craig921 wrote:
With the possible exception of the first round, the entire game consisted of recent questions for Playback.
Not sure if this is someone's idea of payback for complaining about Clapton for a third time, or if there just isn't anyone
running the show anymore, but this is starting to remind me of how Jukebox was handled months before NTN finally
pulled the plug.
Obviously, complaining isn't going to help. The only competition in trivia NTN has that I can think of is live trivia, and the closet
competition for us as a group is some 120 miles away in metro Detroit. And I don't want to take up knitting during the Winter months....
There have definitely been a lot of careless programming mistakes in Playback recently. Maybe one of the workers there has a grudge. Or is just smoking something really good before putting the game together
A couple weeks ago it was putting the 3rd round in the 4th round, and the 4th round in the 3rd round. Last night, they plugged Beyonce in instead of Clapton. Although it's also *possible* that the person that posts the categories for the month screwed up and posted Clapton in there instead of Beyonce. (Although given that Beyonce was just a headliner a few months ago, I think a programming error was more likely).
But getting to the heart of Craig's post... the way I remember the history of Playback (and correct me if I'm wrong) is that of the separate half hour games, Triviaoke was nixed first, and then Jukebox was nixed simultaneously with Get Reel, Retro, etc, in the whole conversion to 15-minute games fiasco.
I think it's safe to say that buzztime is not a fan of triviaoke anymore. When Playback was redesigned, I remember that two of the questions were would you like to ditch triviaoke and replace it with some scaled back version of it. Buzztime said their research indicated their players overwhelming wanted to keep triviaoke.
Personally, I'm surprised that, for the most part, buzztime has never copied Spotlight's first round idea for Playback. In Spotlight they pop up the lyrics of some song, then you usually have to pick the artist. Sometimes the song title. That type of question works very well for Spotlight. It obviously would fit for Playback. Why they've never/rarely really used that type of question in Playback, I have no idea.
Secondly, from the surveys, I remember that buzztime asked if they wanted to scale Playback down from an hour game to a half hour game, and, again, buzztime reported that players overwhelmingly wanted Playback to remain a 60 minute game.
So in the redesign they launched a "More questions! More points!" game. The current 60 minute Playback game has 51 questions whereas the Classic 60 minute Playback only had 34 questions.
The only problem is buzztime has to find the time to write 17 more questions each week. And that worked for a long time, but for the past eight months or so, all they've done is repeated previously used Headliner categories. They occasionally sprinkle in a new question or two or three in that round. But it's like that for the other rounds too. They occasionally sprinkle in some new 2014 questions in the other rounds, but they're heavily relying on repeat questions from the database.
I don't know if this is a problem in Showdown and Six too. I haven't really noticed it in Spotlight, although I know at least a few times this year the Final Cut question has been a repeat question from the database.
In any event, it seems like buzztime has a problem writing new questions. It's definitely very noticeable in Playback. I don't know if buzztime lost their Playback writer and/or doesn't have the resources (funds) to hire a new one. But premium games aren't fun if they're just 80%, 90% (or in those whereabouts) of recycled content.
Playback clearly remains popular. Spotlight is still buzztime's most played game. But at last glance, Playback even had higher participation numbers than Showdown last week. Six is fourth (although in fairness, since the game is played two nights a week... players can pick whichever night they want for the game so I'm sure that hurts the overall participation numbers a little). Buzztime gave up on Sunday nights a long time ago, and though they still do have a "game" on Monday nights, that "game" is so watered down from what Sports IQ was, that it's safe to say that buzztime gave up on Monday nights too. I'd hate to see buzztime give up on another night of the week, but if they don't pump in new content for that game soon, then those numbers will start to dry up too.