Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexM
Why all the fuss about word count? Quality over quantity IMO.
I think WPR is a really good indicator of skill though (and possibly future potential, since speed is probably hardest to improve), but sure you need a combination of both to be really good.
Better players tend to get more words, IMO.
Not to mention that a lot of small words lead to bigger words, so if you crank out a bunch of small words, say you get ARM - well that can lead to ARMET, ARMY, ARMIES, ARMO(U)R, INARM, DISARM, etc, if you know what to look for - so I really think there's a huge benefit to trying to get as many words as possible, it'll help you build to larger words and not to mention that you can just power through someone else that gets better words by sheer quantity.
Also, it's a lot easier of a metric to play by - rounds have HUGE variance, while you can pretty consistently get similar WPR numbers on different boards - so you'll notice when you go above your WPR while having a big score might actually not be that big of a deal if it was loaded round. Similarly, we have access to the total number of words possible, so we can kind of see where we're at with that (i.e. I usually get ~50-60% of the words) but we have no idea what the total number of points is so we can't compare it there either.