[svat]

Right, that point of view makes sense if you imagine two players separately playing Wordle and comparing their results, and indeed that's what the OP may have been thinking. But as far as I know, Wordle is primarily a game for one player to play against the computer, where eventually getting to the word (or not) is the most prominent outcome (the only notion of "win" or "defeat" in the game itself), and solving it in fewer guesses is just a bonus. But sure, if you don't care about occasionally losing, you can just set an appropriate weight for w7 within the same family of cost functions.

[tshaddox]

Indeed, it’s essentially a single player game, but we’re talking about which bot a player would want to use which is inherently a notion of bots competing against each other.