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Comment by jaspax | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain why "agora" (a Greek word meaning "market") was removed? I can at least perceive the motive, as silly as it is, behind the other two, but this one has me stumped.

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They removed it simply to break parity with downloaded versions of the game. It was on the day that Agora was supposed to be played that the two diverged forever and locked you into playing on NYT if you wanted to play the same puzzle with all your family and friends.

https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2022/2/15/22934587/wor...

And it made the NYT version a two-days-ahead spoiler for any clones of the original, which was quite effective at getting whole groups of people to move instead of using clones.

It is too obscure. Source: I am a fairly smart and well-read person and do not know the meaning of the word. You can't have a word that difficult in a game that has a win streak...it is like a reverse deus ex machina or something. Bam! You lose your streak for no reason!!!!

Counterpoint: You break your streak on a word you don't know. You get upset and look it up to see if it's even a real word. You discover that it means a Greek market, and start learning about that culture, maybe a little history.

Maybe you're pushed to learn other 5 letter words, to prevent yourself from losing your streak again. Maybe you start reading more because you want to expand your vocabulary.

All because you lost a precious game streak because you were pushed out of your comfort zone.

I do this on Worldle constantly since I find the geography interesting and gives me a reason to explore a little history briefly outside of the heavily Eurocentric world history I got in school.

But I'd still be annoyed at having to look up a word I never would use in real life. The countries actually exist and are possible travel destinations.

I really wish they would give definitions (or at least link to a dictionary) for all guessed words after playing - especially for all the clones like quordle/octordle where they often use weird words. I would send feedback but there's no contact information on any of these games.

A measurable fraction of people who break streaks simply stop playing. Missing that dopamine hit of your streak counter incrementing (and being higher than your friends) can be worse than having no streak feature at all.

Losing your streak on a word guessing game because you didn’t know a word seems like a perfectly reasonable thing.

Arguably, the possibility of this happening is what makes streaks have meaning and is the essence of the game.

Used to be the name of a large darknet market[0]. It's possibly on whatever list of naughty language they used to demote words.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agora_(online_marketplace)

I think AGORA was removed as an answer, as it's too obscure. Not as a guess word.

https://twitter.com/MikeySlezak/status/1493344574260924420

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