Slashdot Mirror
Scrabble Needs a New Scoring System
innocent_white_lamb writes "A researcher says that some letters are over valued and some are under-valued in Scrabble, due to recent changes to the lists of allowable words. Z and X are now much easier to play and should be worth less, while U, M and G should be worth more than they are now. Joshua Lewis wrote a program to re-calculate the value of each letter to better reflect the current usage. The co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association says that he often hears criticism of Scrabble's scoring system, but any change would bring about 'catastrophic outrage'. A spokesman for Mattel says that they have no plans to change the game."
What are they gonna do, send them a letter?
Why not just version the Rules? Original, 2012, etc? MTG has new decks come out, new rules come out,old cards removed new added... they did fine (relatively).
The language changes... so should the rules.
Mattel has come out with a statement today denouncing logic, reason, and fairness.
Scrabble is Hasbro IP.
Hasbro and Mattel are two *ENTIRELY* separate companies. Rivals, in fact.
Saying that Mattel has no plans to change the game is like saying that Microsoft has no plans to change the iPhone.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It is a game, the iportant thing is that everyone is playing by the same rules. Sure, if you were to develop scrabble today, it might be nice to adjust the values of the letters to reduce the element of chance in the game, but now there is insufficient reason to go and change it. It woudl still have been ok if every letter had the same value.
a random nobody from the Netherlands said "some researchers are over valued and some are under-valued in Real Life."
This was brought up during an NPR interview the earlier this week and I agreed with the mentioned counterpoint. While it makes logical sense for a rework of the scoring system, it's effectively flattening it and removing some of the strategy around the unpredictability of the game.
Regardless, Mattel has already gone on record (I believe) stating it will keep the scoring as is.
Considering the second-last sentence in the summary just mentioned the "North American Scrabble Players Association" right before Mattel, I trust you can understand my confusion. The article clarifies the point by noting that Mattel make Scrabble in Europe.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
is Upwords. Scrabble can get adversarial with the rules on challenging a word. Upwords lets you challenge a word without fear of losing your turn. Also, you can play just fine with a more limited vocabulary due to the nature of play. If you are playing with kids or just want a more amicable game, try it.
Many games have these, 'bonus' and 'penalty', and Scrabble appears to be one of them.
It is part of the game and Mattel has no reason to change their rules.
If you don't like it, go get yourself some wood putty and a sharpie and make the letters whatever value you damned well please.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I can almost say this with certainty that the guy figuring out Scrabble letter values would contribute to society far more doing something else with his time.
My sig of choice is Marlboro
What is that, some kind of ripoff of Words With Friends?
My days of reading Slashdot are nearing an end. This used to be a website for hand-selected news that had value. There are thousands of websites that post, post, post, post, post all day. Slashdot was nice, I even keep it on my iGoogle, because it presented a trim selection of important pieces of news.
I'm sure this is said every day, and wah wah wah, who cares, but it's disappointing to see a web site I love dumb themselves down.
This is a message out of love, not hate.
This is SERIOUS people! This topic should be next in line with 'are we eating too much garlic as a people' :)
Then it seems like you eliminate possible strategies. What's wrong with leaving a bit of strategy to the game where decisions you make are based by biases the rules create?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Really? 'catastrophic outrage'? People really need to get a grip. It's like calling someone a Nazi for minor offenses.
rabble = 10 points. 30 points for triple word score.
We need to redefine 'music' as those 3 notes. Oh wait, stop allowing all those crazy bullshit words in Scrabble in the first place. Qi? Really?
It's just a proposal, not a requirement.
Even Joshua Lewis, inventor of the new system believes the traditional valuations can make the game more exciting.
"You're really lucky if you pick an X because it's over-valued and unlucky if you pick a V. So if they were to re-do the values of the tiles that would reduce the level of luck.
"That might be desirable in tournaments but it might not be as good in casual play where you want the less skilled players to have a shot periodically at beating the more highly skilled players."
Source: The "British Media"
I've developed an open source package called Valett for determining letter valuations in word games based on statistical analyses of corpora. In addition to calculating the frequency of each letter in a corpus, Valett calculates the frequency by word length and the incoming and outgoing entropy for each letter's transition probabilities. One can then weight these properties of the corpus based on the structure of the game and arrive at a suggested value for each letter..
News flash: EVERY OTHER GAME has scores that are roughly, but not exactly, aligned with their probability. It's part if the game. Baskets in basketball have 3 values: 1, 2, and 3 points, for the entire court and all circumstances. A dartboard has dozens of scores possible with nearly NO relation to the probability of hitting one. It's what makes the game what it is and it's what leads to different strategies.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Players who study all the insane crazy words can play Zs and Qs wherever they want anyway, players who don't will never be able to. And at the highest levels of the game, individual letter values don't matter all that much anyway because people are always getting those nutty "use your whole hand" bonuses.
I generally play with a non-scrabble-fanatic judge instead of a dictionary to determine word correctness. Sorry, "Qat" is not a word.
Give them random values! Simply have a list of all of the letters, roll some die, write the numbers down next to the letters, and badabing badaboom.
The G
I can see the point made by people wanting to change the scoring. The initial letter/point associations were made based on the number of tiles in the bag and the frequency of use at the time. The "official" rules have changed by virtue of the allowable words. With new acceptable words added the letter frequency changed as well.
If new words are added (or subtracted ) , to keep the game the same, then eventually the letter scoring would also need to change if the desire was to keep the game from changing. Changes were made for non-English versions, with different distribution of letters and point values:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions
So if English has changed since 1938 it's not outrageous to suggest a new distribution/scoring mix. Desire to keep the game "the same" is also understandable, but that would require using a 1938 dictionary and not allowing new words. ( Nope, can't used "quark" )
Why are you buying a pussy gun? Real men own an AR-10 or AR-50.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
news flash: Play the game with your own rules. I have been doing that with risk for 2 decades now. Most everyone that has tried my ruleset likes it a LOT better than the stock rules.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
His methodology could be enhanced. Letters C and V should be bumped up as well since the fact that they cannot be made into 2 letter words often makes them less useful and harder to play.
Good god. Honestly now, how much of a life do you have to lack to put a story out about the scoring system in scrabble needs to be changed?
Its just a board game, if you dont like it then dont play it. This is as stupid as bitching that monopoly values need to be reassesed due to the current housing market value of a street or the decline of the american dollars value.
...seriously? That's the sort of tenuous, grasping-at-straws discussion hijack the rest of us would come up with when we think we're JOKING about Stupid America's gun fetish.
Q: How many NRA members does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: More guns.
let us be the judge... :-)
coding is life
A perfectly balanced game is not a game. It's a function.
There's little value in making scrabble more abstract. Good on Mattel.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
to Americans who can't spell properly. english spellers rarely use it
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
...Microsoft has no plans to change the iPhone.
In poker, you have the same chance of getting a 2 and King, but the king is more powerful. On a GO board not every playable square is equally strong. Why should scrabble make it so the letter composition of your word is neutral? some letters can be more valuable than others. One can account for this in strategy. makes the game richer not off kilter.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It would be wise for Mattel to change the values because then Scrabble enthusiasts everywhere would have a reason to buy another Scrabble board/chips. It would make for a nice cash grab and they have this research as a nifty excuse for doing so. My parents play Scrabble a lot (they're retired) and their set is at least thirty years old -- it's been around as long as I can remember. Even if they didn't upgrade, someone in the family would be quick to get one for them as a x-mas/b-day present.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
If the players agree, any arbitrary point value can be applied to the letters. There are already several unofficial variant rule sets out there, so, you know, just do it if you want, and don't if you don't like it. Now I am off the cwm to play a tune on my crwth.
The guy who developed the game tinkered with the ratio from the get-go: he put in too few "S" tiles to reduce one obvious tactic (playing a word across another by adding an S to it and making it plural, like taking COP and playing SKATE such that you get the points for both COPS and SKATE).
The corpus is all well and good, but real points are scored on Scrabble strategy. Two-letter words are absolutely crucial in Scrabble, since they let you easily double-count each tile you lay down. If you have APE on the field, and I lay down TIN next to it, I can count not just TIN but also AN, PI, and EN.
This is made even more profitable by the addition of (bogus, at least to me) words like QI and ZA (a way of spelling "chi" as in Chinese medicine and a slang word for "pizza" that they somehow decided was mainstream enough). If you leave me [triple letter score]AT on the field, and I have Q and I, I get to count SIXTY POINTS for that Q (plus the I and the AT). (QAT is also pretty damn bogus.)
You can tweak the words according to the corpus, but all it will do to real Scrabble players is to tweak the game, not fundamentally alter it. It's not really a game of practical vocabulary, and never has been, not if you're planning to score well. It's a game of tactics (generally well understood) and an official dictionary with words that often bear only a dim connection to reality.
Hilarious how this is modded up. Shows the insanity of people on this site.
I can think of nothing more touching and meaningful than commemorating a child's death by going out and buying the weapon that killed him/her.
You guys are exactly the type that need mental health exams monthly.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
This is a way for them to get everyone to re-buy scrabble. Now you have scrabble for each region. U.S.A scrabble, French scrabble, etc.
Beyond that, you can conduct this analysis every few years...so you can have U.S.A. scrabble 2013 and sell more editions.
Whoever is in control of these companies should be fired and bring me on.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
That's not how one should measure the value of letters. Here's a more serious approach:
1) Get a large sample of games by running a scrabble playing program against itself.
2) Assume each letter has a latent fair-point value, model the score differential as as a function of the difference of the sum of the fair-point value of the letters received by each side.
3) Fit fair point values with MCMC
\u262D = \u5350
The guy is clearly making fun of people pro gun.
You got it right. ITS A GAME. If it matters that much to you, play it anyway you want.
Just introduce new words to rebalance.
I propose kwyjibo.
It could get as ugly as when the WWE tried to ban the flying dropkick.
Have gnu, will travel.
klingon doesnt score as well either!
So... new allowable words? Fine, then if we're gonna choose to use 'new' words, then you can by the same token choose to use a new scoring system in your game. Or, you can simply play the way the game was made to be, with the same 'ol scoring system we all grew up with for years, and score the dang thing the same 'ol way we all grew up with for years.
I don't see what the big deal is. If you wanna play in a tourniquet, choose to join a tournament that uses the words and scoring system you like. Or don't. Relax! Can't we all just git a long?
Speaking of logic and reason, fuck the gun-grabbers. I'm going to join the NRA and buy a Bushmaster AR-15 with 2 100-round drums of ammo to show my support for our second amendment. Shit happens. You keep calm and carry on, or you flail your arms like a pussy and ask big brother to ban everything you don't agree with -- which is what happens when America's once proud youth are raised as politically-correct pussies.
-- Ethanol-fueled
I was going to say be careful you don't shoot your cock and balls off, but they're so small you're probably not that good a shot.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
E-F trolled your bitch ass real good !
* high-5s E-F*
The fact that someone posted an over-the-top pro-gun statement does not, on slashdot or most US-based forums, mean that they are trolling. There are plenty of Americans who sincerely believe that if , for instance, the government has heavy machine guns, rocket launchers or attack helicopters, so should private citizens.
Whether or not you think this is insane is not relevant to the question of their sincerity, and thus whether or not they are trolling, i.e. being outrageous merely to provoke a reaction.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I really despise WWF. The board. The tile scores. The multiplier placement [triple triples? really?] -- all of it. Why can't Scrabble make a working app that doesn't suck so bad?
Oh right because EA.
This subject comes up. And every year the various values, or # of tiles, or blah blah blah changes with each "study."
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The guy is clearly making fun of people pro gun.
A classic example of Poe's Law, I'd say, as it is NOT clear whether he's serious or not, and if he is attempting a parody it's come out as no more unreasonable sounding than many pro-gun posts here recently.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The best way to remove luck and improve learning is to play duplicate instead. Letter scores don't need to be balanced.
The vulgarity and tone is a give away. Anyone (from either side) that really spoke like this to positively represent their side would not be one able to work a keyboard.