Re: WordWipe Scoring (2024)

Bogus Scores: Post # 1 of 2 posts.

Reposted to place posts in proper order.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it is highly likely that there are some bogus scores being reported for Word Wipe.

Scores above 60,000: Most likely bogus

50,000 to 60,000: Very hard to believe

40,000 to 50,000: 40,000ish, maybe; 50,000ish, probably not legit

30,000 to 40,000: 30,000ish - Believable; 40,000ish - Very difficult but not impossible

20,000 to 30,000: Humanly possible

10,000 to 20,000: Very possible

In the past week, the AARP leaderboard has contained scores of over 70,000 and over 90,000 twice – by the same person. I’m not buying those at all.

I can’t absolutely prove it. It would be difficult to prove scores either way. If you make those highest scores though, I would be reassured if I could see some proof. Maybe take a screen shot of your score page and post it here?? And give the rest of us some tips!

Scores of 30,000-40,000 seem to represent believable scores for pretty smart people playing the game without cheating. (More on how to cheat later.) If you are just reporting totally fictitious scores, as I believe is happening in some cases, you don’t need either vocabulary skill or luck. The skill you do need is the ability to hack the score reporting system.

I looked at the AARP leader boards for the top 10 players for 10 days including the last week. Out of 10 days, two players were present in all 10 days, one player was in for 9 days, one player was in for 8 days, and four players were in for 6 days. There were another half dozen “frequent flyers” in the group. Given the substantial amount of good luck it takes to score above 50,000, I find it unbelievable that the same few players would have such good luck for so many days. If luck is more or less randomly distributed, more and different players should be expected to be in the top ten.

I also checked the leader boards for the Washington Post for last week and the results were about the same, that is, mostly the same names appeared day after day. And to illustrate that it is definitely possible to report impossible scores, the Washington Post reported all-time high scores of :

1,555,744

1,279,122

607,991

527,096, and

428,202.

There must be very smart people in DC.

In an earlier post, I said I believed that scoring high in WordWipe is a combination of about half smarts and half luck. Even highly skilled players need considerable luck in order to have letters positioned correctly in order to form lots of words and clear lots of squares. Luck is also needed to have a sufficient number of the right vowels and consonants to complete words. And luck is also needed toward the end of each round to have the correct letters in the proper locations so as to be able to completely clear all the lines in a round and thereby get your score doubled for that round. Doubling scores is critical to achieving high scores.

The tables below show two examples of how scores can be achieved. In the first example, “My Usual” is approximately what happens with me. As you can see in the table, about 40% of my 100 squares each round are cleared by forming 3-letter words, about 50% are cleared with 4-letter words, about 5% are cleared with 5-letter words, and 5% are cleared by forming 6-letter words.

The full table is explained in more detail as follows. Sorry for the complexity.

To get the approximate average point value for each category of word, I checked a sample of 10 words from each category. I “froze” each board I reviewed in the “full open” position, that is, with all 100 squares showing while I looked for words. I therefore had virtually unlimited time to find these words. I found that the average 3-letter word was worth about 40.2 points, the average 4-letter word was worth about 71.2 points, the average 5-letter word was worth about 106 points, and the average 6-letter word was worth about 130.8 points, as reflected in the “Avg” line in the table. Six-letter words are not easy to find. I had to look through about three full boards before I was able to find 10 6-letter words. (They are extra hard to find when you have to work quickly under a time constraint.)

I also looked for 7-letter words, but was only able to find two in five or six boards (again with unlimited time). Those two words had an average worth of 203 points but 7-letter words are sufficiently rare as to not make a large impact on scoring, so I have omitted them from this analysis. Their rarity tells us that making extra-long words is probably not the key to scoring high. Doubling is much more important.

The “Plays” represents the number of words of each length that would need to be formed to clear that percentage of, say, 3-letter words (i.e., 13 plays). The number of plays times the average score (Avg) for that length of word gives you the Points for that category of words. So you could expect to get 536 points for 13 3-letter words, 890 points for 13 4-letter words, etc..

Totaling up the point value of each category of word gives me a total raw score of about 1,641 points per round. If I completely clear the board in about one third of my rounds (“one third dbld” in the table), resulting in doubled scores, my total average score per round would be 2,133. And if I clear 14 rounds, my score for that game would be 2,133 times 14, or 22,974. If I clear 15 rounds, my score for that game would be 32,000. Etc..

So that’s about my usual game. I usually score somewhere between about 20,000 and 30,000. If I was REALLY lucky, and cleared 17 lines/rounds and doubled my score on EVERY round, I could achieve a score of 55,794. That’s in the neighborhood of what the top scorers report scoring every day. But how realistic is it to double your score in every round?

I say, not very. I believe there is too much luck involved in completely clearing every board so as to score that high, especially to do it every day. My experience is that clearing 16 rounds occurs fairly rarely, and completely clearing as many as 17 rounds is extremely difficult, given the reduced amounts of time available and the luck required to have properly positioned letters that can form words.

(Please see Part #2 of 2 of this post.)