New Scaratings

With tournament season approaching, it is probably past time to have a discussion of the issues on which STRO elaborated last fall regarding hybrid play. For those who missed those threads, they can be found here:

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viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4106
viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4108


At issue is the clause of the rules that has become boilerplate in most tournaments and which pertains to the use of telecommunication from outside the location. Hybrid play manifestly violates that rule, and a discussion concerning this rule ensued right before the Sandbag Tournament began last fall. For those who would like a refresher on that discussion, please go to the Tournament thread, especially STRO’s post of October 9 and my response on October 10:

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=4105

Later in that thread, I wrote, “This does not mean the larger conversation ends here, though. I sincerely believe that this is a conversation worth having, and that it would be good to get input from the player community regarding these and other issues before making the rules for the next tournament.” This is the purpose of this thread.

A couple of caveats before beginning: 1) While a chunk of the discussion in these threads pertained to Buzztime’s current business model, the purpose of this thread is explicitly to discuss hybrid play only as it pertains to the upcoming tournaments. Whether a person agrees with the current business model or not, it is the one Buzztime has for now and we have to live with it. 2) While I am seeking input as promised, the ultimate decision on the rules rests, as it always has for the last 25 years or so, with the host team (which this year is The Fellowship). I will advise them of what will be said here, but the final form of the rules ultimately will be whatever my team votes to do.

With all the preliminaries out of the way now, let’s have that conversation. I’ll get the ball rolling.

When discussing the issue with my team last fall, several concerns came up from several teammates. I’ll try to summarize them here.

1) Cell Phone Gambit (and variations): The main concern, of course, was the reason the boilerplate was inserted in the first place. Several people had been known to exploit the “Cell Phone Gambit”: Stationing people at one or more locations broadcasting the game a bit ahead of the location with the rest of the team, and phoning the answers to someone on the team. Depending on how bad the lag between the locations was, one could ensure a very good score that way, but even if that lag was short, it would have been enough for the team to ace the pyramid round every time, because you can get full credit for every question even if you wait until the last second to answer. STRO suggested an amendment to the rules to address this concern (“Any practice a team uses to see the game in more than one site is a disqualifying practice"), but some teammates had some lingering doubts because of another concern…

2) Potential Abuses: I want to preface this by making it clear that I trust STRO’s team would play by the rules and would not abuse them. The NY crew has established a 20-year reputation for fair play and were some of the most vocal critics of borging back in the day. But if hybrid play were to be allowed, it would have to be allowed for everyone, and herein lies the concern. These tournaments have always been on the honor system, but that honor system has always assumed in-person play at a location. Policing in-person play is relatively easy—if you see someone opening a laptop or looking up answers on a cell phone, you can just tell them to stop and explain it’s against the rules. The same cannot be said for hybrid play. Let’s assume a team signs up for a tournament in good faith, and everyone on that team is scrupulous and above-board except for one player at home. There really would be no good way to tell if that player was looking something up on another device. In that instance, the team would be in violation of the rule, and they would not even know it, except for the one unscrupulous player. How would anyone else be able to know it in that circumstance?

3) The Meaning of at Team: Hybrid Play necessarily introduces a radical redefinition of what a Buzztime team is. For most of NTN/Buzztime’s existence, a team was everyone who was in the location playing together. With hybrid play, though, a team can be any group of any people, anywhere, who have an internet connection. Is this a definition of “team” with which we would all be comfortable?

I’ll use my own team as an example of where this could lead. FROG is a Jeopardy! champion who used to play with us until he retired and moved away. VICTOR may have been the single most impressive player I have ever seen, but he stopped playing with us some years ago now because he lives in Cleveland and doesn’t like driving at night. Some of you may be familiar with DROLL because he is one of the few members of my team who checks in on ScaRatings and the Buzztime players Facebook pages. He is a terrific player and usually had multiple entries on our Napkin Of Fame every Tuesday until he moved to Chicago last fall. He has joined a five-player pub trivia team there, of which he is the only one who has NOT been on Jeopardy! (yet).

Now let’s say it is the semifinals of a tournament in which hybrid play is allowed. We could prevail upon FROG, VICTOR, DROLL, and four Jeopardy! contestants to join us for that game. It would be objectively awesome for us, of course, but I have my doubts whether our opponent in that game would be as enthusiastic. Of course, maybe they know a bunch of friends who could join them for that game, too, and we could have sixty-odd people from around the world divided between the two semifinalists, but at that point what is a “team” anymore?

Say what you will about old-fashioned, in-person play, but at least it limits the magnitude of these kinds of shenanigans. Certainly there is a long tradition of teams “loading up” for tournament games by inviting/cajoling friends to play, but there is a geographic limit to how many folks are likely to be persuaded to do so. There is really no limit except bandwidth for hybrid play.

My teammates had some other concerns, too. Several spoke to the point that encouraging people to show up to play actually brings new business to the locations that are actually paying for the system, but as I said up front we won’t be discussing business models here, I’ll put that point aside for another discussion.

This has gone on long enough, I think, so everyone, please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts.

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

Responses are forthcoming.

First, by far the biggest issue here is not a bad rule but a bad rulemaker. When you have someone who makes and breaks rules without explaining them to or even mentioning them to anyone and deems himself accountable only to his teammates (if even that), we have a much bigger problem than banning a single team using Zoom from playing in a tournament.

I will now post a piece I wrote in early November which attempts to explain in detail all the problems with this rule and its rulemaker. Subsequent posts will detail what we've learned after using the Hybrid for four plus months, and what we can do to improve the situation. I will also go over any reasonable and maybe not-so-reasonable concerns about this, and answer any questions you might have. Please, ask, or at least say something! We have too many topics where there are hundred of views and three posts. Speak, silent majority!

(This was written back in early November, and some of the references refer to matters as they stood back then, or posts written by Anon back then.)

I apologize in advance for the length of this, but this is like trying to keep track of the claims of George Santos: it is long. complicated and ugly. When you review the history of this telecommunications rule, you quickly conclude that the real problem is not a ruling but the ruler. It's not a matter of "What did he do wrong?" It's more like "Did he do anything right?" As he constantly reminds us, there is a dark spirit that lies within, and it has made a baffling, muddled mess of this situation with a stew of dogmatism, ineptitude and sneakiness with a side order of bias.

Like most of you, I never gave the rules more than a glance the last number of years, even when I was running a contest. When I saw the "telecommunications" phrase, I thought it was a old-fashioned way of saying "Internet." After all, it was part of a rule about reference materials. I considered running a contest as one of the prices a winning team had to pay for winning the contest, along with paying to mail the trophy to the next winner. Do the minor accounting, keep track of the scores, make a couple observations, congratulate the winners, make a decision on the rare occasion one was necessary. I thought this mostly a housekeeping chore, not a power.

During these exchanges, it has become clear the current gamerunner views himself not as a houseminder but Lord of the Tournament, more like Chairman Xi (or maybe a more tyrannical Miss Grundy) than bookkeeper. His disparagement of democracy and any other such affront to his personal rule goes without saying, but let me point out some other similarities.

2011: A Bad Year
Let's go back to 2011. It is discovered that the ever-present time lag issue can be exploited with a cell phone. So what does Chairman Anon do? He bans all telecommunications besides the Buzztime app in the bar! No explanation of the change, no request for comment. Doesn't this seem just like a Chinese COVID lockdown order?

There are good reasons why rule-making agencies explain changes and request comments: it catches overlooked mistakes and problems. There was none of that here, so no one got the chance to point out any problems, like these:

He banned the wrong thing: If you want to make an activity illegal, you make the activity illegal. This rule does not make use of a time lag illegal. It does not even mention the words "time lag"! So what does it do instead? It does not prohibit the action; it prohibits the instrument. It is like trying to stop drunk driving, not by making drunk driving a crime, but by banning cars.

He illegalized wetware: The core principle of the initial anti-computing rules was "Answers should only come from human heads" It's simple, clear, and it covers computers and time lag and split schedules. Illegalizing "telecommunications" does something quite different: It makes otherwise legitimate wetware illegal. People providing answers is no longer good enough; it must be people providing answers inside the bar. Wetware used to be equal; with this rule, some wetware is more equal than others. Why? What is the difference between getting an answer from someone over at the next barstool and getting that answer from someone over the phone? If the principle is "Answers should only come from human heads," the answer is "Nothing."

Isn't that an awfully big change for a housekeeper to make, especially without explaining the need for it or asking for comment or even pointing out the change?

Poor English: The phrasing and arrangement of this rule is also poor. All versions of the rule clump in telecommunications with reference materials, categorizing people as a type of reference material. The original 2011 version at least conveys the writer's fervent desire to ban anything and everything not originating in the bar . Later versions do not:

2011: All answers must be solely provided by the collective brainpower of the assembled team at the location without the use of any reference materials of any kind (or telecommunication from outside the location).

2015 and after: As has become customary for this tournament, it is for wetware teams only. This means no computers and no references of any kind are to be used during gameplay, either paper or electronic (or telecommunication from outside the location).

Here is STRO reading this more recent version with a team playing remotely:

Wetware only? That's us. No reference materials? We're good to go. What's this telecommunications stuff? Well, it's part of a prohibition on reference materials, so it must be about using the Internet to retrieve answers. We're fine there, too.

A rule that can be easily misinterpreted is a bad rule. We had no idea that we were doing anything against any rules until we used the hybrid, long after we came in third place in a tournament run by the same person with the same rules. The 2015 rules can be interpreted to ban the use of Buzztime itself (which requires both computers and telecommunications to be used during gameplay).

Finally, the writer seems to think that "assembled" means only "gathered in a single place." Not so. It can also mean "gathered for a purpose," which fits remote and hybrid play fine.
How should this have been handled?

If you want to ban the use of any technique which uses the time lag to provide correct answers, you write a rule that says "You cannot use any technique which uses the time lag to provide you, directly or indirectly, with correct answers."

If you still want to ban the use of telecommunications, you cannot ban it on the basis that it violates the "Answers should only come from human heads" principle, because it doesn't. If you want to do this competently, you come up with a different reason for the ban, and state it as a different rule. You do not bolt it on at the end of a sentence talking about reference materials, because that looks incompetent, sneaky, or both.

As a justification for this rule, we hear about a selfless sacrifice by a team not calling an ex-teammate in France around 3am for answers. Some of you might also be wondering, "This rule has been on the books all this time, why the complaint now?"

The problem with bringing "Phone-a-friend" from Millionaire to Buzztime is not that it is evil but that it is not effective. All that matters when you get an answer from elsewhere, good, bad or indifferent, is the amount of time it takes you to get the answer from whoever wherever compared to the amount of time the game gives you to enter an answer. Parsing then conveying at least the gist of a question over the phone, then (usually) relaying the answer from the phone is time-consuming (and also occupies the attention of a second player), so giving that up is not any big sacrifice. While it can sometimes work in Showdown, which has longer intervals and rounds with no timed point reduction, it is inefficient even for Showdown and ineffective for the other, faster-paced games. That would have gotten old quick for FROG croaking out answers, especially when the croaking would start at 2:30am local time.

So for most of the time since the rule's creation; it prohibited an ineffective activity. It was a dead letter rule.

On the other hand, Zoom, etc. is much, much better than a phone for getting an answer from somewhere else. Fully remote play with Zoom has no time issue. and you can hear answers from multiple people at the same time. The Hybrid at Herrill's is far less efficient than fully remote at home, but it's still better than the phone. Zoom is a much more credible Terror from Beyond the Bar than any phone.

2022: A Worse One

Moving on . . . after the French lament, we suddenly get this pivot and the gamerunner tells us that telecommunications is actually OK . . . when my team needed it during COVID, as long as we don't play using it in a tournament with The Rule (which is beginning to sound like one of the Ten Commandments, only more important, by the end of the piece). But once it was back to normal for my team, it was back to me scheduling tournaments with The Rule.

I see. A crisis is over when it's over for you. Yes, you said something about a "critical mass" of sites being available. Really? What's that? Obviously can't include NYC and Washington and many other places. The only critical mass that seemed to count when you restarted was the majority of your team that voted to restart it.

Yet, the first time the Rule is dusted-off post-Covid, and the first time the Rule could have been actually used in a real situation, it wasn't. An exemption is granted to an orphaned team for the Brainbuster tournament. In October, we were told, "As I think you know, we agreed to grant your team an exemption for the Brainbuster tournament based entirely on the fact that it—alone among all of the other teams—had no actual brick-and-mortar location in NY at which to play."

The exempter goes on, "However inconvenient Herrill Lanes may be for some of you, it is an actual brick-and-mortar location at which a quorum of people play. As the basis for the exemption no longer exists, so does the exemption."

Except . . . I didn't know. There was no record of this in Scaratings or my emails, or PMs or head, so I asked. The answer we got was "I didn't tell anyone outside of someone who asked, not even you, mostly because I did not want others to notice and I didn't want to encourage others to do the same." The only regret he seemed to have was granting the exemption, not covering it up. This is like Nixon going on national television and announcing "I ordered the Watergate break-in because I was afraid of losing the election. I guess I should have stopped the election instead."

Just to make this perfectly clear, here is a chronology:
1) Tournament is announced.
2) STRO, having no idea there is a rule banning his team's participation, applies for entry.
3) Chairman Anon, not aware that STRO is not aware of his precious Rule, decides to grant an exemption to the Rule, but does not tell STRO nor the other participants. He only puts Lighthouse in, and only discloses the exemption privately to someone who asked privately after seeing Lighthouse included on the tournament list. STRO has no idea an exemption was granted bercause he had no idea one was needed and was never told otherwise.
4) Fast forward to September. STRO comes up with Hybrid and tries it out. Chairman Anon notices, thinks Mad River has found a new home and contacts STRO by private email. STRO corrects that impression and explains Hybrid to him. Chairman Anon states that Hybrid will not be kosher for Sandbag Tournament, blaming his team for that. STRO is pretty stunned at this interpretation of the rule and starts researching history of it. STRO also prepares lenghty descriptions and justifications for Hybrid and formally requests inclusion in Sandbag to get an on-the-record decision. Chairman Anon prepares such, citing previous rules and decisions for which there is no record. STRO inquires, response reveals secret history of the exception to Rule.

So the only actual expressions of this exception is a private email to someone and the sort-of expression of a rule made after applying for a different tournament. Before going into the substance of this, a few words about the process: this is not acceptable behavior. If there had been any mechanism for removing you, we would demanded it back then. You do not make secret decisions and implement them hoping no one will notice. You are supposed to be accountable for the decisions you make and you do that by revealing them to affected parties, no matter how whatever you think your position makes you. And no, transparent does not mean invisible. This is like Trump declassifying documents in his head. You make that kind of decision, you post it publicly. Period.

Getting back to substance, we have had an Unknown Rule and an Invisible Exemption, differing pieces of which were made known to different individual/groups at different times, but usually long after it was supposed to take effect.

Unknown Rule: To play in one of my tournaments, your entire team must go to a Buzztime location if there is one in your state and if a "quorum" can get to that location.
Invisible Exemption: The ruler may exempt a team from The Rule if the state requirement is not met.

Putting aside the unknowableness and invisibility of this, is the state requirement a good rule? No, because it chooses a nonrational basis for granting an exemption. A rational basis for an exemption could be the physical distance to a location, or the length of travel time. A state border is no impediment to travel in-and-of itself, while states can be . . . big. Buffalo is about 300 miles from New York. Cincinnati is over 200 miles away from Cleveland.

Did the former Mad River team meet the Invisible Exception to the Unknown Rule for the Buzztime Tournament?

I don't know, because the Invisible Exception as stated to somebody else in March was not the same as the one stated to all of us in October ; the March version did not mention a specific state requirement or quorum rule. Did those requirements exist in the mind of the rulemaker before October? Sorry, but I can't do telepathy and if I could, I can only assume that would also fall under the telecommunications ban if I played Showdown with it.

Back in March, there actually were a few locations in New York State. Most were a couple hundred miles away. One was closer, just a 4 1/2 hour commute under perfect conditions, but if you do not make perfect connections the instant Showdown is over (have cab there, get in cab, travel 3 miles to railroad station and get on platform . . . in about 5 minutes), you have to wait over three hours for the next train and get home at 3am. Surely no one could expect mostly elderly people to take that trip frequently for anything outside of chemotherapy, but maybe not. That was no reason not to go according to the October rules . . . except for, maybe, this quorum requirement. Now only if we knew what a "quorum" was . . . .

After a keyword scan on Scaratings, I discovered that "quorum" has been used a few times to describe at least 5/6 boxes in play for a premium game, which is the basis for calculating a location score.

This creates a Catch-22 for a team like us: if you can't get to a place in your state, you cannot see nor play the game. But if one or two of you, or maybe you and a local manage to get to a place and play six boxes, then you are disqualified because your whole team is then required to go to the bar rather than have some play remotely under this quorum rule.

But, if this rule had actually been made known to everyone with the Sandbag tournament announcement, we could have told you we would play with five boxes and you would have had no choice but to accept us under the Invisible Exception. And, unless you can show that these rules were posted anywhere outside of your imagination, we could have demanded that you include us in this tournament and calculate our scores with the top five scores as just compensation for you not following your own rules.
Unless . . . the Invisible Rule is actually the Inapplicable Rule because if the October rules apply to March (never mind ex post facto), there was a location in New York State where a few brave souls undeterred by a return trip that would challenge James Bond could travel and . . . get their team disqualified if they played a box too many. So we shouldn't have gotten that medal after all.
Are you dazed and confused enough? Is this the person you want making rules and decisions for you, especially when he keeps them under his Mad Hatter hat?

Really, folks, if your housekeeper made such a mess of things, then tried to cover it up, what would you do with him/her?

And this was a ruling that was in our favor!

I apologize for wasting so much of the readers' remaining time on Earth with this, but imagine how I feel expending far more time trying to make sense of this. This is what happens when someone makes things up on the fly without thinking them out and not telling anyone.

But what matters more here is the human element. I began my discussion of Hybrid Showdown by talking about Dorothy and her wish to play Showdown again. The answer to her is "I don't care if you're over eighty years old with a bad knee and have to commute five hours to play Showdown, get thee to the bowling alley if you want to play in any tournament of mine."

Man, that's cruel. Yes, there is indeed a dark spirit that lies beneath.

It was not that way on March 15, 2020, when it was a question of how far your team had to travel to play Showdown at the beginning of COVID, when you said, "I think our closest location is Zooky's Sports Tavern in New Brighton, PA--about 1 1/2 hours from my house. I suspect it will be a tough sell for the team ." Then again, the Invisible Exception for some inconceivable reason implicitly precludes interstate transport. But if it didn't, I'm sure some new Unseen Invention would have popped up.

Would it have been reasonable to have expected anyone to travel so far, especially at the dawn of COVID? No, of course not, that would have been inhumane. But so is insisting on this from people with no nearby place to play due to the consequences of COVID.

Why?

When you go through this, you keep asking yourself, "What could be the reason, the motivation that compels such slavish adherence to this bar fetish?" This is more than "This is the way we've always done it." This is more like preventing blasphemy and sacrilege.

I asked for reasons, but what I got was fears. A lot of fears, lightly disguised, but still fears. Fear that some Zoomatics would fiendishly recruit Ken Jennings or James Holzhauer or some world coalition to join them (read to beat Red Fox). Fear that other teams could use this to gang up on Danny K's (read Red Fox). Fear that somebody somewhere might be looking up answers somehow somewhere off-camera (read to beat Red Fox)

Some of this could easily be handled by a rule: You could specify that a player could only play on one team per tournament. Some of this is just prejudice; to presume that people playing remotely are more prone to cheat than those playing at a bar is just the same-old Fear of the Unfamiliar, except the Unfamiliar isn't immigrants or blacks, but Zoomies. (You do get video on Zoom, which makes that sort of effort more noticeable, and again, it's the speed of the game that's the biggest factor here). Now maybe you're that sneaky and think everyone else is, too, but history gives us actual examples of teams using computers at the bar loudly and proudly for years. I would have far better reason than you have to say "National West Covina and Inglewood have used computers in bars. Let's ban bars from tournaments." Some is just excessive self-centeredness: if it were advertised in the media that Ken Jennings and/or James Holzhauer were playing Buzztime, that would be GREAT for the game, might even guarantee its continued existence, EVEN if it meant Red Fox losing a tournament.

But if you're afraid of being knocked off your pedestal, if anything new or different might be a threat to the status quo, lots of things look like threats. Ask Chairman Xi.

A corollary to this fear is the desire to protect your group by preventing others from gaining the same advantages through other means that you currently enjoy . Red Fox has an unusually large contingent of players, which is rarely if ever matched by its competitors. While I think Zoom, etc. is self-limiting when it comes to creating mega-numerous teams (see https://www.rieti.go.jp/en/special/p_a_w/177.html for some research on this) , it certainly could be used to create bigger, better teams.

And if it did, so what? Isn't that the nature of competition? If something new would be good for the game but bad for your team, do you say, "Let it be," or do you ban it?

I took a look at Red Fox's statistics to get an idea as to what those advantages are. What you notice immediately is that there are far more boxes playing Brainbuster than Showdown: usually 25-31 for Brainbuster, (as many as 40), 15-20 for Showdown. It's very, very unlikely that the extra Brainbuster players regularly decide to go home after that game. It is very, very unlikely that Red Fox has 25+ boxes and a bunch are put away at 8:30. It's possible that some or all of the excess boxes are players' second boxes, but photos of the Red Fox team show rather more than 15-18 players. The most reasonable assumption is that the number of boxes playing Showdown are the current number if working boxes at the place and there are somewhat to a lot more players than boxes for Showdown.

Who gets to play Showdown? How are the excess players playing Brainbuster?

To answer the first, about a dozen handles play Showdown almost every time they play Brainbuster. About a half-dozen get to play Showdown about half the time, and about five show up regularly and almost never get to play Showdown. The doghouse bunch have handles like MIGUEL, BHUTAN, WIGINS and TREIZE. They are almost always there for Brainbuster, but almost never there for Showdown. I don't think these are second boxes, most of them have pictures rather different from those of the regular players.

Then there is the mystery of DROLL. You've heard of DROLL; he was the Napkin Hall-of-Famer who moved to Chicago. You would think DROLL would be one of those sure-to-play players, but while he was at Red Fox, he had 18 Brainbuster games to his credit in the past six months (as of early November), but had not played a single game of Showdown during that time.

Moving on, so how are the excess players playing Brainbuster, and where? There are only two possibilities:

1) Because a few players almost never get to play Showdown after Brainbuster, and a few more play sometimes, it is conceivable that some are playing remotely. If that is the case, the score patterns indicate they are not playing by themselves (their scores are often near the top), so there would have to be some form of Hybrid in operations. Is that convincing evidence? No, but when you see handles like MIGUEL and BHUTAN and WIGINS and TREIZE almost never get a chance to play Showdown while others almost always do, it makes you wonder.

2) More likely, everyone is at the bar; the excess players play Brainbuster on their phones, and most stay to provide answers in Showdown. This would be in accordance with the current rules, but let's compare what they do to what the Mad River people do in the Hybrid:
Red Fox: For Brainbuster: Play game on phone, shout out answers. For Showdown: Shout out answers to people with boxes.
Mad River: For Brainbuster: Play game on phone, shout out answers. For Showdown: Shout out answers to people with boxes.

Both groups are doing the exact same thing. The only difference is that the second group is doing it over a video link.

Does the video link somehow violate the "Answers should only come from human heads" principle? No.
Is there anything about the video link that inherently creates cheating? No.
Could the use of video threaten the status quo? Yes.
Could it be used to match quantity/quality advantages held by certain members of the status quo. Yes.
If the answer to 1 and 2 are "No," is it sufficient reason to ban a technique if the answers to 3 and 4 are Yes?
You answer that. Not ANON. Not the Fellowship. Not me.

The prevention of potential threats to Red Fox looks to be the real rationale for the slavish adherence to the dubious rule, though there seems to be more than self-interest in play here. There seems to be a visceral repulsion to the concept going back to 2011, a repulsion untempered by actually doing it when his team had no choice. There seems to be at least a hefty dose of xenophobia flavoring this, maybe more.

The main issue for me is establishing the legitimacy of these styles of remote play, not necessarily qualification for a particular tournament. Under normal circumstances, it would be reasonable to allow some time for a decision. But this person made up his mind on this back in 2011, and I didn't hear anything about getting the opinions of others when I was told "No" in September . Is there a difference between getting an answer from someone in the bar and getting that answer from someone outside the bar? He's been saying "Yes" for the last 11 years. None of the fears he listed as reasons to reject this will go away any time soon or ever, and all of his fears boil down to "This could dethrone us!" which is not a reason to ban anything. Add to that this person's actions that state "I don't even have to tell you about decisions I make that affect you!" and I have little hope that any promised review for the next tournament will be any more open to change than Chairman Xi's Party Congress.

You can't claim to be acting on the behalf of the other teams, then refuse to ask them about the issue. After you hide decisions and give us Invisible Exceptions and Unknown Rules based on Nonrational "reasons," you shouldn't then claim to "avoid arbitrariness and capriciousness." Finally, after you confess to making a decision without announcing it to the participants, it is laughable to claim to be worried about being unfair to participating teams.

Word Games

The term "fair play" is cited a lot. It's not mentioned or defined in the rules, though by now we should expect invisible rules. My experience has taught me that when people use the word "fair," it usually means "better for me." The real issue is not "fair play," but who decides what fair play is. For instance. I have heard from multiple people the opinion that Red Fox playing with 30 or 40 people is not fair. Like beauty, fair play is in the eyes of the beholder, and when the beholder/ruler reminds you more some combo of the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts more than any other giant of jurisprudence, that ought to bother you, especially when the guiding principle seems to be "What's good for Red Fox is good for America."

Nor is "fair play" the only phrase endangered by the Alice-in-Wonderland treatment. "Cheating" is another. In another rule revision slipped in without any explanation, the ruler may ban/disqualifying a team for "any form of cheating." There is no definition of cheating in even the most general sense, which means cheating is anything the Through the Looking Glass ruler feels like calling cheating. Well, yes, this does happen in the real world, usually the Third one. In contrast. competent rules define these terms so as to keep those enforcing the rules from making up reasons to support their arbitrary and capricious decisions. Not surprisingly, when asked about this, the ruler did not seem to comprehend the concept that rules ought to limit the power of the ruler.

Is it good when the person running a little contest thinks himself the sole authority? No, but it's not surprising. Is it good when that person puts the interest of his team ahead of the overall good? No, but again, not a shock. But when that power-that-be refers to past events and rulings that did not happen and those rules that actually exist are either faulty or make little sense at all, we have a bigger problem than whether or not a particular team gets to use video to play in a particular tournament. Do you really want a judge who reminds you of something out of Lewis Carroll?
I'll put it this way. The judge made two decisions about my team. One was in our favor; one was against. We find how the judge handled the one we won far worse than the one we lost. That's bad.

I understand that nobody wants to be bothered with this stuff, but that's how those who want to be bothered with this stuff get control, and that's why they want to be bothered..
So what can be done? These tournaments are a small chore, normally requiring a few minor tasks. There was no perceived need for a lot of rules governing the activity because there was usually so little to do. Unfortunately, the lack of rules has been interpreted by a few to mean, "I can do anything I want." Anything?

Many conceivable situations have no answer in our lack of rules. For instance, what if you need to get rid of someone? Let's say a gamerunner loses a tournament and says. "They cheated. We won. See you next year." What do you do, and who decides?

General consensus is a good principle to base rules upon. You can hardly have that if you aren't even told about rules and decisions that affect you. No rulemaker is perfect. Certainly it wouldn't hurt to explain changes to people and give them a chance to have their say about it? After all, this is America, not China.

More thoughts about this in future posts. Thank you for your patience.

First, I’d like to thank STRO for his response, and for his helpful and categorical list of what apparently are my many and manifest inadequacies as a tournament commissioner and a human being. I have always appreciated your frankness and the firmness of your convictions.

While I suppose I could quibble with you about many of your characterizations, I really don’t think that would serve the main purpose of this thread, which is to get input regarding the tournament rules as they pertain to hybrid play. One thing on which I do agree with you entirely is that I should have let you know at that time why we were giving your team an exemption for last year’s Brainbuster Tournament. I did apologize for this last fall, but it bears repeating: I apologize for my error. Perhaps we should have instead chosen to exclude your team, but that seemed a callous thing to do for a team that literally had no place to play. If you would also like my apologies for including your team in the tournament, I can extend them here, too.

Regarding the making of the rules in general, I confess I am a bit surprised that someone who has played as long, and studied tournament history as thoroughly, as you have seems to have missed the larger fact that the rule-making process has NEVER been a democracy. Since the earliest days of the McCarthy Cup, one of the few “prizes” of winning the tournament—apart from holding the trophy for a year and putting a plaque on it—was the privilege of making the rules for the next year’s tournament. The Sandbag Tournament followed this same tradition. Every. Single. Time. In fact, as you also well know, for the vast majority of tournaments the host team has not even consulted or sought input at all with the larger playership on the formation of the rules. This thread—what we are doing right now—is by far the exception rather than the rule of tournament rule-making.

All of this being the case, let’s get to it, shall we?

It seems that a major crux of the issue is how one chooses to define “assembled brainpower.” If you had asked any player from 1998 to 2019 what that meant, you would have gotten the same answer: the brainpower of people assembled at that location. I think it is probably safe to say that this continues to be the connotation that phrase would have among most long-time players today. STRO has introduced the point that in the post-COVID era there is a new, revisionist way to interpret that phrase. With Zoom, Skype, Discord, Teams, etc., so common and widespread now virtual assemblage of brainpower is now possible in a way that would have been hard to imagine 10-15 years ago. The main question seems to be whether or not people want to accept this new interpretation for the purposes of tournament play. Is that how we want to start defining “team” now? I have my doubts, but this is why I started the thread, and cross-linked it to the Facebook Buzztime Players pages: so I can see how people feel about this. You know, like tyrants do.

Also, STRO, in the spirit of helpfulness: I have noticed that a new location—Bull’s Eye Sports Pub—has opened at 2073 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and people have been playing there as recently as a couple of days ago. It seems to be a heck of a lot closer to Manhattan than Herrill Lanes. Given the fact that you have stated that hybrid play is harder and more inefficient than in-person play, perhaps a way to make the playing experience better for your team might be to patronize this Pub?

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

I'm sure ANON will reply soon, but I wanted to chime in since I was cited twice already in this thread.

At some point in the last few years, I have forgotten the password to the DROLL account, and it seems like too much of a hassle to recover it (I'm not even sure what email account it is under). Because I have managed to stay logged in to the Buzztime app on my phone, I only use the DROLL account there - therefore, it isn't used on the tablets at Red Fox (or at the boxes at Teasers, for that matter). I usually play Showdown or Six as LOLLYJ. Teasers has the app disabled, so I can't even use it there.

MIGUEL, BHUTAN, and TRIEZE are all other players' second accounts; WIGINS usually gets to Red Fox too late to get a tablet.

STRO is right that Red Fox usually has too many players for the number of boxes the restaurant has. Before I moved in November, Red Fox was down to roughly 15 boxes that consistently worked, and we typically had 20-25 people playing.

As for the matter at hand - I don't play on Tuesdays anymore, so I don't really think my opinion matters too much.

You do not answer what are a series of serious charges against you by fluffing them off and giving us a George Santos-style answer. That tells us that you either have no answer to them or believe you are not at all accountable to us. In its tiny way, a gamerunner is a temporary custodian of a public trust. A gamerunner is accountable to the participants of the game. At a bare minimum, a gamerunner must inform the participants of what he is doing that affects them, whether it is a change in rules or a decision. You have consistently not done this. You do not even seem to comprehend why you should. You deceived all the participants of the Brainbuster tournament by underhandedly breaking a rule you single-handedly created, and even after being taken to task for this coverup, you see no need to even acknowledge that you did wrong to them.

To the extent you think yourself accountable to anything; it's this Fellowship. Is the Fellowship accountable to the participants? Not at all; to us it is a secret body not unlike the Star Chamber that does or does not communicate its decisions through its messenger/divine right ruler/whatever. or maybe they are just more verbal confetti to justify a particulardecision of the gamerunner's decision. My experience with a variety of teams is that most players know little and care less about relationships with other teams, and to the extent they think about such things, they have opinions that are heavily biased in their own favor.

If the "Fellowship" decides after losing a tournament that the victors are a bunch of cheaters and votes to keep the trophy, what is to stop them?

Per claims that I am demanding democracy. perhaps an example will make this clearer. No one would ever call the IRS (or SSA or any other American public agency like them) a democracy, but they are accountable for their actions and are required to explain their actions. If the IRS or SSA or whomever makes or changes rules that apply to the general public, they are required to publish those rules in advance and normally provide the opportunity for public comment. The average person may not know this happens, but they should know that if the IRS decides you owe them money or the SSA denies your claim, they have to tell you why. That is exactly what is not being done here, with rule changes made on the sly and secret decisions, that is what is unacceptable, and that is not something I recall any other gamerunner doing during his or her tenure.

Please address all the issues I raised.

_________________
“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

Per Bulls Eye, the view expressed here is rather myopic. A better examination would have revealed that I played a game there on October 15, 2022, or that no Showdown games were reported there. Here is the email I sent to my teammates about that:

Buzztime site in Brooklyn unsuitable for us October 16, 2022 6:53 AM
From:"edwardstroligo"

To:"Buzztime" (team mrmbers)

I went to the Bulls' Eye Sports Pub yesterday. It is not suitable for our play because:

1) It is a Buzztime Lite site, which means you have to bring your own devices to play and you cannot play Showdown or Spotlight there.

2) Both the bar and table areas are very small; it would be awkward at best for my equipment setup and there would likely be other size-related problems.

So Earl and Scott, thanks for the offer, but there is no need for travelling this Thursday.
____________

Here's another overlooked fact: Around 60% of the reported gameplay at the location is coming from MEGUMI and his aliases playing remotely; the Torrey Pines, Las Vegas home base should have hinted at this.

The remaining gameplay is pretty minimal. This bar had the game for a short period of time some years back when it was at a different location.

Per "It seems to be a heck of a lot closer to Manhattan than Herrill Lanes," well, Teaser's is closer to us than Phat Turtle, but that doesn't make it an acceptable commute. I have been travelling to the general vicinity for other reasons for a long time, so I am very familiar with getting there. Bulls'Eye is actually a longer commute for me than Herrill's is (3-3.5 hour round trip commute vs. 2.5-3 hours for Herrill's). This is not always the case; if Dorothy made the trip; the round trip to Bulls' Eye would be about 3 hours round trip compared to 5 hours for Herill's. We have only one player who would have a somewhat acceptable commute time since he lived in Brooklyn, but his round trip would be around 1.5hrs. In contrast, the commute to and from Mad River was be less than 2hrs for everyone, and as little as an hour for some.

More coming on other issues raised.

_________________
“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

No, it does not. It tells us, as I thought I had explained above, that I started this particular thread to solicit comment specifically on the issue of Hybrid Play and Tournaments (see title of thread). Any discussion of other issues is a distraction from this thread's specific purpose. In order to help keep this thread focused on its purpose, then, I have started another thread called "ANON: Bad, Sneaky, Inept, Tyrant?" so the issues that are not germane to this specific topic can be discussed there.



As I mention on the other thread, I will do this as time allows.

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

The history of this rule and the actions you have taken under that rule are very germane to an understanding of this issue. Your explanation
might have been plausible if you had bothered reproducing or at least linking my comments to that topic. But you didn't, which led me to think for about
the hundredth time, "Is he that sneaky or that inept?"

In any event, per hybrid play:

We have played the hybrid for about four months. We have obviously not set the world on fire with this alien technology. We have won one Showdown in that time when everything went our way. We have won Brainbuster more often, but we were playing Brainbuster and occasionally winning it playing fully remote long before the hybrid. Overall, we have been playing at roughly the same level we were playing at Mad River before COVID.

We have been playing games like Brainbuster and Six with full remote play for almost three years, and we have just as obviously not coaxed teams like Walsh's and Teaser's into retirement. We have played in tournaments, even one run by Anon himself, and did not destroy the world as a result.

If places like Teaser's and Walsh's don't feel threatened by us, then what is the recently self-proclaimed "best trivia team in the world" so afraid of?

It is not like there is some vast Zoomie Horde out there waiting for the chance to overwhelm Bardom. There's one team using the hybrid: us. You have witnessed our results over four months. At what point do actual events show that fearful fantasies are just that?

Be clear on this: the hybrid is simply a clumsy version of remote play, nothing more or less. It is only in existence because the Buzztime app does not include Showdown, and allows people without reasonable access to a location that has Showdown (which includes all of NYC) to indirectly play. Remember that remote play was enabled by Buzztime and many of those now denouncing it were using it during COVID. COVID and the loss of BWW dropped the number of sites by more than two-thirds. You can't play in a bar when there is no bar to play in, a simple fact that Buzztime and perhaps many here studiously ignore.

Only Buzztime can change their business model, but that is about as old as the average player. The Buzztime app is designed for remote play, but Buzztime is too dumb and/or cheap to either a) get paid for remote play through remote individual subscriptions or b) do the programming necessary to block GPS spoofers, like every other phone app out there (the attempt a few months ago to get that effect by blocking questions was comically incompetent). Young people I talk to cannot believe that they cannot get an individual subscription to Buzztime. We may not be able to change Buzztime's business model, but that should never be the excuse to ban those relative few who are not walking away from the game like most people but are trying to hang around for better days. Remember, Buzztime has never disapproved of computer use in its games, but that never stopped anyone from banning computer use in their private tournaments.

My team has the most (and in the case of hybrid, the only) experience with remote play. What advantages does it give us over playing in a bar? It makes it possible for us to play because it takes us too long to get to any bar that has the game. It is usually not as noisy as the average bar. Are there disadvantages? There are some games where there are. For a game like Brainbuster, there isn’t. For a game like Six, yes: more information is made available in the bar version of the matching round than on the Buzztime app. We estimate that if we had played these games in a bar the last almost-three years, we would have won a few more games due to this, but Teaser's and Walsh's would have still won Six far more often than us. Hybrid has much bigger communications issues (and occasional technical problems), but the overwhelming factor in how we do is the exact same one that applies to bar play: Do you know the answers or not?

Some of these issues have been answered in the past, but I'll go through them again. When you go through this, keep something in mind. Former teammate DROLL confirmed that Red Fox has a substantial number of players who do not have boxes but shout out answers to those who do. This is exactly what happens with the hybrid. The only difference is that the Red Fox people do it in the bar while the Mad River people do it over a Zoom link. Ask yourself when reading the charges and responses if the charges are serious and real enough to allow the bar answers but ban the Zoom answers, or to allow both, perhaps with a rule or two governing that.

To be honest, these issues may have come from Anon&Co. but some of this starts sounding like something out of QAnon.

Time lag exploits: The situation differs depending on the game.

Showdown: This is QAnon material in a site-poor environment. Showdown is only available in bar locations. To make a time lag work, you would have to have people at two different locations, which is exponentially more difficult than going to one location when there is no place to play. We simply could not get two people to do that on a regular basis; it would be pretty rough doing it once, and that would only work if there is a serious time-lag between those two specific locations. While I suspect somebody like RICHEK could enlighten us on this point, I personally have no experience doing this and don't know if you could determine ahead of time what the time lag would be for Showdown.

Buzztime app games: Time lags can occur even when all the devices are on the same site, but they are sporadic and almost always cause lags not exceeding a second or two. People like RICHEK have shown us a time lag exploit is doable by using multiple devices playing at different locations. It would take me some time to test this, but I wouldn't have any real problem testing this. The only big issue I see is how consistent the time lag is between sites: if Site A is ten seconds ahead of Site B, is it always around ten seconds ahead, or does it change a lot? If it is consistent, then this would be a lot easier than if it isn't, but either way, it's probably doable.

But just because something is doable doesn't mean it will be done. This is just as doable in a bar as it is at home. You may say, "But someone else can see you do it in a bar," but who is watching the bar? The history of this game is filled with examples of bars doing all sorts of things with the acquiescence if not approval of other players. We have never seen a team forfeit a game because of some minor or inadvertent infraction of this rule. We can't see what happens or doesn't happen in a bar, but if you want, you could watch us. I just add you to the Zoom invite list and you can see for yourself.

Computer lookup: Is it doable? Of course, both in a bar and at home. Is it more undetectable with the hybrid than at a bar? Not really and here's why.

First, it takes time to request and get an answer, and there's not much time to do so. Even in a game like Showdown, maybe you can, maybe you can't. But even if you can, what you cannot hide is when you answer the question. You will not have a normal answering pattern. People will provide most answers early in the answering period. They do not normally answer them towards the end of the period, but someone looking up an answer has no choice but to do that, consistently. Additionally, if you're trying to do this while on video, you're going to be looking down and fidgeting around a lot more than if you are not. This isn't something you'd catch instantly, but it's definitely something observable.

There's an underlying assumption here that is troubling, that people walking into a bar are somehow more saintly about these matters than people sitting at home, which is absurd. This is a bar, not church. Let’s assume a team signs up for a tournament in good faith, and the people on that team have average morals, which means they do not do the right thing all the time. At some point, someone comes up with an answer or two or three by looking it up (people dink around with their phones constantly these days). This gets discovered. What is the team more likely to do? Stop answering questions on the spot and forfeit the game immediately thereafter on Scaratings? Or would they let that slide, rationalizing that it didn't matter that much? Since we've never seen the first happen, isn't the second at least possible, if not likely? P.S. I can throw somebody out of a Zoom meeting a lot easier than you can throw a player out of a bar.

What is a team? I just checked a bunch of dictionaries for its definition, and not one of them included the concept of specific location. Now there are certainly activities that require a geographic gathering; you can't play baseball remotely. There are also activities that initially required physical proximity but now no longer do so: a class would be an excellent example of this. Buzztime initially was like baseball, but the Buzztime app made it more like a class.

The thought of a Buzztime team not being strictly confined to a small space terrifies our gamerunner, provoking a spasm of xenophobia: "a team can be any group of any people, anywhere, who have an internet connection." Hmmm. I can't recall the security clearance process I had to go through to play at a bar, can you? I'm afraid we're back in QAnon territory again: this is the old Ken Jennings/army of geniuses/fill-in-the-blank bogeymen coming to kill us. Now if I were putting out global want ads or combing the prisons for people, I could see that bothering people, but I know this is a self-limiting approach. You can't have terribly many people shouting out answers on a Zoom link, certainly not more than those shouting out answers at Red Fox and I think much less; people drown each other out. You can only have big Zoom meetings when only a few people talk and everyone else listens. The easiest way to ensure that Zoomie armies do not emerge is to have individual paid subscriptions. Finally, and most importantly, just how many billions do you think are biting at the bit to play Buzztime? Do you really think there are too many people playing the game these days? I am actually trying to get people to play. For the most part, the people we have tried to get have been former team players who moved away. We got a few, but they have tended to drift away. A big factor is technophobia; I've had people frightened at the thought of downloading an app on a tablet. So go ahead and try to get those ex-players, you're going to find out it's not so easy, and if I'm wrong, then good for you! I'm not afraid of increased competition, but why are you? Why am I hearing through all the verbiage, "If you're afraid you can't beat them, ban them?"

I explained months ago that you can easily stop ganging up with a rule restricting people to play with just one team during a tournament, but I guess that didn't sink in.

Please ask the people who think that "encouraging people to show up to play actually brings new business to the locations that are actually paying for the system" how much encouragement they would need if they had to travel four or five hours to play Showdown. Then tell them they would have to do that under your rules, even if they were eighty years old. After that, ask them about the level of encouragement required for them to go to Cincinnati to play if that were the only place in Ohio to play, then tell them that your rules would require that, too. I want to read their responses here next Wednesday.

I repeat, again, you cannot play in a bar if there is no bar to play in.

Finally, per the use of the term "assembled" the dictionary defines the meaning of words, not you. If the situation precludes any nonlocation based definition, then the word is superfluous. You would never say "The assembled baseball team met in the dugout". If the situation does not preclude location, either definition could apply if not restricted by other parts of the sentence. Your 2011 phrasing was adequately clear; your subsequent phrasing was not.

Enough for today.

_________________
“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

I am not a Showdown player so there wasn't much reason to comment in the past.

If I was a Showdown player and we were fielding a team for a SD tournament I would vote to allow the hybrid play. It's close enough to remote play through the app for other games for me.

It all comes down to the word of the team. If they say they won't cheat in any way then I will go with that until there is something odd showing up.

As for what to allow in the zoom call? I would ask any teams that they not add new team members during tournaments. Again you would have to take the team's word on that. Maybe they would even invite you or representative to sit in on their zoom call?

If it seems too many teams are trying to play this hybrid way then you go back to prior rules on the next tourney.

I'd let 1 or 2 hybrid teams in with assurances of no zoom ringers or references or any other form of cheating. 1 vote from a non Showdown player.

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

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

I have no problem with reasonable regulation, and these suggestions are certainly along these lines.

I think it would be a good idea to draft a set of rules that would cover this area and other problems which have emerged due to this to give people something concrete to see if their concerns are addressed, then share their thoughts about it.

In the meantime, if you are interested, I could PM you the Zoom invite tonight, and you can see for yourself what we are doing.

_________________
“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

Won’t work for tonight. But yes sometime in the next month I could sit in and maybe even offer an answer or two.

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

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

Draft additions/revisions to tournament rules

Recent events have pointed out the need for revision and additions to the rules. These draft rules provide what should be considered a minimal reformation of rules; a far more substantial overhaul is more than warranted, but this would do for now. These rules can and should be incorporated into all private tournaments.

There are three areas of change. The new transparency rules require that the gamerunner reports all his actions and decisions along with all new and modified rules to a public forum for public comment. There is currently no way to replace a gamerunner for any reason whatsoever, so it also provides rules for his or her removal and an override of decisions.

The prohibited practices rules set forth general principles to be followed in making rules under this section, makes explicit and more clearly defines currently prohibited practices, and sets forth the range of penalties for infractions of those rules.

The restricted practices rules set forth the general principle that while play at a paying location is the norm, exceptions are allowed when such play is not feasible. They set forth the conditions for an exception, namely travel time and restrictions on who may play in such a group. They also establish the principle that further restrictions cannot be applied unless they are applied to all teams.

Transparency Rules:

General Principle #1: The gamerunner must make all his actions, decisions and rule changes as gamerunner public.

• The gamerunner must always make all his decisions public and must publicly explain his reasoning for making those decisions in a designated public forum (Scaratings.com).
• New and modified rules must be written in clear and unambiguous terms, and a separate explanation of what the rule means and why it was changed/added must be provided at the time it is issued. No rule can take effect until it has been posted at the designated public forum.
• All new/modified rules must allow at least a week for public comments. Emergency rules can be issued to take place immediately, but they will not become permanent until they have gone through the public comment period.
• The participants of a tournament can remove a gamerunner on the grounds of misconduct (whether within or without the duties of gamerunner) or inability to adequately perform the duties of gamerunner by a two-thirds vote of all teams registered to play in the tournament. Before doing so, they must give the gamerunner the opportunity to defend himself and they must publicly post the reasons for the removal.
• Decisions of the gamerunner can be overridden by the tournament participants, but they can only do so by a unanimous vote.

Playing Rules

General Principle #2: Answers should only come from human heads: If an answer does not come from a human head, neither it nor the practice that generated it is allowed. Answers that come from human heads are allowable unless specifically prohibited or restricted by a rule.

Prohibited Practices:

Specific practices that are always prohibited are:

• Use of a time lag: Any course of action or procedure which yields the result of getting a Buzztime answer from a game at one location and using it to answer the same question in the same game at a different location which is running that game at a slightly later time is prohibited.
• The use of reference materials: Any attempt to find an answer using reference material is prohibited. Reference materials include both printed and electronic forms. For the purposes of this prohibition, all Internet websites other than communications conduits such as Zoom or Teams or Discord, are deemed to be reference material. People are never considered to be reference material, nor are computers used solely as a conduit to convey answers from one person to others.
• Certain human transactions: Telephone calls made to nonplayers for the purpose of getting answers to questions are not allowed.
• Playing for more than one tournament team: No player may play for more than one team participating in the tournament during the tournament.

A team that engages in any prohibited practice can be terminated from the tournament and forfeit any prize or standing from the tournament. In the case of minor infractions of this rule, the gamerunner may choose to impose a lesser penalty such as a penalty in the score of a game or a zero score for a single game. All such decisions must be posted with an explanation on Scaratings.com.

Restricted Practices:

[i]Since this is a new section covering new practices, some additional explanation is warranted.

Background: The Buzztime business model depends on locations paying for the service. The number of locations is less than a third of what is was in mid-2019. Large chunks of the country have no locations that can be reached within a reasonable period of travel time. The number of people playing the game is a small fraction of what it was a few years ago. The Buzztime app is not dependent on being around a location to function. It is possible to play most Buzztime games remotely through the app by using GPS spoofing. Showdown is not one of those games, so a different remote technique called the Hybrid is used: someone goes to a location, starts a Zoom link with remote players, shows the Showdown game in progress, and relays answers from the remote players who cannot play Showdown to those at the location who can. It would be far better if Buzztime let those orphaned by the location drop pay for individual subscriptions and play remotely through the Buzztime app, but they have not yet been willing to do so. Only one team is currently using the Hybrid, and no other team has yet inquired about adopting it.

Description of Rules: These rules establish the principle that players should play at locations, but provides an exception restricted to those impacted by the lack of locations. It requires that any teams that wish to play under the exception must disclose that wish and verify that they qualify under it. It restricts those who can play to people who have had a previous relationship with someone on the team. This is meant to include people like former players who have moved away and family members and exclude what one called “Zoom ringers.”
It also provides for equal treatment between remote/hybrid and regular teams. For instance, if a gamerunner decided to restrict the number of players playing remotely/hybrid to fifteen, he would have to impose the same rule on all teams. Finally, it provides for an exception in case of an emergency. These rules would need to be substantially rewritten if Buzztime began to allow individual subscriptions.[/b]

General Principle #3: When reasonably possible, team interactions should take place within the confines of a paying location, but when they are not, alternatives are allowable.

General Principle #4: Besides the location and relationship restrictions, no other restrictions will be imposed on teams playing remotely that would not also apply to all other teams.

Definitions:

Remote play: Playing Buzztime games using the Buzztime app outside of a Buzztime location with or without the use of GPS spoofing.

Hybrid play: Playing those Buzztime games not available with the Buzztime app by establishing a video link showing the game to those watching remotely and relaying answers from the remote players to those playing the game at a Buzztime location.

General rule: Players should play at a paying location

Exception:
1) Players in site-poor areas. A player is considered to be in a site-poor area if the nearest Buzztime location that carries the specific game to be played is more than an hour away from him one-way using that player’s regular means of transportation.
2) If a group of players seek to play together, they are considered to be in a site-poor area if the nearest Buzztime location that carries the game is on average more than an hour away from each of them using those players’ regular means of transportation.

Players/teams in such areas may play in tournaments either remotely or by using the hybrid. In hybrid situations, it is the location that shows the game that requires the hybrid that is used for the travel time test.

Relationship Requirement: For purposes of the initial tournament, all players playing remotely must have a preexisting historical or familial relationship with at least one member of the team. (This rule will be revised in the future to address the circumstances under which new players will be allowed to join.)

Disclosure Requirement: All teams that plan to play in a tournament under the exception must publicly disclose that to the showrunner and explain that they meet all the requirements of the exception. A brief written statement will normally suffice unless the gamerunner decides more verification is required.

Emergency exception: The gamerunner may waive all these requirements for a tournament team that is faced with an emergency that prevents play at the regular site. This includes but is not limited to technical difficulties, removal of the game from a location, bar closure, and natural disasters. The gamerunner may also allow a tournament team to temporarily or permanently change their location. All such decisions must be posted on Scaratings.com as soon as reasonably possible.

Equal treatment: The gamerunner may not impose additional restrictions upon those teams playing remotely/hybrid that are not also applicable to regular teams.


Hear Ye, Hear Ye! Now hear this! Call it great, say it sucks (but either way, please say why). Make suggestions, ask questions, but say something! This is the way it ought to be: someone proposes something that can affect you; they have to tell you about it and you get to tell them about what you think about it. An informed consumer is our best customer! So speak now!

_________________
“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