Hard mode also lets you reuse good letters in bad spots. Like if you start with stare and the answer ends in s you get a yellow on that first s. Hard mode will let you play another word that starts with s even though you know the answer does not.
I try to play by applying all known information in all subsequent guesses. Green letters stay where they are, yellow letters move until their location is found, gray letters never reused. I would say my success rate in following these rules is under 50%. Like today’s, for example, where I completely bailed after two guesses and switched to checking as many letters as possible. (My first two guesses had uncovered all vowels and I was at a loss.)
I’m using “scam” in a very broad sense–it’s a game that entices players by implying that it is a game of skill, so people want to test their abilities, see how good they are at it, etc. But it’s mostly (as Johnny Bravo pointed out correctly, not ALL, as I said in the OP) luck that makes you get a 2 one day and a 6 the next.
I do much the same as you - today I held to it for the first three guesses. My fourth guess was almost a complete throwaway to just confirm the presence of the final available vowel. I finally got it on my fifth guess.
I had all the information I needed to get the correct answer on guess #4. But I failed to do so and got a poor score. It wasn’t bad luck. It wasn’t a dice roll. It was a failure on my part to piece together the clues I had.
Wordle is not strictly a dice roll. It’s a game where you make a dice roll, then use logic and vocabulary to increase the value of your future dice rolls. That’s where the fun part is.
Certainly there’s an optimal way to play, but I don’t care about that. I play in a number of suboptimal ways because it’s more challenging and more entertaining for me. When I win, it’s mildly satisfying. No more or less. I enjoy the game and will continue to enjoy it until it gets old. Or the NYT makes it inconvenient to access.
I find it enjoyable because it forces me to rack my brain for words. My usual strategy (and, yes, my average is right around 4!) is to play hard mode, start with STAIN and then pretty much just use the first word I can think of that fits the information I got from the previous guess. Sometimes it takes me quite a while just to think of a possible word, and that’s the challenge I find entertaining.
I agree that there is a considerable amount of luck involved in how many guesses are required to solve a particular puzzle, so I don’t really have any ego invested in that. But I imagine my world will be shattered if I ever actually fail to guess one in 6.
Scam is such a strange word, I have a hard time getting past it.
That said, when I think of the die roll mentioned in some posts above, it’s clearly the first word choice that’s the die roll (& its relationship to the final word), with the rest requiring some skill.
In that light I do have some sympathy for the OP’s point, which is that there’s a certain mathematical inevitability to the long-term results, especially for non-bots and those choosing not to look at word lists or optimal start words.
Here are some language-disparate data points, obviously idiosyncratic to me:
English, a language I am very comfortable in: median = 4, mode = 4, mean = 4.1, no misses
German, a language I read fairly well but speak on a more limited basis: median = 4, mode = 4, mean = 4.3, no misses
French, a language in which I could perhaps construct 10 distinct sentences, but I know lots of random words: median = 5, mode = 4, mean = 4.9, no misses
Of course, one gimmick in those comparisons is that I’m not penalized for trying words that aren’t on the list (or nonexistent words), or given unlimited tries…if I were, my French mean and median would be way worse (but my mode would be the same I suspect). That failure to penalize non-words is another thing that keeps the numbers contained.
If someone were able to show how he got a mean of 5.0 or 3.0 after 40 or 50 games, I’d back off my use of scam. I use it because I find people are deceived into thinking that it makes a big difference how hard they try, how big their working vocabulary is, how good they are at word-games, etc. Those are very minor factors, I find, over the long haul.
One strategy I haven’t quite decided is optimal is avoiding/encouraging vowels early and often. For now, I avoid them, because they are unavoidable and by Turn #3 no matter how you try, you’ve probably gotten at least one correct and you still have numerous consonants to eliminate. But I see players boasting about their optimal use of starter words like ADIEU so maybe it doesn’t make much difference.
Yeah, I’ve backed off using ADIEU as a starter after reading it’s actually not all that good a starter word, and I can’t see it’s made all that much a difference in the short term, at least.
Well I have a mean of 3 from 35 games so far, and that doesn’t count my first one on which I got it in 2 because then I didn’t do it for a few days. Your use of “scam” still makes zero sense for this game even if most people have a mean of 4. Brain power and knowledge of words does make a difference and it’s bizarre you think it’s (as you said in your OP) “all luck.” Your first guess is just mostly luck, but each guess from then on takes information you’ve gained from previous guesses. You aren’t just guessing random words for subsequent answers.
Some rounds can turn into mostly luck, like when you get all but the first in green and there can be multiple choices, you basically just have to keep guessing one letter, and some take more involved thinking.
There are 26 letters in the alphabet that’s being used.
It’s absolutely impossible to hit all grey letters all six times in hard mode. It’s got to be statistically really unlikely by around the third try (I am not a statistician.) So yeah, you’re not going to be able to get long runs of all greys. I don’t see how that makes your point.
– wait a minute, I’ve been playing in voluntary hard mode; and part of my doing that is that I don’t re-use letters that have been grayed out. Does the official hard mode setting allow doing that? If it does, then if by chance I hit all grey on the first try, I can get that run with no problem just by repeating the same letters over and over; and can pretty massively increase my chances of doing so by mostly repeating them and otherwise adding in only the least common letters. I still don’t see that it proves anything.
It tells me that people who don’t like this sort of word games are probably not playing Wordle; and that people who do like this sort of word games probably have developed the skills to play them, over the years, by such things as playing Scrabble and doing anagrams.
If what you mean is just that Wordle’s not a terribly hard game, but has been designed for a level at which most people with halfway decent spelling and vocabulary skills in English will succeed in guessing most of the time: that’s true, but that’s not at all the same thing as saying that it’s pure luck.
It takes quite a breadth of vocabulary first, to be able to think of those two choices; and second, to know which one is more common.
Ah. I’m playing in an invented “extra hard” mode, then: green letters have to be used and to stay put, yellow letters have to be used, letters once greyed can’t be used again.
And yellow letters should be used in a new spot, though occasionally I screw up and put one in the same place by accident.
Oh, and I deliberately change starting words; though I do choose ones with at least two vowels and with relatively common consonants. Again, because I think it’s more fun that way – first I get the fun of racking my brain trying to think of a starting word I don’t think I’ve used before, or at least not recently – (hey, there are two good possibilities right in that sentence! though one’s better than the other – I try to save the e and s for the second word, as having them available usually expands my options for second word a great deal so I don’t want to risk greying them out on the first word.). I don’t keep a list, though, and I’m sure I’m occasionally re-using one.
Getting it in 2 is mostly luck, for the same reason that getting it in 1 would be entirely luck: until you’ve got the results from at least two tries, you just don’t have enough information. So winning in 1 or 2 tries is going to be really unlikely; nearly all results are going to be in 3 to 6 tries, or will be a loss.
But it’s skill that makes the difference between a 6 and a loss.
You’re leaving out of your figures the huge universe of losses – the people who might have gotten it in 7 tries, or 8, or more. Especially if greyed letters can be re-used. That skews your average 4 towards the center; it’s actually not a center result at all. But I expect that most people who would usually take more than six tries aren’t playing very often, if at all; they’re most likely either not interested in such games to start with, or giving up in frustration.
I’ve lost one. I’d gotten it down to a combination from which I might have gotten the answer on 4 – but there were a whole lot of possible letters remaining that could fill in the two that I hadn’t got yet, and I ran out of chances before I ran out of combinations.
I can’t actually tell my average; I’ve been playing both the daily Wordle, and bit by bit working my way through the 190-something that had been used before I started the game; and have done both those things on two different devices, each of which has shut down at least once since I started playing. So Wordle thinks I’m a whole batch of different people, and I’ve only got partial averages.
Indeed.
Another factor, which isn’t scored, is how long the puzzle takes you. I’ve hit a couple in which I wound up with a combination of letters that reduced me to typing in things that I thought weren’t words, in the hope that one of them was, because I couldn’t at first think of any five-letter word that had that combination but none of my already-greyed-out letters. At least once one of the things I thought wasn’t a word was one. (I am not, obviously, referring to the word lists. That would take most of the fun out of it, for me.)
I expect that most people who are either extraordinarily good at it or extraordinarily bad at it don’t play it, or don’t play it very often. The people who find it fun are the ones who find it to be somewhere in the range of difficulty that’s going to wind up with a lot of 4’s. That doesn’t mean there’s no skill involved; it means that the game selects for players of a certain range of skill, and that players are adjusting the game’s level of difficulty (such as by playing or not playing on hard mode) in order to keep it, for them, within that range.
My point there is that it doesn’t make much difference how “good” you are at Wordle–if you try to get as many gray boxes as colored boxes, your results will be very similar in the end. It’s all information, and it’s all useful.
I attempt to play that way. Sometimes I mess up and miss that a letter was already gray, such as my example on today’s word.
You are aware that there are people who can’t actually come up with a word that fits all available information, correct? Hell, I’ve come close to that myself, but figured them out after walking away for a bit.
I could go with the thesis that Wordle’s popularity is due to seeming harder than it is… like “how did I get from STARE to KNOLL, I’m a genius!” It gets significantly easier with every guess, whether there are hits or misses.
But some effort is required. Although it’s mathematically possible you can solve it in 6 random guesses, it’s incredibly unlikely.
Apparently not, because I’ve also mentioned that several times.
All of these averages are for people who are able to finish the puzzle at all. Today’s word was hard enough that I was stumped for minutes on what it could possibly be. My sister is at a total loss what to guess next.
I play the Spelling Bee and do the crossword every day, so I have a pretty good grasp of English words and a pretty good vocabulary. Someone who doesn’t have that might have a hard time even failing in hard mode – they literally may not be able to get past the 3rd or 4th guess.
I waste my time playing word games and arguing on a message board that requires full sentences and clear arguments. Other people waste their time different ways. One way is not better than the other, but some of those others just won’t do as well with Wordle.
Sure. But that’s just saying that the difference in mean of performance (attributable to skill) is small relative to the variance in outcome on any one hand. Similar to poker - good players always win in the long run, but there’s a lot of luck involved in the deal for any one hand. That doesn’t prove your claim.
Your claim seems to be that perfect or almost-perfect strategy is not difficult to implement, so there really isn’t much difference in mean performance between a player with basic competence and the most skilful player. You’re just saying that the game does not have much strategic depth to it. That might be true. I’m quite good at this type of game (vocabulary, simple logic, simple optimization) but it’s not as though I’m doing anything that requires great genius, and my average from the outset has been 3.7 in hard mode, already pretty close to the optimum. I’m not improving and I’m getting a bit bored with it. I don’t think I could really improve without “cheating” using word lists and writing a computer program to perfectly optimize, which isn’t really very interesting.
Yes. And if I played football, no amount of luck would turn me into Blake Bortles (to pick an average one off the top of my head). I’m glad you finally get it.
