So you didn’t read the post in this very thread where someone said they did not get it by the 6th guess?
People are wired so that they feel good about winning (and/or doing well at) just about anything, whether or not it reflects on their own abilities. People feel good if “their” team wins a ball game, and bad when their team loses. People feel good when the lights are green on their drive in to work. People actually do feel good if they get a particularly fortunate dice roll in a game they’re playing.
[quote=“Eyebrows_0f_Doom, post:61, topic:959438”]
That’s actually the reverse of what I was describing – I could come up with too many words that fit all the available information.
I have, however, gotten stuck more than once on the problem you’re describing: I couldn’t, for some time, think of a word that fit all the available information. So far, I’ve always eventually been able to think of at least one; but I’m sure there are people who can’t, including some who have this happen often enough that they quit playing – if, again, they ever started in the first place. Children aside, I very much doubt that the Venn diagram of people who enjoy doing word puzzles and the Venn diagram of people with relatively small vocabularies has a whole lot of overlap.
My mean is 2.5, with equal numbers of 2s and 3s.
I only have two legitimate games, and got lucky on both
So what? That’s another aspect of your premise that’s nonsense. Many games and sports trade on small margins. But there is a difference between a mean of 4.1 vs. 3.9 vs. 3.7. No one can get a 3 every time, but the fraction of 3s increases with improved skill. And the required amount of skill increases dramatically as this fraction increases, requiring memorizing thousands of words and doing information entropy calculations in your head.
The luck averages out in the end. It takes still to consistently play better than another, even if that only means getting the 3s a tiny bit more often than usual.
Is it a scam that due to luck, sometimes a not-so-great player can snag a 3 while a great player might get a 5? No; that’s good game design. It doesn’t mean there’s no skill involved. It just means they gave the skill distribution some overlap in the final outcomes, so as not to instantly demotivate people.
I’m not seeing the logical connection between the fact that people tend to average somewhere around 4 guesses and the assertion that the game is mostly luck/a scam.
It’s true that Wordle is not tremendously difficult. Once a player finds an effective strategy, applying that strategy consistently will, it seems likely, lead to averaging about four guesses to find the right word. But so what?
@Roger_That, is Mastermind a “scam” as well? Mastermind is quite similar to Wordle in that it relies on logical thinking to find the correct answer. But in a game that uses words instead of colored pegs, players can apply their knowledge of how words are constructed as well as the type of logical rules that Mastermind uses. There’s no reason why any two colored pegs can’t be next to each other, but if a player know that the second letter is N, they can deduce a lot about what the first and third letters can be through their understanding of English spelling and phonetics.
With Mastermind, there is a limit to how good you can get, on average. All players employing optimal strategies will eventually tend to find the answer in the same number of guesses, over a large enough sample of games. That doesn’t mean Mastermind is strictly luck or a scam. Same with Wordle.
I said it was possible that such people exist, and also that I’ve never met one, both of which are still true.
I have had a situation where I didn’t get it until the 6th guess. That was when I had every letter down except one, and it fit multiple common words by using a previously-unused letter. (Basically I had every letter but one but the 3rd guess, then it came down to luck.) It would have been theoretically possible for me to not get that word at all, I think there was still one more potential word it could have been.
I believe my wife has once or twice not managed to get the word at all. She is not stupid, she does technical writing for a living, so she knows the English language pretty well.
Dare I say that the people who frequent the SDMB for the most part have a stronger grasp of logic and English than the average person living in English-speaking countries, and if we go by how everyone here is doing on Wordle, we’re not getting a very useful sample.
I’d argue that your wife, like most of us here, probably averages slightly under 4 (i.e., mostly 4s, with more 1s, 2s, and 3s, than 5s, 6s, or misses, and those misses bring her average a bit closer to 4.)
In fact, I’m not sure why I’m arguing that the average, or the mean, or the median, must be exactly 4. It is what it is, 3.9 or 4.0 or 4.1, and it will probably pass through those numbers constantly after a large sample of games for almost everyone. My true point is that it’s a VERY narrow range for everyone, and everyone does about as well as everyone else.
Do you mean “mode” here? If you do mean “mean,” that’s an exceptionally hot streak you’re on.
I think what the OP is saying is deeper than that. He’s claiming that EVERYONE’s stats will look like that. That’s hard to believe: Surely some people are really bad at thinking up words.
I guess what I’m saying is that maybe the stats of successful solvers is like that, but that excludes the many people that sometimes can’t guess the word at all. The OP says he never met anyone like that, but they’re out there. I guess he doesn’t associate with people with average to below average intelligence.
And this is the difference between Wordles and dice. With dice, an ignoramus has exactly the same odds as a genius. With Wordle, a really dumb person has no chance.
I suspect the vast majority finish. I highly doubt adding in the losers will skew results much. There is the Twitter chart a couple posts up, but, of course, that’s going to be skewed towards people who post their results, and maybe a DNF (did not finish) is less likely to post. Still, I’m pretty sure we can confidently state that the mode for Wordle is 4; the mean is going to be somewhere a bit higher than 4.
I don’t think so. He appears to think it’s meaningful that the range of scores is narrow. Yes, probably any native speaker can get at least to the low 4s, and no one can do better than the mid 3s. But that has no relevance to how much skill is involved in the game to achieve a given score.
And mine is that that doesn’t show that skill has nothing to do with it.
What I think it shows is that people who find the game extremely easy aren’t playing it because it bores them. And people who find the game extremely hard aren’t playing it because either it frustrates them, or they never bothered with it in the first place because they’re just not interested in that sort of game. And the people who are actually playing it use various methods of play in part to make the game easier if they find it relatively difficult, or harder if they find it relatively easy. So nearly all the people who keep playing it will, indeed, wind up with average scores running around 4 – not because skill’s not needed, but because that’s the level of play at which the game’s interesting enough for most people to keep at it; so those whose skill levels wouldn’t get that result aren’t playing it.
– there are only so many Wordles. I don’t feel like playing 50 or more of them while deliberately trying to lose, as suggested in the OP, in an attempt to prove that I could do so.
– wait a minute, in the archive version you can play the same one more than once. So I could go back through and try to lose the ones I’ve already played. Maybe I’ll try it; though it’ll take me a while.
I suspect this is already mentioned in one of the other wordle threads, which I have not been following, but you can play endless wordle here and it also lets you choose your own 5-letter word and invite others to play it.
I just made one:
I challenge you to a Wardle 
Got it in 4.
How did @Roger_That know??
I got it in 2!
Wordle Unlimited 2/6
- It’s fun that you posted this, thanks.
Wordle Unlimited 4/6
Wordle Unlimited 4/6
Whoa. Four!
Amazing!