Wordle cheating is "rampant", with thousands looking up the answer every day, study suggests

rockpapershotgun.com:

Thousands of people are cheating at Wordle by looking up the answer and popping it in as their first guess, according to a new study of players’ daily guesses.

James Dilger’s study of Wordle guesses between May and August suggests that up to 10,000 people are simply cheating their way to a perfect score. (Thanks, Discover.) As Dilger points out, the chance of guessing the word on your first go is around 0.04% - meaning that only around 860 players should be nailing it on the first guess.

Instead, anywhere from 0.2% to 0.5% of people are managing to pull off a first-turn win in Wordle’s normal mode, with Dilger converting that to between 4,000 and 10,000 players based on Wordle’s 1.7 million daily users.

“At least 5-times as many people as expected were "guessing" the target word by "chance"!” Dilger writes in the study, adding that the number “happens consistently every day”.

There are some other telltale signs, too, such as unlikely words suddenly spiking in popularity on the days where they also happened to be the answer.

“What serious Wordle player would choose NANNY as a first guess? You’d be testing only 2 vowels and 1 consonant!” Dilger observes.

Even so, the number of cheaters also seems to be gradually dropping over time, with Dilger proposing “Are cheaters getting bored with Wordle, or have they just been on summer vacation?” for the trend seen during the three-month study.

Hardcore Wordle players playing the game’s hard mode - which forces them to use any correctly-guessed letters in subsequent guesses - also cheat a little less, Dilger found, with only around 0.3% of those players typically guessing correctly on their first go.

Dilger’s in-depth dive into Wordle stats also found that at least