New Scaratings

Before I talk about how Buzztime can be handled and paid for differently, it would be good for those who don’t know to explain how the Buzztime systems work, and how it is possible for people to play from hundreds or even thousands of miles away from a location.

Old Buzztime

The bar has a desktop computer and a number of boxes/tablets upon which players enter their answers. The boxes/tablets send the answers wirelessly to the desktop, and the desktop talks to the Buzztime compuers, displays the game, and does any other necessary processing.

“New” Buzztime

If you ever played a game in a bar with a phone that had the Buzztime app, you probably think the phone is just a substitute for a box/tablet. NO, IT ISN’T. It works an entirely different way.

Your phone doesn’t talk to the desktop or anything else in the bar. Instead, it talks directly to the Buzztime computers, which conveys things like your score to the bar computer. It seems like your phone is directly connected to the bar computer, but it isn’t.

You might ask, “If that’s so, then how does the Buzztime computer know where I am?” The answer is your phone tells it where you are. Normally, it uses built-in routines like GPS location that figure out where you are, and tells that to any other program that wants to know, like the Buzztime app.

Software can override whatever the normal routines are on your phone and tell it to tell anything else that you are wherever you wish to say you are. So I can sit in New York City and use this software to tell my phone to tell the Buzztime app that I’m in Walsh's in a Chicago suburb, and when I sign into the Buzztime app, it will think I’m in Walsh's and I can play the game and have my scores show up on Walsh's leaderboard.

This is called GPS spoofing. How hard is it to do? For Android phones, it’s pretty simple. You can get the software for free. If you can follow fairly simple instructions and can read a roadmap, you can do this. We’ve used cheap burner phones to do this, and they work OK. It’s possible, but rather more difficult to do this with iOS phones.

The Buzztime app is a far more modern approach to playing this game It cuts out all the middlemen; it’s just your phone dealing with Buzztime. You don’t need to be near a bar computer or bar to play the game, unlike the old Buzztime system. Any location limitations come from Buzztime, not the technology, unlike old Buzztime.

If your experience of this technology is having some invisible intruder stage a home invasion of your location and conquer your leaderboard, your only likely question is “How do we stop this?” While I am not a programmer, after looking into this, I’m pretty sure Buzztime could stop most of this pretty easily without knocking out all Buzztime app use in a location, which at least was recent policy. Why haven’t they done so? Either they don’t want to lose the extra players and plays, or their programmers don’t know what to do. I could believe either. (I know they’ve had someone doing programming because they did something a while back which changed the Android requirement from version 6 to 8 without telling anyone.)

Let’s review the important points: Buzztime does not need to create a new system to enable remote play; they already did that with the Buzztime app. The Buzztime app could deliver all the games by itself; it does not need fixed locations to do that. Any restrictions are Buzztime crippling their own system, which can be circumvented with GPS spoofing. What Buzztime needs to do isn’t to stop remote play; it needs to make remote play pay, like all the other streaming services out there.

If Buzztime is going to last, it will be the Buzztime app and its successors that are going to have to lead the way, not the old stuff.

Video Playing and Its Limitations

If you have a team, and you’re not in one place, how can you play together? This is why God created Zoom (or equivalent). The cost for a Zoom license is nominal, for me a little over $10 a month. As long as you can hear each other, nothing else really matters. But that can sometimes be a problem.

A good question some of you have is, “What would stop you from getting (some huge group of enormous brains) together and do a Godzilla on the rest of us?” There’s the small issue of getting such a group to show up and play with you, but even if you did that, you would have to be able to hear them and that is a big self-limiting factor with a big group in Zoom. Go over ten people, and you have problems hearing individuals over each other. We’ve had people stop playing with us for that reason.

On the other hand, we also miss out on a different kind of roar, the noise of the bar/restaurant.

But this is being used for cheating!! I have seen this!

Yes, you can cheat using this technology, but you can cheat the same way in a bar with a phone. How does that cheating work? Buzztime has always done a bad job of synchronizing the clocks on their locations. This means Location A will show a question/answer before/after Location B. Occasionally, the time gap between the two can be so big that you can see the answer in Location A before having to answer that question in Location B. This is the main means by which a few individuals have been able to rack up endless near-perfect scores. However, this requires very deliberate effort by that individual to see the game at multiple locations; this kind of time lag does not occur when all are playing at one location. From my personal observations, very few people are playing the time lag game. Far more are simply using your location as a place to play..

Why don’t you get Buzztime Lite?

We didn’t/would not get Buzztime Lite mainly because it is not adapted to remote play. Unless all the players came to my house, they could not play the game from their houses unless they used GPS spoofing. Just as we could go to any location with spoofing, if we got Buzztime Lite, anybody with spoofing could play at our location. If Buzztime ever blocked spoofing, they would block my team as well.

But Now There Is Buzztime Go!!

Yes, there is. It is designed for solo play. It is quick, and you get to choose the subject of the game. Those are big plusses. There is no live competition in the games, no leaderboard. At the end of a game, you get told you did better than XX% of other players. This is a huge minus. If you normally want competition, or want to play as part of a team, Buzztime Go is not an option.

So What Can We Do Instead?

What Buzztime needs to do is set up their own hybrid situation: retain free play in bars/restaurants and create a new paying player category to create a second means of playing. Buzztime would charge a set monthly fee for access to some or all of the same games as the bars. This would work solely through the Buzztime app.

The use of locations would be expanded. Paying players could choose to join an existing location or create their own. Teams could be formed/disbanded by groups deciding to join or leave a “place.”

With the carrots come a necessary stick: devices using GPS spoofing must be automatically blocked from the Buzztime system. As I pointed out earlier, this can be done for most devices without blocking the use of phones, etc. in the bar; this is likely to be more difficult for iOS than Android phones, but spoofing Is more difficult with iOS, too.

So how would this change how my team plays? If a member of my team wanted to play, with our team or by himself, he would have to pay Buzztime a monthly fee, just like Netflix. He would have to do that because if he tried to use GPS spoofing to pretend to be in a bar, Buzztime wouldn’t let him in. When he signed in, he would no longer sign into some bar in New Jersey or Long Island; he would sign into “our” place, and that would be his (and our) location on leaderboards. Assuming Showdown was included in the games covered by the monthly fee, there would be no need to continue with the “Hybrid Showdown” play; we would just play Showdown remotely, and pay Buzztime directly to play that and all the other games.

Creating and maintaining a subscription system would be a significant cost, and one can reasonably doubt initial revenues would justify the outlay. If the only purpose of the exercise was to gather up the lost sheep of the tribe of Buzztime, I couldn’t justify it.

But the same old, same-old didn’t really work in the good old days, and it’s a lot worse now. Buzztime has to decide whether or not it wants to keep living. It may think staying the same is the way to go, but there’s just no future in catering to a dwindling remnant of old fogies with a dwindling remnant of old locations, especially when there aren’t a stream of new fogies showing up as replacements.

Come on out, Rip

Is trivia dead, a fading fad like doo-wop or disco?. Not at all. Non-Buzztime trivia is doing wonderfully. In a city of eight million that just got a single Buzztime location in an outlying section of an outer borough after a two year lapse, here is some of what else is happening:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/nyregion/nyc-trivia-league-kings-cup.html

https://nyctrivialeague.com

Almost four times the number of players who play Showdown nationally played in this New York tournament. So many players! So many locations! And so young and so unlike our geriatric Buzztime!!! You can play at a bar. You can play virtually, too.

In contrast, Buzztime looks like more like a post-nuclear holocaust production. The original business and most of the customers are gone, and the successor business and a small remnant of survivors continue the ancient rituals because they can’t think of anything better to do.

Which group is going to be around ten, twenty years from now? What makes more sense: to try to pick up a few more old fogies, or try to get these people and others like them?

Any Signs of Life Out There?

If you have any questions, comments or complaints, I’m all ears.

All your posts have been very interesting and insightful. Given the options you have presented, what does the NYC group intend to do going forward? Continue to play the hybrid Tuesday game? Continue playing on Zoom (kudos to your Lexitopia mastery)? Is it possible to get a convenient location to sign up for Buzztime?

You are quite correct that Buzztime may have sub-optimized over the years and that an inadvertent benefit to lockdown has been to show us all the Zoom quizzing opportunities (I have played with quizzers from all over the US and Canada, UK/Ireland, Europe, India and Australia/New Zealnd over the past two years). In Chicago though, we have been lucky that there are still various places in the met area with the game and a number of people still enjoy gatting together, drinking, laughing and playing. As long as we have that, we wish Buzztime very well and will continue to support them.

The possibility of spoofing does create some annoyance. There is one player in particular who sits in his (mom's?) basement and spoofs to various lcationws just to fill up the leaderboards by parlaying the time lags between locations into high scores. This occurs on various games, but mostly on lunch/countdown and late night. He has become somewhat more inhibited in this as BT may have improved the time lags and legitmate Chicago players have gotten Buzztime to kill various of his ID's. The locations have also dealt with it in different ways. At Teasers, they have turned off the App capability and only in person play is allowed. At Walsh's App play is still needed for legit players, so we concentrate on outscoring him on the games we care about, which gives us another monthly game, so to speak.

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Merkin

We'll continue to try out the hybrid and see how well we can get it to work. We'll keep up the games at Lighthouse; we'll win Lexitopia and maybe History and you'll win everything else, though those Fargo people have been giving us a run for our money, good for them! Getting a location for Showdown is problematic. We don't have heavy drinkers, and we just don't spend much money in a place. Nor are there a lot of lone players around. We just don't have the nerve to lie to an owner about the money he'll make having the game, then come in week after week as he slowly realizes how much we lied to him. A place down in Southern Brooklyn got the game back (they had it some years ago, played there once), first location in NYC since Mad River closed two years ago, but it's an hour and a half subway/bus ride from midtown. If a place pops up that's somewhat centrally located; we'll go there, but even there we'd be likely to try some hybrid play. I think most of our group would be happy to pay Buzztime and sit at home and play Showdown and the rest. Doing this does change your attitude about how and where you like to play the game.

NYC and the Northeast have always been weak on locations and number of players, and it just kept going downhill. For the last decade, it was pretty much just Mad River and the BWWs. None of the BWWs got much business from it, a few actually hid the game away. Right now, New England and New York have about 30 sites total. In contrast, live trivia does well. There was a big crowd for it at Mad River, and we tried to get a few to play with us, but the young people were repulsed by Buzztime, like it would prematurely age them or something.

We might look into this NYC trivia stuff and see if we can't get some of them interested in playing some of our games.

Per our visitations, before we go to a place, I check to make sure they have almost no nighttime play (which is rather common). We also make it a point not to play Countdown in these places, no point angering the locals.

When COVID hit and I found out about the remote stuff, I just wanted us to be one of the last groups standing. I thought that would take about three weeks, but, almost three years later, somehow, we're still standing.

Good stuff Stro. I agree with the majority of your post. I do think there are still a good number of players playing the lag. A lot for LT it seems. There are still some bars that are behind. There’s a guy from CO that logs into our bar but rarely plays. I believe he’s getting the answers at our bar to enter elsewhere. I’ve played remotely at some of his bars at the same time, they were behind a few seconds, not enough to get perfects but definitely a big help. I’m sure there are other bars further behind.

Also to throw a wrench into the works I saw mention that BT was planning on moving the BT app over to the BT Go platform which is newer and won’t be spoofable with current spoof programs. Close to what gambling and sports book sites use now. I think they verify locations with Bluetooth. Forcing you to turn on Bluetooth to continue.

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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!!!!

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

Well, Buzztime did it differently than I expected, just removed questions from the app. Remote play is over. Gotta go to a bar in person.

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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 saw that today. I have mixed feelings. It doesn't stop the Richhk's from finding a bar with lag to get the answer before the question comes up. The app still shows the correct answer, even though you can't see the question. He won't see the question but will see the correct answer. I also just got back from a 4 week trip to Europe. I'd log in while relaxing before dinner. It was fun to answer an Arno river question while looking out the window at -- the Arno river!!! I also played a few games while on I-90 across South Dakota (My wife was driving, not me). Can't do that anymore.

That said, this gets back to the purpose of Buzztime -- get people to spend money in the location.

Pretty stupid even for Buzztime, crippling their current system rather than advancing it..

Nope. No problem for the Hybrid. Did a 4th in Showdown tonight.
Again, you can't expect people to go to the bar when there is no bar to go to. Do I expect Hybrids to pop up
all over the place? No, I expect more people to walk away from the game. Buzztime has lost over 90% of their premium
game customers; I guess that wasn't bad enough for them.

Which has never worked. My point has been and is there is more than one way to skin a cat.

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

So, with the hybrid play for SIX someone in the bar now has to read the question to those playing at home? Or do you use a phone camera to show the question from the tablet on zoom?

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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!!!!

The latter; I use a separate webcam to point at the tablet.

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

Apparently, BT has changed their minds, at least for the present...

The questions are back on the app, have been for at least a week.

They must have gotten LOT of hate mail or something... I sent an email, relatively polite... Pointed out that I live over an hour from a locale and that many live fursther away than that.

Or something.

I do notice that they didn't notify anyone that the app was back, unlike when they proudly announced the killing-questions "upgrade".

So maybe this is temporary until they think of another way...