You are underestimating the cognitive reserve utilized for knowing to USE vision at a certain time, therein by taking your attention away from your board; as well as the fact that vision words are very short in nature vs inspiration.

I think everyone uses at least one freeze.

For point 2 I'm opposed, I think that in general % does a much better job of showing who is in the race to win the group and who is in the bottom. I can look at the standings right now and see a ton of groups where if it was done by points it would be completely misleading. A very simple example is in group 4, where right now monkeyrunbad would be in first above Plumbst, when I think it's pretty obvious that shouldn't be the case. That kind of erroneous placement seems a lot more important than any kind of issue where someone who played 2 games and has a high percentage happens to be at the top for a little bit.

Another example would be in Group 1 where chronick would be in first, and I'd be in second place. That's just completely ridiculous as it's obvious to anyone that my chances to win the group are monstrously lower than thegroupie's right now. To have any system where I'm currently ahead of her is just wrong in my view, and I'm not in favor of it at all. One last silly result that it would create is that JamesonPainter would be in third place right now, which makes no sense at all. Basically the point of having them ranked is so that we can get a relatively objective look at how they are doing without having to do much math. If we put them in order of points, everything will be ****ed.

As far as I can tell the current system is the most accurate way of doing things. The only other possibility would be to have some kind of combination of games played/points, but that seems overly complex and annoying.



For point 1 I'm certainly fine with any change. I'd recommend any change though be made on a test page, so I can see how easy it is to make it work. Also it's imperative that I be able to set this up every season with no more effort than what I do now. I pretty much have it down where I can setup a new season in 20-30 minutes tops, and if that number goes up to like 45-60 it will be a problem. However in general if it's something that will be easier for people to use, won't create any more work for me, is something that I'll be able to maintain each season and looks better then I'm for it. However forgive me as I am having a hard time envisioning how it will look in practice without seeing a test page first. I'm not a big google docs champion.

Thanks.

btw Sangaman, sometimes when someone has games missing, it's not their fault. If it is their fault, I always make sure that they don't get promoted or something like that. I mentioned this before. In the future I'm going to auto fill in results of missing games, and if I have heard no reason for these games being missing, I'm going to basically punish both sides slightly. I won't make it a double forfeit or anything, but instead of 5 total points for the game, there will be just 3 or 4, and I'll make sure that it doesn't result in someone not demoting or promoting, if that makes any sense.

Honestly in the bottom groups, a lot of the missing games are people who just can't figure out how to enter scores, or so I've been told.

i googled and youtubed but couldn't find these.. can you link me?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAyxs-EuadY

Seriously? googling lyndseybrowning like all the first 6 links are relevant.

Anyways: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAyxs-EuadY

wow i just downloaded the scramble update and learned about vision. it's amazing! bring it on, suckers!

Yeah although most of the top guys don't seem to like vision very much. But I do

Perhaps, but at least for someone like me who is still a budding enthusiast getting ~80 words a game it helps me find new branches of words that I can then spend the extra time building off to get more that I may not have found on my own using just the freeze time. I can see the case for someone who is so good that they're simply moving their finger around getting all the words they know are there using some sort of system which is thrown off balance by the pause of vision which then only shows them words they knew about anyway.

Then again I would think that those people would still get to a point where they've got all the basic words they know of and vision helps them find words that they missed or weren't going to get anyway and could benefit them in that way.

whoops i spelled it lindsey instead of lyndsey

I'll concede my 2nd point, it's really an aesthetic change for all intents and purposes anyway.

I can set up a new results entry system on a test page. It shouldn't take you any more time to set up a league, it's just a tweak to the formulas that count up points and games played.

Are there any vocab lists available? and also word sets, like what words can be made out of S,A,T,E?

I don't think it's necessary to 'study' words. I think skill is learnt from experience. People always ask me if I've spent time looking in a dictionary, or studying word lists, which is funny but really strange (and untrue by the way ).

Anyway, how I learned was simple: the more I played, the better I got. I started out playing a Scrabble type word game called Wordox which was based on word stealing. I enjoyed playing players who were better than me as I would always learn a new word or two each game.

In relation to Boggle, just looking at the word list at the end of the game helps. If you start to see missed words cropping up a lot, they tend to start sticking to your memory. At least, they do for me, most of the time lol.

So, I don't think studying anything is necessary, the more you play, the better you get is the way I see it. In my case, I think that playing games like Scrabble has helped and watching the big players on ISC, whose words are sometimes extremely rare but are good to know!

Lyndsey.

BTW is it confirmed that the clock trick for free tokens doesn't work anymore? Is there any other way?

Best bet is to just wait it out and do something else

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe that you've been playing seriously for many years, I'm not sure how many but it sounds like at least 5 from hearing you talk? I imagine that directed study would speed up the ability of talented players to get where you are. Sure you don't have to study, but it certainly couldn't hurt and would probably accelerate progress drastically.

Should I wait for my opponent to start the 2nd match at their convenience or is it fine for me to start both of them?

WeirdChess and PearlJammer are destroying group 3 and making it no fun for anyone!

Nice seedings Curtains...

lol

Hey now! I'm very cautious before putting anyone in Group 2 without proving themselves first, as the competition there is extremely high level.

In any case it's fun for them

Technically you are supposed to wait, but it's not a big deal. I'd PM them on 2+2 if possible first but if not just go for it, make sure they know it's a league game. Probably tell them league before even starting your first turn, and then either wait for a reply or for 12 hours , so they know you didn't decide to say league after you played it and had a good round?

Too many people coming into the league at once that should have been group 2 or 1 obv.

Yeah not much to do about that. Basically I try to start people approximately 1 group lower than I think they should be if they are going to be in the higher groups, although it doesn't always work out exactly like that. IMO getting into Group 1 and even Group 2 is something that a lot of people are fighting hard for, so I don't want to gift it to someone unless I'm completely certain that they deserve to start in Group 2. I don't want to put someone right in there and have them get 40% and then someone who got demoted feels cheated and honestly had no idea who it made any sense to leave out of Group 2 for this season.

Everyone has different study strategies, but for this particular variation of boggle I feel like practice to attain speed and volume should be the main goals for most people, rather than word study per se. Word lists are going to be particular to dictionaries - usually the Scrabble dictionaries SOWPODS (international) or TWL (US-only). I can't tell what dictionary SWF uses but I don't believe it is standard TWL.

I learned the game on SOWPODS which has about 100K words more than TWL (and whatever SWF is using) and I'm constantly trying to play words that I'm used to that are not accepted in this dictionary :\

Another thing to remember with SWF is that there is no premium on unique words. In standard "brick and mortar" Boggle scoring, if you find a word that someone else has found, you both cross it off your list and get zero points. If you are playing a version of Boggle that uses this style of scoring, finding words that no one else has becomes extremely important, and this is where studying word lists would be quite useful. I have pages and pages of word lists although I don't study actively anymore :) A couple of my cool finds:

http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...6_506469_n.jpg

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto...07386_61_n.jpg

http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphoto..._7404167_n.jpg


If you do want to study words though, I know a lot of the Scrabble/Boggle sickos use http://jumbletime.com/ as a study tool/game to keep them sharp on words and anagrams.

I got seeded after one game with Curtains. Clearly standard and I don't think Curtains should be playing more than one game with each newcomer (you already do way too much for this league Curtains), but I'll admit it wasn't my best game and I performed maybe a little subpar of my standard. I expect I'll move to either Group 1 or Group 2 after this season.

I don't even know where I'd be a good fit. From my limited number of games with Group 1 & Group 2 members, I'd guess I'd get about 60-65% of points in Group 2, but only about 20-25% in Group 1. The tail end of the distribution gets much stronger by a wide margin and Group 1 looks really elite.

I think you're a stronger player than I am for sure and I think Group 2 is made up of players at around your strength, so yeah, I think your estimates are accurate.