u/Dry-Royal7707

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

The Titles tab in your profile used to hold 24. It now holds 120, and whicheverone you are showing sits next to your name. You can pick a favourite or leave it on automatic, which always shows your strongest.

They come in three groups, and they behave differently on purpose.

* Game titles, 80 Open the tab and each one tells you what it wants. A few of you will already have some without having noticed.

* Prestige, 20. These are stunts, and they are meant to be awkward. Each one tells you exactly what it wants and then dares you. A few of them:

* Lipogrammatist score at least 50 without using the letter E in a single
accepted word.

* No Loose Ends find every valid three letter answer on a board that has at least ten of them.

* Alliteration Station ten accepted words starting with the same letter in
one Daily.

* Full Spectrum words of length 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 or more, all in the
same round.

They are all doable in one board. That is the trick of them. You have to give up scoring well to go after most of them.

Secrets, 20. These work differently to anything else in the game, so this bit
is worth reading properly.

An undiscovered Secret shows you nothing at all. Not a name, not a locked silhouette, not a hint. There are twenty slots and they are simply blank.

The moment anybody finds one, it opens up for everyone.

Its name appears, the reason behind it appears, the date it was first found appears, and so do the names of the players who found it. Permanently, in every single player's collection.

And it is not a race for one person.

Everyone who finds it on that first day is recorded as a founder, together.

If six of you crack the same one on the same board, all six names go up. Anyone who gets there later still earns the title, they just do not get their name on it.

Look at the two numbers in that section. "Yours" is how many you hold.

**"Found" is how many the whole subreddit has uncovered between us.**

Both are on zero.

**What unlocks them is not in the game's code.**

It is not in the database, it never reaches your browser, and it never gets written to a log. It sits in one encrypted setting the game reads and never repeats back. I built it that way so I could not leak them by accident, and so nobody can find them by reading the source.

That is why I wanted the founder list to hold more than one name. I did not want twenty private puzzles solved alone in twenty bedrooms. I wanted people comparing notes in the comments, someone saying "I got one right after doing this, did anyone else", and a few of you getting there together on the same day.

I am not going to confirm guesses. That would spoil it for everyone including me.

You can also post your title card to the Title Gallery, which resets every six
months.

---

One small thing

Reddit does pay developers, but those funds are a long way off for a game this
size, and right now Wordy Bunch earns me nothing at all. I build it because I
enjoy building it, and that has been enough so far.

You may spot a Support button in your profile.

**Please ignore it for now.**

It went live before it was finished and it does not yet give you what it says it does, so I would rather nobody used it until I have fixed that properly. I will say when it is ready.

The thing that actually helps costs nothing. Say the name somewhere. Drop a comment when word games come up in another subreddit, post a board you were proud of, or tell one person who would like this sort of thing. For a game this size that does more than the Gold does.

Somebody in here has played 63 of the last 64 days. I still find that slightly astonishing. Thank you for your support and playing everyday.

first proper knockout week is done. congrats to:

Championship Cup: u/basherrrrr, who takes the Weekly Arena Crown with it
Challenger Cup: u/Least_Resolution_674
Contender Cup: u/Wallace_B

basherrrrr put up 226, then 239, then 273 across the three rounds. u/EdsMum and u/Billz_The_Big_Dog both got to a final as well. and Least_Resolution_674 knocked me out in the semi 88 to 77, which i am handling well.

now the awkward bit. all three of you were meant to be revealed together in a post on friday. that post never turned up, because i never actually built it. the titles and flair went out on schedule, Crown included, so if you won something you do have it, you just got it in silence. that one's on me.

a couple of other things were murkier than they should have been. the pinned Arena post only ever said the Cups were decided, with no names on it, so unless you opened the Arena yourself you had no idea what had happened. it's also locked, so there was nowhere obvious to ask.

which is really why i'm posting. first run of the format, a fair bit of it guesswork, and i want to know how it read from your side.

did you even clock that a tournament was running? did you follow your Cup through the week, or enter once on the saturday and forget about it? and is three Cups too many for the number of us playing, would one bracket with everyone in it just be better.

if you played it and it felt like nothing much, say that too. easier to hear now than after i've built another month on top of it.

someone over in r/wordgames posted asking if anyone else played this and dropped their friend code. i added them, a couple of others jumped in, and one of them said a league sounded fun. so.

it's called Karma Farmers, which felt about right for a reddit league where the whole thing is grinding points every day.

there's two of them, because a league is tied to your word list. if you picked UK when you first set the app up you want the UK code, US the other one. put the wrong one in and it just tells you it's for a different region, nothing breaks.

Karma Farmers UK: AKM8ZR

Karma Farmers US: SSHM44

to get in: open the app, tap Leagues, type the code into the box next to Join. or tap the link on your phone and it does it for you.

UK https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=AKM8ZR

US https://wordybunch.co.uk/league.html?code=SSHM44

scoring goes off where you finish in the league that day rather than your raw score. top 10% of everyone in the league who played that day gets 5 points, then 3, then 2, and 1 for everyone else who played. so a rough day still puts something on the board as long as you turned up. that was the bit i cared about, otherwise it's the same two people at the top all month and everyone else quietly stops opening the app.

anyone who joins today starts on tomorrow's puzzle, so nobody's sat there with a week of points on you. join later in the month and the daily you've already played that day counts straight away.

august is nearly two thirds gone so treat this one as a shakedown. september is the first full season.

a streak starts as a reason to come back and turns into a reason to feel bad. usually around day thirty.

somewhere in there it stops being "i fancy today's puzzle" and becomes "i have to protect the number". that's a different feeling entirely, and it's worse. you're not playing anymore, you're maintaining. and the moment you miss one, whether you're ill or busy or just forgot, the whole thing collapses and there's suddenly no reason to open it at all. i've quit two word games i genuinely loved that way and i don't think i'm unusual.

the bit that annoys me is that it's an incredibly cheap mechanic to add and it does produce the numbers. retention charts love it. so everyone puts one in, including me, and then we all wonder why the day forty audience keeps evaporating.

what i think would actually be better: something that accumulates and never resets. total words found, or grids cleared, or a slowly filling collection of some kind. you'd still get the come-back-tomorrow pull, without building a mechanic whose whole job is to punish you for having a life.

i'm biased. i build a daily word game and mine has a streak in it, which i'm now fairly sure was the lazy choice.

does anyone actually like streaks? genuinely asking, because i've never once heard a player defend one, only designers.

so it turns out you can't play FART in wordy bunch. someone found this out the hard way and yes, i owe you an explanation our friends from r/fartology demand it lol

the dictionary is a standard word list with a blocklist on top that i went through by hand before launch. the game runs inside family subreddits so i was pretty ruthless about anything that could put a slur or something genuinely nasty on someone's board. trouble is, when you're binning hundreds of words in one sitting you stop weighing each one, and fart got swept up with stuff that actually deserved it. it was sat in the list between some proper filth, poor thing

anyway, wrong call. fart is a perfectly good word and i'm putting FART and FARTS back in the dictionary. the boards are getting rebaked now so they can actually turn up and score, should be live in the next update

FARTING is still blocked though. i've got to draw the line somewhere haha (before anyone else quits I’ve added this too lol)

Ending on a genuine note there is a post about words like this that are genuinely not on the approved word list of you ever come across one that should be in but isn’t just give me a shout I’ll sort it out.

Farting out o7

The Weekly Arena has a new format. The Crown queue is retired, and if you were in it there should be an invitation in your Reddit messages already.

Here is how a week works now.

Play one timed qualifier run before tonight ends. Your score stays sealed, so nobody sees anyone's number while entries are open. At midnight UTC the qualifier closes and the ranking seeds the Cups: the top 8 go into the Championship Cup, ranks 9 to 16 into the Challenger Cup, and 17 to 24 into the Contender Cup. From Monday it becomes a knockout. One opponent per round, matches through the week, and the winners of all three Cups are revealed together on Friday.

There are new titles on the line too, from playing your first match all the way up to winning the Championship Cup.

Your past Crown weeks are not lost. They stay in the Hall of Crowns for the next six months.

This is the first tournament week ever, so if something looks odd, say so here and I will sort it. A fresh qualifier opens every Saturday. You will find everything in the Weekly Arena post.

so it turns out you can't play FART in wordy bunch. someone found this out the hard way and yes, i owe you an explanation our friends from r/fartology demand it lol

the dictionary is a standard word list with a blocklist on top that i went through by hand before launch. the game runs inside family subreddits so i was pretty ruthless about anything that could put a slur or something genuinely nasty on someone's board. trouble is, when you're binning hundreds of words in one sitting you stop weighing each one, and fart got swept up with stuff that actually deserved it. it was sat in the list between some proper filth, poor thing

anyway, wrong call. fart is a perfectly good word and i'm putting FART and FARTS back in the dictionary. the boards are getting rebaked now so they can actually turn up and score, should be live in the next update

FARTING is still blocked though. i've got to draw the line somewhere haha (before anyone else quits I’ve added this too lol)

Ending on a genuine note there is a post about words like this that are genuinely not on the approved word list of you ever come across one that should be in but isn’t just give me a shout I’ll sort it out.

Farting out o7

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Duels have been broken on here since the end of July, and if you gave up on them I don't blame you.

If you sent a challenge and the Direct tab told you there were no active duels, or a rematch came back saying you already had one running with that person, or a new duel just dropped you back at the hub, that was all the same fault. Nothing you did.

What was going on: the app writes to storage in small locked blocks, and there is a limit on how many can be open at once. A weekend's worth of finished duels all tried to settle on the same hourly pass, hit that limit, and fell over. An hour later the same pile tried the same thing again. Once it jammed it stayed jammed, and it dragged live duels down with it.

That is fixed, and the fix is on here now. When it hits the limit it waits and tries again instead of failing. The hourly pass also takes a set number of duels at a time now, and anything that keeps failing gets pushed further back each go, so one bad duel cannot hold up everybody else's.

If you have duels stuck, leave them where they are. The backlog settles itself on the hourly passes, oldest first, so give it a day before starting new ones over the top. If one of yours is still stuck tomorrow, reply here with who you were playing and I will go and look at that one.

Second thing, and it is the bigger change. The Arena is being rebuilt.

Right now it is a queue. You join it, you wait your turn, and eventually you challenge whoever is holding the Crown. Fourth in line means days of waiting for one match. Here is how the new one will work.

Saturday and Sunday is the Weekend Qualifier. Enter, play one board, and that score is your seed. One attempt only. Entry shuts six minutes before the window does, so there is always time to finish what you started.

Monday, the top eight go into the Championship Cup as a bracket.

Monday through to Friday: the last eight, then the last four, then the final. Each round stays open for about a day and a half, so you play it whenever suits you inside that.

Friday is the reveal. One winner takes the Weekly Arena Crown.

If fewer than eight of you enter, the empty seats go to the Editor, which sets a target score you have to beat. Under four entries and no Cup runs that week.

If plenty of you enter I can open a Challenger Cup for ranks nine to sixteen and a Contender Cup for ranks seventeen to twenty four, so a busy weekend gives three separate brackets running side by side.

If you are in the Crown queue right now, you will get a message from me when it switches over. Nobody loses their place.

this is the 6 july board, retired, so nobody's live daily gets spoiled.

had BONE. had HEAD. sat there a good twenty seconds while it just looked at me. BONEHEAD, 23 points 🙃

still in the archive if you want a go at beating it.

nicking this off other game subs where the members write most of the posts. seems to work a lot better than me posting at everyone.

if you get a word you're pleased with, stick up a post called "best word: [your score]" and say what you managed. you don't have to name the word if you'd rather not spoil it. anyone who fancies it can go play the same board and try to beat you.

i'll put mine up first.

every word game has a few of these, i'd rather know than not.

what did you type in, know full well is a word, and watch get rejected.

the game gives out titles as you play, and they sync to your flair in here.

no idea what the spread actually looks like from my end though. drop yours and let's see whether everyone's bunched in the same place.

this sub asks some version of "why is every mobile game stuffed with ads and timers" every few weeks, and the answer usually lands on greed. i built one the other way this year, so here's the view from inside it.

no ads, no energy meter, no login wall, and one optional cosmetic purchase that the game never nags you about. roughly the thing people in these threads keep saying they want.

the bit i didn't understand until after i shipped it: ads are how studios pay to be found. mobile has almost no organic discovery in my experience, nobody stumbles across your game, so you buy installs instead. and to afford to buy installs you need enough revenue per player to bid against everyone else, which ads plus aggressive iap gets you reliably. monetisation and discovery turn out to be the same machine. pull one lever out and the other quietly stops working.

mine's been out a couple of weeks. about twenty regular players, and i'd say half of those are people who already know me. the game itself is fine. nobody can find it. i'm a few thousand down.

so when a genuinely good no-ads game does turn up, something is usually subsidising it underneath. a publisher, an earlier hit, a day job, or someone's savings. mine is savings.

i'd honestly rather be argued with than agreed with here, because agreeing doesn't help me. is there a route that doesn't loop back through paid user acquisition?

i make a daily word game. you get a grid of letters and pull words out of it, and the default version runs on a two minute clock because i'd assumed the clock was the whole point.

a couple of people told me the timer made it unplayable for them, so i added a mode that replays the same grid with no clock and no score at all. you just sit with it and find words until you're done, and nothing gets counted or ranked or put on a leaderboard. much closer to a wordsearch you can take your time over.

it plays inside reddit so there's nothing to download and there are no ads. the untimed mode is on the reddit version only at the moment, the phone one is still timed, so if the clock is the bit that would put you off then the reddit one is the one to try. it's over at r/WordyBunch.

fair warning on the cozy question since it's a fair thing to ask: there's a competitive duel mode in there as well and that part isn't cozy in the slightest. i'd ignore it completely.