There is a boring lack of variation in this game...

I started playing this game recently, and it was interesting and fun for a bit, but now we keep getting words that are similar to the last played word. We had three letters in a row, and then we had leg and foot just now; this makes many of the top words the same week after week. It would be nice if words that are similar aren't placed consecutively.  Also, the words are pretty general and simple, which is fine, but it might be interesting to up the difficulty level occasionally.

I agree with you, Topic selection is a big problem. At first players voted for next topic and repeated topic were selected very often. Richard try to solve this with "Now WORD for game is chosen from popular answer and never used words." and we have similar topic to play.

It is evident that Empathy have a big problem. Players number show this: at a beginning we have about 100 players and now less than 20.

If somebody have idea how to solve this, let say it. Maybe Richard will implement it.

I think at least one simple constraint could be enforced to avoid the repeating issue: if a word appears in X times (by everybody) in the past Y games, then it shouldn't be selected as the new topic.

I'd like the topics (or at least some of them) to be randomly chosen from different external sources, for example, Word of the day in Wiktionary, Today featured article from Wikipedia, Trending topics, Google Trends, etc. This way I think we'd have more variety in topics.

As an alternative idea, to avoid the topics being "Taylor Swift" (assuming that such topics might be less popular), would be to make the topic a random selection from one of the one-point words.  Reading through the Empathy forums, these are funny, diverse, and if the players are aware that this is the algorithm, might add to the laughs :)

these days it sucks again - month by month ...

I change algorithm according to gamesorry suggestion. X is 1 and Y is 100.

Thank you for the modification, Richard!

I have to admit that the new algorithm is not clear to me, but it is obvious that it don't work well: again we have a month as the expression.

It seem to me that selecting new expression from already played words isn't a good idea. It will be better to randomly select a word from some dictionary or title from some encyclopedia and compare it with all played expressions.

I restarted last round with photo expression.

Richard, thanks so much for all that you do :)

Some people suggest me to change Empathy game:

1. More often games (every second day), but with longer time to play (week). There will be 3-4 game played concurrently.
   
2. Only 5 associated word (!).
   
3. More often photo game.

A random word from the 10000 most commonly used ones in the English language? Or perhaps even SOWPODS?

The photo round is a nice change of pace though :)

my votes for suggested changes:

1.  good idea, but can be a little bit confusing

2. no! Usualy even 10 words isn't enough.

3. yes

But I think that most important is to eliminate repetition and very similar expressions.

I agree with Elisa. It should be ten words. Also, photo rounds are nice.

As for expressions: How about letting last rounds winner choose the topic for the next round? With some limit to how often the same player can choose topic, maybe (if the same player won two three times in a row, the runner up gets to choose the next expression, for example). Usually, the top players will have a general feeling for what a good topic would be, and would also try to avoid repetitions.

I think that in most of the games there aren't many players with the same number of points. If that's the case, reducing the number of words shouldn't affect so much. In any case, I don't see great benefits with this measure.

The more games question can be a good idea. As you say, it can be confusing but i hope we will pick it up soon.

About the expression, sorry but I can't think about any good solution

Aren't there some public domain pictures database available somewhere? Maybe Richard can use them and have, say,  one topic out of 3 be a picture.

And maybe we can have two random words instead of just one as a topic? It might open more possibilities.