231–240 of 271 posts
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With Wordle, you only play against yourself, so cheating only cheats yourself. So no need for anti cheating. Client side dictionary isn’t a cop out at all. It’s a terrific solution for a single player game that helps keep the code base elegant.
> so cheating only cheats yourself Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component. I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree. PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the f…
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> so cheating only cheats yourself Well, cheating is less important than in Counter Strike, but not entirely unimportant either. Playing Wordle has a social component. I think this solution is neither elegant nor terrific. It's simply completely ignoring the problem and claiming that it doesn't matter anyway. I obviously disagree. PS: when I was a kid, I learned programming on my C64 with BASIC. Like many kids, the f…
I think cheating would matter if there was individual words tied to an account. But not when the design says every browser session on the planet gets the same word.
It's just the default of "I decided not to tackle this problem because it's hard and not a priority for my design". This was also what I defaulted to with my C64 BASIC games when I was a kid, "I don't know how to hide this, so I won't".
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I agree with your philosophy against cheating, but still, games must implement some sort of anticheat, just like they must implement some sort of game rules. Imagine not implementing blocking walls in Counter Strike, "just don't walk through walls, it would make the game less fun and why would you ruin the experience for yourself like that?". This is a case where not hiding the word list was done because it was easie…
Not at all the same as in counter strike, as if one person was walking through walls, it'd break it for everyone else not walking through walls. My wordle doesn't get worse from you cheating, but my game of CS sure would.
"I don't need to implement wall blocking, the player should just refrain from walking through walls". It's not elegant, it's lazy.
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I've lost when I got into a situation with three green letters, no yellow letters, and a ton of valid words remaining with the other 2 slots. Can happen with one open slot too.
In that situation you don't keep guessing at the word... you enumerate the possibilities and guess a word that you know is wrong but will cut down your search space.
The code design is also very elegant in its simplicity. You have two static lists of words in the JS code - known words, and a smaller, random pre-shuffled list of words the game will select from. The selection is done on the client, by date, from the second list - every day at midnight (your local time!) the next word in the pre-shuffled list is selected - no hashing or randomizing or anything. No cookies are involv…
I think the full list of words being hardcoded and readily available is not a kind of elegant simplicity, but simply an inelegant compromise to get everything done client-side, which has obvious benefits. It's the one thing I would change about Wordle's implementation.
What would you change specifically? Adding an API call backed by servers / lambdas? The creator mentioned it costs in the tens of dollars per month to run wordle for 10s of millions of daily players. Having to run servers would not only add a ton of cost, but now be vulnerable to latency spikes, ddos, downtime.
Wordle scaled to 10s of millions in a few months, without any latency or downtime. Pretty elegant in my book.
Having implemented my own 5-letter word game, I can agree that much finesse lies under the covers. Wordii is for the impatient, letting you play more often if you choose: https://frequal.com/wordii/ The many subtleties of this genre make it a great programming challenge. I encourage developers to try making their own version. I think you'll come away with a healthy respect for Mr. Wardle.
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> Making the whole thing client side also let him scale from a small handful of users to literally millions with basically zero additional work. But everyone on HN is telling me that I should move away from client side and render everything server side! In fact, all state should be server side! Use a fancy library that opens a web socket and turn the users 4+core computer into a mindless zombie controlled by a .25CPU…
I don't know how Wordle managed to scale to 3 million players without Kubernetes, it must be magic.
Because web servers are really good at serving up static files.
That is it. I get to make an app, deliver it through the web, and not worry about server resources. I do have to worry about making the app not suck, but as a software engineer I should always be worrying about that! Web, mobile, desktop, making code not a bloated mess is kind of important no matter where it is running.
I may be completely wrong but, after playing 3 or 4 times, I got the feeling that this game is very easy and involves more luck than skill or strategy. It looks and feels like a puzzle so you get the feeling of having solved something but have you, really? If you find the word in 3 tries 90% of the time, does it mean you're actually better at the game than someone who usually needs 4 or 5 attempts? Or are you just a…
Over a small sample size it's impossible to say, but if you maintain those numbers after many games then yes, you are better. And there are a lot of opportunities for skill or strategy. For example the choice of your first word matters a lot, should you plane something like ADIEU to get most of the vowels, or should you plane something like CRANE that has a lot of the popular consonants? And then the biggest mistake…
I just heard about this game for the first time from this thread, went to play it, and realised this on row #3 after initially wasting row #2. It made me want to go off and write an algorithm (I actually returned to the thread to see if anyone had written anything along those lines).
But I just realised this won't do, because your score depends not only on the last row but on the intervening ones too, so there's a perverse incentive to repeat the successful letters. That works nicely for non-programmers, but it made me think I'd prefer a purer game where the only 'cost function' is based on the correctness of your final guess. Or at least, that game would be quite fascinating to try and write an optimal algorithm for.
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When I first discovered Wordle, I immediately looked for a way to keep playing with new random words, something that most clones have implemented. After a few rounds, it just wasn't as fun. What makes it fun to spend 10 minutes on the game is that it's the only round of the day so there's a pay-off to giving it some thought. When you can keep playing new rounds, it's just not rewarding and I would just close the tab…
I have been playing Quordle as well, and now find Wordle very slow and dull. I'll persist as long as my streak is active (60+ or whatever) but bail if it breaks. I play 10-20 games of Quordle a day and find it more interesting, challenging with IMO more difficult words, etc. But I can appreciate that one shared round was key to Wordle being noticed.