bingo cards before you deposit your money. There are further deposit bonuses of 50%. The free pounds worth is a great way of having a taster before you commit you credit card details to the account.

Ease Of Use

Site side, there are few problems to complain about other than the navigation and layout issues already mentioned. The site begins to fall down badly when you hit the actual game window. To start with, it's the bog standard and fatally flawed Globalcom offering. Other than adding a banner to the top left, little has been done to improve the interface.

I'll roll off my list of problems with the interface here in brief, they are covered in detail in other reviews and I'll put together an article at some point to put these all in one place. OK, so here we go. Poor layout, unintuitive buttons, hard to follow bingo cards, lack of understanding of the mechanics of Bingo, no feedback on purchasing, no auto sort, over-priced games, poor chat layout, misleading pricing and labeling, lack of feedback on stake money and no stops on the lines, two lines full house, etc. There's more, but that's enough to be going on with for now.

The software can be improved by the people implementing it, Foxy Bingo made vast improvements over the poor initial offering. The bog standard Globalcom 90 ball game is not a good one to for anyone to go with, and frankly, sites that don't put an effort into updating this poor offering seem to my mind at least, more interested in taking your money than giving you a good all round Bingo experience.

Community Spirit

The chat room's fine, but the layout of it makes using and following the chat a chore. The CMs should also stop dropping lucky dust bombs every two minutes as it shoots all the interesting chat off the screen.

The CMs were helpful with my requests, but I'd rather you didn't get the boilerplate autogreet every time you log on to the game. You also get a massive list of unclickable URLs when you enter, that take you to pointless and unclickable mail out pages. It's just poor - there's no need for it.

Prize Money

The prize money on offer is a bit poor on the more expensive games, and don't offer good value. Some games can cost as much as £6 for your standard strip of six tickets, and when the prize money is only £30ish, doesn't encourage participation. Same goes for the 50p a ticket games. On the more standard 10p games in the afternoon, there were around 18 players, and prize money of £6 line, £6 two lines and £15 Full house.

In the evening there was around 35 players, and on the 25p a ticket games, prizes were around £9 line and two lines, and £20 the full house.

They make a big play and promotion of their £1,000,000 jackpot game on both the homepage of the site and the games window. Before you give it a spin though, I'd recommend you take some time to read the Terms and Conditions of the big prize money game - you'll be disappointed to learn that if you were lucky enough to win the prize, it'd take 30 years to get it in equal installments.

Security

A couple of areas of concern, but otherwise it's of the standard you'd expect when playing online. You get your email and password sent to you in one email - not an ideal situation. I also find it off putting to jump into the bingo games and see my browser's status bar tell me it's pulling information from a different Bingo site. I'm sure it doesn't cause security issues, it's more a mental perception. Otherwise - everything is solid enough to entice me to part with my details.

Overall Feel At ABCBingo.com

Oh well, have to report that this is another poor implementation of a second rate gaming platform. I get the impression the site is more interested in taking your money than providing a satisfying Bingo experience. The prize money and ticket prices need a lot of work before anything else.

Dumping the clunky and ugly Globalcom software would also be a major step in the right direction. It amazes me how many sites are running on this platform. Few of them have made an effort to improve the basic offering, and other than the nice low level for the sign up bonus, the site has nothing I can commend or recommend them on.

Overall rating - 3 / 10 (November 8th 2006)

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Visit: www.abcbingo.com

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