New Scaratings

They made an official post, of course there is no information whatsoever as to why.

http://www.buzztime.com/blog-trivia/862 ... anges.html

Hey Buzztime Nation! I just wanted to give you a quick update about some schedule changes that will take effect at the end of this month.

The game had a great run, but all great things must come to an end. With that being said, 10/31 is last day of Fox Sports Trivia Challenge. I encourage everyone to go to your favorite location in costume and give Fox Sports Trivia Challenge a proper send off. If costumes are not your thing, then at least wear some sports attire!

Sports IQ will also have a schedule change. 10/30 is last time Sports IQ will be on a Sunday, and starting on 11/7 it will begin airing on Monday nights at 7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT. Now all of you sports trivia nuts can play Sports IQ before playing QB1 for Monday Night Football. Having Monday as a sports trivia night kind of always makes it feel like a 3-day weekend, right? Enjoy it!

Until next time... Good luck and good fun

The official stance is that three premium sports games is not supportable.

In the middle of a pretty good discussion about this with someone in charge, I did mention that Friday is a silly night for a sports game and wondered what would happen regarding sports games after football season.

BO

Do they have some sort of research to support that? As someone in the previous thread on the topic pointed out, there is almost never a sports related question of any kind in Countdown or BT, so the current 3 hours a week of Sports Trivia is the only option for getting sports trivia, where as fans of every other trivia category get those questions regularly, all day, every day. So if they have some research showing that a premium sports game 3 different nights a week is unappealing to the players, that's fine, but if it is someone arbitrarily deciding "this seems like too much, so lets cancel one of them," then that is a problem.

EDIT: I guess I missed the key word of "supportable." Does that mean they don't have the writers handy to come up with three fresh sports games every week? If so, I would gladly write the questions for STC (or Sports IQ) every single week, for free.

I don't have a problem with only two sports games, but The Season isn't a true sports game and it only runs five months of the year.

Personally I think SIQ is a better game than STC, but have a problem with how and why STC is meeting it's demise. What if BT developed a tough general trivia game and put it on Saturday night and then killed Showdown? That's what this feels like.

I took some steps in an attempt to save STC and got some info in the process, but TPTB consider The Season a success based on game play numbers while STC was lagging.

BO

Is it number of players, or number of players for a premium game requiring new questions every week? Because I find it hard to believe that the numbers will be better for four straight 15 minutes games that will surely replace STC than they would have been previously. Although I rarely play QB1, if I was going out to play QB1 for a Sunday Night Football game, in the past I would have definitely gone out an hour early to also play STC. Now, not a chance. So what is the actual problem with how things were?

I sensed it was simply game play numbers. I explained that if you moved STC to Friday before SL it would draw 7k+ players. Conversely if The Season aired on Monday before QB1 it would draw 4k players.

Sadly, if BT aired LEWSER and SPOTES doing Karaoke before SL it would still draw 7k players. At least the first week.

BO

Don't think for a moment that our rendition of "Some Velvet Morning" won't bring down the house... assuming that Lewser's Nancy Sinatra impersonation is everything read about in Las Vegas Weekly...

Maybe you three oughta come across the river the Sunday Night after the Sport Trivia Championship at Schatze's and we all can do karaoke since there will be just BTT to play.

I was once a karaoke nut before I started playing NTN.

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Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

And while 7k looks good, it pales in comparison to the number that SL used to put up before the schedule change.

But, I know, it's the age old question.. is participation down because of the economy or is it down because of the games themselves? It's surely a combination of both, but the weighted percentages of each factor is a lot more difficult to figure out. Buzztime is betting that it's the latter reason for STC, but that's a bad gamble IMO.

Any official word on what replaces it? Probably 4 BT's as they would have announced a new game or reschedule by now, but even if we could sneak in an extra CD it would be worth something.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

Its gonna be like it was when they dropped STC on sundays in 2009. An hour of BTT's.

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Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

This truly sucks. I always enjoyed STC (and SIQ too).

Had lots of fun Sundays back in the day; used to be one of our nights. Remember trying to get a bar # 1 at TGIF-Lou, finally got one after a lot of close calls over a year or two... Tim was there I recall, maybe Cloudy. NBA and OOSVN were there that night for sure.

We can but hope that they'll come up with a baseball version of The Season to while away the rest of the calendar.

But we know better.

I say these last two weeks we log in every box at every place that's regularly playing, say screw them and their player counts

gavv

Some amazing improvement in STC last night.

One location's scores from two weeks ago... http://www.buzztime.com/site/29899/game ... 1010163000

And now playing solo, scores rise an amazing 60+%... http://www.buzztime.com/site/29899/game ... 1024163000

What I'm curious about is what happened two weeks ago. Thoughts as to why the secret score enhancer was unavailable?

Solo? 8 boxes? 5 I have seen - never 8. I don't keep track of multiboxer aliases but some of those are not familiar as such either. Just out of interest what makes the second instance more solo than the first? No idea of course as to your Q but I'd start with overall average score (I can vary 60% on Nth degree let alone an hour long game, as difficulty varies), and given the specific game I would then look at time and sport bias comparisons. I'm never going to be a powerhouse on STC/SIQ but if you give me a game heavy on 90s-00s pro football and hockey I'm going to score much more than one heavy on 60s-70s college basketball and Olympics. Even amongst far better sports players than I, you will see strong biases. It's certainly possible this is innocent, and of course certainly possible it isn'y, but given these two data points I for one am not that capable of being sure either way.

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

Dave, I've seen the person in question play 8-10 PMs, as availability allowed.

As to why....my quess is that he doesn't drink enough alcohol. I've played with him a few times and he truly loves him some Buzztime. I have never seen anything hinky going on when I've been there.

But there could be.

It's already been proven there are hinky things going on there, been discussed in the Sandbag thread. And there is more proof that has not been made public. All 8 PM's in play last night belong to the same person, that can be proven as well so I'll skip the details unless some non-believer demands it.

My question is, why were there no hinky things going on two weeks ago? After seeing those scores, I was hopeful all hijinks would stop.

And FWIW, back in the 90's one night I played 11 PM's in SD, was able to score max points on 8 during rounds that counted down.

I was paying attention to the Sandbag tourney and the discussions.

What I'm saying is this, fwiw, I have never SEEN anything hinky when NOLES and have played with the person in question (not naming names...me likeses DANTE; don't want banned). But that was just when the phone app was coming out.

Why do I remember this?

Because NOLES logged onto another site while we were at the Ironton BWW site, just to check the app out, and ended up on the national board at two separate local locations. All NOLES said was, "Huh. Don't think this is a good thing." and went back to drinking and discussing vaginal reconstruction surgery with the bartender (OK. BOTFLY was talking about VRS with the bartender...but I digress).

I THINK the site NOLES was on using the app WAS running slightly faster. Hell, I just now remembered that Joe did use his phone there for one game (but hadn't forgotten about the VRS discussion...selective memory, I guess). Joe's score was higher at the BWW than when it scrolled from the other location, the name of which I forget.

So, yes, it can be easily done from that site. I've seen it.

What that all means, I'm not sure. But if y'all just want to chat about VRS, I'll just let you know...YOU HAVE A VARIETY OF OPTIONS...EGADS!!!

I think I still have the VRS ad I "won" at WVO III somewhere. I am not sure why. Maybe it works on sheep.....

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Please forgive any strange typos or grammar errors. I am typically using voice recognition software to enter text, and sometimes editing works differently from how I expect.

Isn't it obvious? Group members distract him. What they distract him from, however, is up for argument.

I don't play the sports games and will program them out if I'm alone, but I respect the games for those that do. My hope is they move "The Season" to Sunday now and bring more entertaining games to Friday.

I feel the same. I never like to see a game go away even if I do not play it. Bring back Wipeout!

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"Truth Like Football. Gets kicked around much, before reaching goal." - Charlie Chan

" Don't look back, The bastards might be gaining on you." - Satchel Paige

Frank