New Scaratings

Does anyone here still play Showdown? I’d like to hear what your experience of tonight’s game was regarding warmup and lightning round scoring, rankings, final question, and pyramid questions.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

At Turquoise Trail (Albuquerque):

Warmup scoring was 1000 points/question

Categories mismatched questions

Pyramid had questions on:

Bryan Smith won the first game for what team? (Rockies)
Some 2006 group had a song named after what Beatle? (Paul McCartney)
and 3 other pretty easy ones

Final category was British Monarchs. I seem to recall the question didn't have anything to do with the category, but I can't remember it. It was easy, I recall.

Showdown? Didn’t think that was anything these days with most people using the app from home. There is still a big drop off from Brain Buster to SD when the app is dead.

As for the report from ABQ, the mismatched categories is a somewhat common occurrence that is just the wrong file up loaded hopefully one time only. But wrong points for warmup is more troubling meaning the code was changed? Or the point structure is a file as well that was the wrong one for SD? Probably that, just a one time loading of mismatched game coding. Rankings are easily screwed up and generally fixed.

But I didn’t see it and haven’t played SD in years.

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BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Caps and Os!!!!

We've been playing at the relatively new Bombshells & Ales in Ashland, KY. It opened 2020 May (Amazing they actually opened & not just survived but thrived.) and got Buzztime this past winter in February I think. Even before they could have in-dining you could get take-out and sit in your car and play Buzztime. Well last night's Showdown was curious/weird for sure. Warm-up round answer were worth 1000, in the Countdown Round there was a question involving Hooter's Hospitality etiquette that was written in a different font. Something about what the first thing to do when a guest arrives at Hooter's. Might have been like a training question? In Category the categories didn't match but that's happened before so that wasn't shocking. The questions though were mostly movies and tv shows, like you would see from a Countdown game. A question about Thirty-something, one about The King of Comedy, two animated movies questions. Pyramid was 2 boxing questions, another movie question, but I think everyone got at least 4 of 5 in Pyramid. Final we crashed on, the topic said British Monarchs. The question was, "During medieval times, to determine quality, royal taste testers of beer would 'blank' it. Not sure if that is verbatim but I think it's close. Anyway it was "sit on" was the correct answer. They sat on it by pouring it on a bench to determine its stickiness. Weird game, but our group has been playing again since May it was great to have a trivia home. We hadn't played or even seen each other in over a year when we started playing last month. Sadly we lost a good friend of our group in March who played under the handle FIRM since 2002.

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Homer:No beer and tv make Homer something something.
Marge:Go crazy?
Homer:Don't mind if I do!

Thanks for the input, everyone. Based on this and what people have written on a Facebook group, it seems pretty clear that the only thing that was consistent across the network in last night's game was that it was scored incorrectly the same way.

For example, people have now reported at least 5 different final questions (ours was something like "Which of the following was not based on the life of a real person," with the answer being "Nicholas Nickelby"). Furthermore, it also seems that the same was true for other rounds, including the Pyramid Round. For example, we did not get any of the pyramid questions reported here or on the other site. The only ones I can remember from our game had to do with RU-21 and the borough of NY in which Martin Scorsese was born. We did not get any of the hospitality/training questions, but even the ones people have reported do not seem to be exactly the same.

Furthermore, the 1000 points for each warmup question--which does seem to be consistent--meant that the final possible score was somewhere around 70,000. The only thing that I'm still not clear on is whether the same was true of the Lightning Round. At least on the main screen, every question was posted as a 1000-point question, but I'm not sure if they were actually reckoned that way in the scores. That would not make a lot of difference in the final score, but it certainly added to the confusion.

Thus, the nearest sports metaphor that comes to mind regarding last night would be if the PGA Championship were being played simultaneously by 70 individuals on 70 different courses of different difficulties, and the scores for holes 1 and 2 were doubled on everyone's scorecard. I guess there could be a "winner," but the designation is kind of meaningless.

This may explain the idiosyncratic nature of today's HOF. As DROLL has said, "Buzztime officially took the L on this one"--there are no team scores for Showdown. Even stranger, though, is the fact that the individual scores that are reported bear no resemblance to the ones we saw last night. Our top score last night was in the upper 50k range, but in the HOF, the top Red Fox score is 38k.

I guess you'll have this from time to time. Here's hoping BT figures out the problem and gets it fixed before next week.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

A good summary Anon. As you know, I posted at some length on these events on FB. Only addition here is that I think the individual scores posted on buzztime.com were the scores prior to the final question. The low 40s high 30s numbers for us match what we thought was a very good game points wise (even though obviously mis-scored on warmup and lightning rounds and with categories and final not matching subjects.... Oh never mind. The different courses analogy was apt. My nominee is a course Koufax and I used to play in New Philadelphia (I think it was called Green Gardens) where you had to hit balls off a cliff on one hole, another hole had a funicular.....

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Merkin

and heeeeere we go again…. got a waitress question again, and warmup q’s were 1000’s

categories not matching…

Yeah, it was a pretty frustrating experience again last night. While we have not gotten any of the wait staff training questions at Red Fox, people on Facebook have been reporting getting questions specific to Hooters and even Damon's(!), which gives us some idea of just how deep into the database they are drawing the questions.

As we watched the trainwreck unfold again last night DROLL and I realized that for all of the commentary we had last week from the BT player community on various social media platforms, we couldn't remember anyone saying that they had contacted Buzztime about the problems. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, so I sent the following email to BT last night after I got home:

"I’m not sure who needs to get this message, but the Showdown game has been seriously messed up in the same way the past two weeks, making the game meaningless to play. These are some of the problems the game has had for the past two Tuesdays:

1) Warmup and Lightning rounds scored incorrectly—all questions were worth 1000 points instead of their usual scoring.

2) Questions do not match categories in Category Round.

3) Final question Category does not match final question.

4) No network rankings, including no team rankings on the Hall of Fame last week, and individual scores on the HOF do not match the individual scores on the local rankings the night before.

5) Most distressingly of all, though, different locations received different questions throughout the games, making network rankings meaningless.

Please try to fix the game as soon as possible. . . . If you have any questions, please feel free to ask."

I realize now that I should have added something about the non-trivia (training material) content, but I am hoping that others will be inspired to contact Buzztime to bring their attention to these issues in a spirit of helpfulness.

P.S.: Just minutes after posting this, I got a reply from Buzztime asking me for my location. It looks like they are at least trying to respond. I added some stuff about the wait staff questions in my reply.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

Yes I also didn't contact Buzztime last week. Should have in retrospect. Did the dumb thing assuming it was just a one off incident. Had two training staff questions. Questions felt mind-numbingly dumb. One pyramid question was, "What does amnesia effect?" Points were screwed up as well. So last night I sent a message on Facebook and this morning got a response asking where I played and thanks for letting them know. The staff for Buzztime is probably really limited at the moment, but this is something that really needs attention immediately. Hopefully since people are reporting it this week it will be fixed before next Tuesday.

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Homer:No beer and tv make Homer something something.
Marge:Go crazy?
Homer:Don't mind if I do!

We experienced these problems and a couple others also. We had 2 questions that had a choice of answer 1, answer 2, answer 3 and answer 4. Who knew what they were even though we knew the answer.

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Middle age is when a broad mind and a slim waist exchange places.

We had a question like that last week. Good thing we didn't need the clues on that one.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

Buzztime posted the following on its Facebook page this afternoon:

Hey Players!

Looks like Showdown has been experiencing issues ranging from improper questions being displayed to incorrect point totals. Our team of engineers have been deployed to investigate.

We greatly appreciate your patience with this issue and we will diligently be working towards a resolution to get you back to the game with your friends and network rivals.

Stay tuned right here on our Facebook for more updates on the issue and thank you for playing.

-The Buzztime Team

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

I did email my BT contact this morning and listed all the problems experienced. I had not done anything after the 1st bad week. Got a quick response saying they would look into it.

At least more players are back in the bars now to notice.

Hopefully ok next week.

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BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Caps and Os!!!!

I have not e-mailed for the same basic reasons. Thought it might be a one-off first week and then you guys beat me to it second week. thanks to all who stepped up.

I am disappointed that we did not get any bar training questions in our packet.

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Merkin

Buzztime just tweeted the following:

"The issue with Showdown has been identified and fixed!

Thank you to everyone who reached out with details that helped us zoom in on the occurrence.

We'll see you on the leaderboards!"

Here's hoping...

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

I'll believe it when I see it. Taking the week off, will watch for news.

Believe it...everything was back to normal last night (pretty tough game, too).

The game ran fine but we only got 5ish scores on each leaderboard.

Our first night back in 16 months, was good to see people. Thought the sports game was a hot mess, first few questions about who played who in last year’s college football bowl games. Last half was all about the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Interesting. We had the same leaderboard issues, too--good to know it was not a local glitch.

Playership has been slowly increasing despite the mess of the last two weeks. When we started playing in-person again back in May, the HOF listed total players for Showdown in the low 400s, and the low 500s for BB. This week those numbers were 567 and 650, respectively. Still depressingly-low by historic standards, of course, but these mark about a 20-30% increase in general. Here's hoping this trend continues.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

Good to see...

I will be back in the fold next week.

Just talked with a player at Cameron's, and he said scores showed fine after the game.

Oddly, I just looked at the BT website, and it said last night's player total was 494 for Showdown. Wha happened to those 73 players?

Hmmm…that is odd. I was referring to the at-a-glance numbers for each game of the week on the HOF page, which report the higher numbers. If one goes into the details for each game, though, they report lower numbers. Has this discrepancy always been there?

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

Pretty sure this has always been the case. I remember delving through premium game numbers back in the day to show BT the error of their ways and I had a way to see numbers of registered players per game as well as total players per game. So if this is still the case last night in SD there were 494 registered players and the other 73 were guest players.

Ah--That would make sense! Thanks for the explanation.

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Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."