muffinista / botgle Goto Github PK

Hi!

I'm @jseakle on twitter, and I've been playing botgle quite a bit, fairly seriously. I feel like its popularity and fun is being held back a bit by the extreme size of the wordlist, which highly encourages typing in likely-sounding nonsense as fast as you can over actually looking for words you know. I feel kind of bad about doing it, but ten minutes is a long time, and it's just bad strategy to not utilize any downtime typing in everything even remotely reasonable. In the most recent game I won, 5 out of 30 of my points were earned this way, nearly enough to cost me the game. And on top of that, the best words found by the stats bot includes "BURUT", which does not seem (from a bit of googling) to be an even remotely real English word! I've also noticed that any given name I've tried has been accepted - a lot of those are also words, but I kind of suspect a lot of proper nouns and names are incorrectly accepted as well.

It looks like from your commit message that your dictionary is a superset of SOWPODS - might I recommend restricting to to just SOWPODS, or maybe even something smaller? (SOWPODS does not contain BURUT, at least, but it's still enormous, and full of archaicisms (like COURB, also from that last game). The game would be perfectly fine with a dictionary half the size.)

Thanks for making botgle! It's lots of fun.