Wordfeud League of Honour

Tough luck Graham, when you come up a guess short, suddenly a draw doesn’t look so bad after all. Good luck breaking through for the win

What triggered this question was I was using the practice mode and the word CRWTH was the solution. Obviously quite memorable given it has no vowels. Then maybe a week later it popped up again as a solution and I thought statistically that was unrealistic. I know the scrabble word list currently has 13000 words and I figure SOWPIDS probably has 12000-12500. So I started recording the solutions in practice mode as a bit of a test and from my sample of 250 words, I found 9 duplicated which seems incredibly high given a word base of 12-13 thousand words. I even had CRANE appear twice in the space of 6 puzzles. It just seems very unlikely the full 12 or 13000 words are in play.

The Rules page also mentions the list includes words posted in the comments field on this site in the first 10 years. My match solution the other day was IXORA so I searched that word in International English Wordfeud forum for no hits. This tournament one of my solutions was ALBUM, which was the same as the previous season. Again statistically improbable on a wordlist the size of 12000 or 13000 words. Hence why I was asking whether we are playing with a full deck or if a link to the actual wordlist could be provided. Eskil?

AFAIK, "the English word list is the SOWPODS list",(RULES page), and it´s used for all the different modes be it practice, duel or tournament match. If I had to guess, I´d say that the algorithm or game-code randomly assigns new challenge words depending on several factors and rules, the top of which being the player´s ranking profile and the fact whether the word had been played before by either opponent in a match.

So, I´m guessing that if you play the practice mode while you are logged-out, you´d mostly get the "ordinary" common picks. on the other hand, if you play any mode while you´re logged-in, you´d most likely get a lot of the "rare, weird" ones because you, your top ranking and the history of your already-played words) are identified and therefore assigned a new "tough" word accordingly.

Now, whether the creator periodically tweaks the code so as to affect how are new words are picked for whom? I´d say you´re guess is as good as mine. But I have no doubt that he´s doing his best to bring us a fair competitive challenge. So let´s just appreciate it for what it is and seek perfection in embracing the imperfections ;D

Eskil, in case you read this, is the word list for the practice function the same as the true game word list? It’s just in practice mode the words are nearly always quite ordinary with a rare weird one occasionally whereas the match/game words seem a much higher percentage of weird and wonderful ones. You haven’t culled any words out have you? Or better still, is there a link to the actual word list being used that can be provided?

TRUDEFIX, MONTY022, MINIMINISTONER, GRAHAM-S, RUSSELLJMUNN, ELLEM3939, LIAMCORINNE and RIVERGODDESS is among these few heartwarm samaritans who sacrifice some of their own money, earned through suffering and pain, to pay for the fun for all of us.

The two last players will be relegated. If I were to guess, I would say that trudefix wins this group.