Separating the wheat from the chaff..........

[RussDNails]

Anybody else notice it's getting awfully hard to find "good" boards these days? By good I mean those with high word counts/higher scoring potential. I assume this is happening since the admin updated the game and added a lot of new boards but man it's hard to find a good board to play now..........

[bwt1213]

Yup. I'd noticed the same thing, but I figured it was just me.

[beany1102]

bwt1213- You took the words right out of my mouth!

[iBnutz]

My criteria is a little different than the big shooters, but it has been taking me FOREVER to find a game to play.

[lalatan]

As a long word player I've had the same problem. I don't play as much now, too much wasted time filtering games.

[admin]

Hmm... Nothing has changed on our end so I'm not sure why you'd be seeing different results now vs. a month or so ago.

What is it you're looking for when you're searching for a "good" game? If you're going by "Best Word" or "Long Word" understand that these are only displaying what's been found so far, not necessarily (and not in most cases) what the actual Best and Longest words are that are actually in that board.

[DonGuy47]

I've never met a Boggle board I don't like. Play 'em all!

[bwt1213]

I think the boards that are the richest in points are getting recycled very soon after they appear, because someone scores very highly on them. And recycled boards seem not to come back right away, so there are fewer of them around than a few months ago when nothing was being removed. That's my guess.

[lalatan]

...recycled boards seem not to come back right away, so there are fewer of them around than a few months ago when nothing was being removed. That's my guess.

I think you're probably right about that. I used to be offered 5-10 new boards/day but now it's 0-2 new board/day since the new games were added and stats filled up in them.

[admin]

I've made some tweaks to hopefully improve the randomizer a bit. Let me know if you see any improvement.

[lalatan]

Wow! I was offered 3 new 5x5 games since you tweaked it. Thanks!

[jbud1980]

The 4X4 grids. I sometimes wonder if they were meant for those fluent in the Russian language...

[RussDNails]

Hmm... Nothing has changed on our end so I'm not sure why you'd be seeing different results now vs. a month or so ago.

What is it you're looking for when you're searching for a "good" game? If you're going by "Best Word" or "Long Word" understand that these are only displaying what's been found so far, not necessarily (and not in most cases) what the actual Best and Longest words are that are actually in that board.

Stephen, as I mentioned in my first post by “good” I meant boards with high word counts/high scoring potential. I think when you added all the new grids a few months ago, a lot of lower scoring boards were in the mix so now it takes longer to find a “good” board. And I mean a lot longer! I spend more time sifting through boards than actually playing and have recently reduced my expectations for my monthly average, I.e. I get bored and just play a lot more of the “bad” boards I would have skipped over in the past. This isn’t just the last month or so; I noticed it as soon as all the new boards were put in play.

No knock on you at all, this is still a great site and I appreciate the effort you put into keeping it running smoothly……

Best,

Russ

[Naboka]

Life is full of compromises. What suits one person doesn't necessarily suit another.

Reaching incredibly high averages is always impressive. Impressive because it's out of the reach of most. We're awed by comparison.

But, far more of us simply want to take a leisurely stroll for our exercise.

Having an abundance of "bad" boards is "good" for someone who can get a record or two because the more competitive players don't want to play those boards. Scoring 600 points is simply out of the reach for most players. Reaching a 1,000? Unimaginable. Consistently finding 16/25 letter words? Not a chance.

Without chaff, there would be no wheat.

Sometimes it makes sense to appreciate the chaff. Cattle love it.

[bwt1213]

Naboka, I had no problem with having "bad" boards for players who just want to enjoy playing the game, while having the chance to set a record that will stand and not be trampled by those more competitive players. The problem I have is that boards for those more competitive players were simply going away. We all winnow the boards our own way; some play everything until they get tired. Some compete with themselves and try to set a new personal record. Some try to surpass X% of some other player's score. It would be nice if all players could find ample boards suited to their style. I get 600+ a lot of the time, 700+ rarely, and have never scored 800 or higher. There are a whole lot of players better than me, so if I set a high score on any board and then RussDNails or Brisul or Scheffek or BabyBullz59 or Megaword or FastEddieb or many others play that same board, chances are that all my records would be wiped out. I don't track my lifetime high scores on anything; it's pretty meaningless to me, because it's just a measure of how many times one of my boards were retired before a better player could get to it. As far as "longest word" or "best word" records, if one of the champion-level players got to the board first, it would be very unlikely that I'd find a better word. I think in seven or eight years of play I've taken down one of Lalatan's records fewer than five times, maybe a lot fewer. There have been a very few times when I was the first to find the longest possible word for a board, but that's happened; it will happen to everyone eventually.