Increase the presence of "q" , "z" and "x" letters in the basic "english" mode

[dzintars]

IMO simple "english" mode is where many new users land at the very beginning.
The issue is that in that mode letters "q" , "z" and "x" are not included https://github.com/Miodec/monkeytype/blob/master/static/languages/english.json
I think, this should be fixed.
The words which come into the mind could be:

{
  "words":  [
    "query",
    "zero",
    "quantity",
    "qualify",
    "next",
    "example",
    "wax",
    "muzzle",
    "maze",
    "freeze",
    "unique",
    "squirrel",
  ]
}

[Miodec]

Yeah people suggested that, the issue is that adding more words to the word list right now, would effectively make it harder, which makes all the results on the leaderboard kinda invalid since they were achieved on the easier list.

Im not sure what is a good solution here.

[frogfrogfrogfrogfrog]

:/

well i mean the idea is still there
if you increase the word set it'll be past the 200 words

[Miodec]

As i said though, im more worried about making it harder for everyone by adding more words compared to people who already got good scores on the leaderboard than having a few more words over the 200 mark.

[dzintars]

But how fair are those scores if they are missing ~10% of the letters? IMHO few words should be swapped keeping the character count.

[neinja007]

What about making these letters more common only for users t´who activate a specific setting?

this could be called, something like "key frequency" and it is either "balanced" (each key has roughly the same probability of coming up) or "real" (the top 250 english words are used, period. no letter adjustment.)

these names are pretty terrible, but i hope you get my point.

[fehmer]

with q having 0.095%, x having 0.15% and z having 0.074% relative frequency we are not missing 10% of the letters.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency

[dzintars]

You guys definitely know the background better, so i can speak just from my "simple user" perspective.
With "simple English" mode personally i do not care much about the leader-boards as i don't think it's carries any meaningful value besides just a simple fun. Where the leader-boards really make sense is the "1K+" modes.
I treat "simple English" (100 words) just as training space for the beginners (like me) and i am interested to gain the real typing skill instead of being in some of the leader-board. What's the point of leader-board for 100 common words?
This definitely is just my SUBJECTIVE OPINION.
Mby it is reasonable to consider swapping last few words for the next common words which does include those letters? So that those letters appear in the test at least once or twice. In my opinion all letters should be included in any given test. Leader-board feature should be less important than "teach to type" feature. Learning should be the priority and the competition goes after.

[frogfrogfrogfrogfrog]

The problem with this is that Monkeytype is designed (in my subjective opinion) in a more competitive environment where you can hone your typing skills. The leaderboard can be for fun but for some people it's a genuinely serious object to work towards. I don't know about you or other people but to solve this problem you could simply... Switch to 1k+ modes? Since people complain about there not being q, z, or x then they won't complain about the harder words. Besides, you'll type the harder words faster as well.

[dzintars]

This is what i did (switched to 1K) - after i realized, that there is just a small set of words by default.