A crazy, surprising run continued

[Razorflame]

Thanks RazorFlame! It's what I like to do on this website. At one point over a year ago I told someone on the forum I didn't want to learn chemistry/science/medical long words but I guess I changed my mind.

I came across 1 of your games yesterday where you scored over 500 and 100 words. Doesn't look like there's too much rust on your game!

There still is rust in my game. Back when I left, my average was 70 points higher than it is now and my average words per game was about 10 more than it is now. I also believe that I was scoring on average more 700+ point games back before I left. It will take some time to get back to that point, but I think it will take less time than it took the first time. Thanks, though, for the compliment!

[lalatan]

You're welcome. My prediction is you will get back to where you were and then some. You're driven and have skills. (I've often thought you have to be fairly obsessive (and I was but now am less so but still like to compete) to succeed in this game and push yourself higher.)

[Razorflame]

Yes, you have to play continuously in order to keep your edge in this game is what I've found. Basically put, you have to play for at least half an hour daily in order to keep what you've learned and more play often leads to higher scores and better performances over time. Sadly, I probably will cut back on the amount that I am playing in a week or two because I have to practice for an event I might be participating in in early May..but I will still play here for at least 30-60 minutes a day. I just have a lot more time on my hands this week because my parents are gone and I have to petsit..

[MistMyChance]

I have a strategy. I add up the number of words and will play a game if the high score is less than that number, but only if more than 3 people and less than 30 have played that game and only if the high score isn’t over 500 and lalatan doesn’t have the best or longest word.
But if a game is outside those parameters and a single person has all 4 stats, I will play it anyway. And if I don’t like the person’s name that has the stats, I will play it even if it’s WAY outside those parameters.
I now spend far more time looking for a game than I do actually playing it.

[Spike1007]

MistMyChance, that's pretty specific! I can see that your strategy evolved over time. Does it help? Mine is a lot simpler, since I mostly just go for long words, and will play a board if there's a chance that there's an unfound word that's worth enough for me (even if lalatan has the current best). I throw away a lot of games though, so while I spend more time playing than clicking, I'm not sure it pays off.

By the way, in the past I've also done the thing where I just don't like the player's name & will try to best their words. I know it's petty (and I won't admit to what those names are), but it does add to my personal enjoyment.

[Razorflame]

I, too, am finidng that it is taking me, on average, as long as it takes to play a 5x5 game to find one to play, which is about twice as long as it used to take. This is mostly due to the fact that there are less people playing this game then there were back 2-2.5 years ago, which causes the games to recycle a lot slower, and since a lot of the currently active players here play the higher word amount games, that leads to them being recycled faster than those with much lower scoring potential, which means there are a lot more games with lower scoring potential than those with higher scoring potential.

One possible fix for this that would actually work would be for the creators of this game to add a couple hundred high scoring games to the board rotations, though this would cost a lot of development time that I am not sure the current administration team is willing to do at this point in time. Another possible fix is for more players to play the more undesirable boards. I'm probably going to play every board in 5x5 next month that I get and see what kind of average I can get with that. This would also help recycle the lower scoring boards faster.

[Brisul]

image_68.png Kind of cool when your score is exactly twice what the original high score was. Never had this happen before.

[bwt1213]

Well. Brisul, I had something happen in about the first month I played here, and I have never had it happen again. I exactly matched the high score, AND the most words, AND the longest word, AND the word with the most points all on the same board. Of course, that meant I got credit for exactly zero records (and deserved none). I called that an "invisible game". Has anyone else ever done it? And just FYI -- I did not use all the same words, because I got credit for some unique ones, and the game had been played about a dozen times previously.

[lalatan]

Some interesting scoring results there.

bwt, did you ever see my reply to your post? xttps://forum.puzzlebaron.com/forum/puzzle-baron/wordtwist/19337-achievements-and-accomplishments-thread

[bwt1213]

Yes, I did see it and I used it. It worked well for me, and I thank you. I've been remiss on too many of my responses and haven't played as many games recently. I did something to my back and it hurts a LOT. I've been putting off seeing a doctor in hopes it would get better. It's been a couple of weeks and it's getting worse instead. Sorry for not answering right away, though. I should have, and I'm ashamed I didn't.

[lalatan]

No problem bwt. Ouch! I hope you get your back problem cleared up soon.

[mdyak]

I, too, am finidng that it is taking me, on average, as long as it takes to play a 5x5 game to find one to play, which is about twice as long as it used to take. This is mostly due to the fact that there are less people playing this game then there were back 2-2.5 years ago, which causes the games to recycle a lot slower, and since a lot of the currently active players here play the higher word amount games, that leads to them being recycled faster than those with much lower scoring potential, which means there are a lot more games with lower scoring potential than those with higher scoring potential.

One possible fix for this that would actually work would be for the creators of this game to add a couple hundred high scoring games to the board rotations, though this would cost a lot of development time that I am not sure the current administration team is willing to do at this point in time. Another possible fix is for more players to play the more undesirable boards. I'm probably going to play every board in 5x5 next month that I get and see what kind of average I can get with that. This would also help recycle the lower scoring boards faster.

I swear they are recycling the exact same boards! I play a game that has only been played 2 or 3 times and recognize it as one I already played that had been played a LOT more times when I saw it last. It's taking longer and longer to find a game that looks like fun, and then so many of them are reruns... boring...

[Razorflame]

I swear they are recycling the exact same boards! I play a game that has only been played 2 or 3 times and recognize it as one I already played that had been played a LOT more times when I saw it last. It's taking longer and longer to find a game that looks like fun, and then so many of them are reruns... boring...

If you only go for longest words, then you are going to find a ton of repeating boards.

[lalatan]

I swear they are recycling the exact same boards! I play a game that has only been played 2 or 3 times and recognize it as one I already played that had been played a LOT more times when I saw it last. It's taking longer and longer to find a game that looks like fun, and then so many of them are reruns... boring...

They do recycle boards all the time after they're played 50-53 times. In the past I've played a game, set records for it and then have seen the same board w/o the record I set. Sometimes they rotate the board with the same word in it. I like the blend of boards with previously unfound words mixed in with words I encountered before. Since the move to a new server, I am offered more new boards than previously so maybe the daemon does its thing more often now. It seems to take me a little longer to find the boards I want to play but it's not bad. Amazingly, I was able to play 6 games with 45 pt words in them last month. The most I was ever offered before was 3. There were months when I saw no games with 45 pts words.

I feel bad for the speed players having to look through more games. As bwt suggested, the scoring limit for recycling games should be increased from 600 pts to a higher one, like 1k. The current limit doesn't account for the increased abilities of players and is outdated as a result.

One problem of being a long word player is that once you've set records on each of the big 3 (45 pts words) that is the ceiling for moving any higher. As a speed player you can always better your personal high score, words total, avg/game etc. In January 2018 I tried to set 1k best/longest word records and was successful in 25 days. I was hard at it every day (I think I played over 1k games to get there). So this month I thought I'd revisit that challenge to see how many records I can collect w/o playing so many games. (So far I've played 385 games this month and the totals are coming along nicely.) Consequently I'm not sure if I'll try for any APPW trophies or not. If someone gets a decent avg (>15 pts in 4x4 and >35 pts in 5x5 imho) I won't compete.

Edit: I set 1,248 best/longest word records during the month of May and retained 1,214 of them at month end. I hit 1k records on the 25th, the same day as last time but with much less stress and effort than before.

[Spike1007]

I've waffled on whether I think things have changed since the migration. lalatan, you play a LOT of games, so you might have a better take on it than I do. I don't notice an especially higher number of new boards now. (I could swear that I've seen more in the past, but not consistently.) Then again, I'm still trying only for new best words (past a certain threshold), so I'm not clicking through as many boards as in the past. Post-migration, I started to think that they'd redone the "rarity" value of words. A lot of things I found that I thought should have qualified as ultra-rare were just rare, but I don't keep records to prove that. Anyway, I just occasionally see "trends" that are probably just statistical flukes.

I see duplicate boards (sometimes within just a few clicks), and sometimes closely-spaced boards that have basically the same long word, but maybe one without the plural, or maybe an S rather than a Z. Their stock of longer words is obviously limited, and after a while you've seen most of them. (That doesn't mean I'll find them when they're there.)

Since I do like getting new best words, I'm currently kind of fan of fast recycling. I agree that seeing what someone else has been able to do with a board is a good indicator of whether to play it or not (so a 1k score recycling criterion definitely makes sense for some), but that almost has the opposite effect on me. I don't often do better on a board where a 14+ letter word has been found, but I play them anyway, mostly to track my mental acuity & see if I can match it. (If I miss too many, it's time to take a break.)

Off topic, but I found VIOLINISTICALLY a few days ago. I was desperate to find something to go with -CALLY, and that was the best that I could do. It worked, but wasn't worth enough to keep.