What’s under the hood

Two new pages, a way to share a profile, and a shop that turns out never to have worked.

A page that shows every formula

Amordle now has a methodology page. It sets out exactly how ratings, experience and coins are calculated: the Elo equation, the two K-factors and where the provisional threshold sits, why there are forty separate rating pools, how a match is decided on points, how the leaderboard breaks ties, the experience curve, and the formula behind the one price in the game that moves.

The reason it exists is narrow. A rating that goes down is easy to blame on the system, and there is no way to answer that except by publishing the arithmetic. Every number on that page was read out of the code that runs, and the page names its source for each one.

One thing was deliberately left off. The daily streak on the private stats panel is displayed but never advanced by anything — it is only ever set by importing an old save. Documenting a dead number on a page about honesty would invite exactly the suspicion the page exists to prevent, so it is not there. It will either start working or stop being shown.

An About page that was already written

About existed and had for some time. It was simply not in the menu, reachable only by an old redirect nobody would guess at. It now carries the repository, three separate routes for reporting a bug, a security problem or an idea, and where the words come from — every word in the game is drawn from the English OpenList, which is published in full so the vocabulary can be inspected rather than taken on trust.

Both pages sit in the menu, after Help.

Finding your own profile

Every player has had a unique profile address for a while. What was missing was any way to find your own: opening your own public profile redirects you to your settings, so the only route to your own link was asking somebody else to look you up.

There is now a copy button on your profile, and one on anybody else's. Both hand you the full address.

A shop that had never worked

Reading the economy in order to describe it truthfully turned up something worth stating plainly: for anyone signed in, buying a hint had never worked at all.

The app and the server had drifted into naming the same two items differently — the app used the names of the database columns, the server expected its own — and neither side was wrong on its own terms, so nothing failed anywhere except at the boundary between them. Every purchase was refused. Guests were unaffected, because guest purchases never leave the device, which is why the shop looked fine to anyone testing without an account.

It is fixed, and there is now a test that compares the two sides against each other rather than against a written-down copy of what each is supposed to say. The written-down copy would have drifted the same way.

The player directory is players again

Eight of the eleven accounts listed on Players were not people. They were end-to-end testing accounts, left behind by an old test harness whose cleanup could fail without saying so, and they had been sitting in the directory ever since — each with a name like Ember 194096d2, zero games, and the same unremarkable "PLAYER" label a real account gets.

They have been removed. The test suite that runs today deletes its own accounts after every run and proves it did, so the directory should stay honest without anyone tidying it by hand. Nobody's real profile was touched.

Smaller things

• The leaderboard links to the methodology, so a rating you did not expect is one click from an explanation.
• Outbound links across the app now behave the same way as each other. Two of them previously disagreed about how they opened.
• Copy buttons report whether the copy worked. One of them already did; the other three failed silently, which is worse than not offering the button — you walk away believing you have the link.