New Scaratings

I didn't think "Good Girls Don't" rated that high. (I'm not doubting it in this day of the Internet, but I don't remember hearing it that often back in the day.

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Malort. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

I'm not prepared to say that I heard it every day, but I remember hearing it about as often as I heard Money Honey by the Bay City Rollers a few years earlier.
I can't be the only person linking those two songs in their personal life's soundtrack, can I?

The entire headliner round was a repeat of the August 16th Beyonce game. I didn't play that game because i didnt give a rat's ass about beyonce but got stuck playing it this time when we were expecting Clapton. Maybe Clapton will show up in a few months.

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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!!!!

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.

So the game was basically a repeat and a location score of 14k cracks the top 20 in the west feed. How 'bout that awesome competition?

For the record, Showdown still consists of mostly fresh questions. Occasionally I'll recognize the odd question but the game still seems to be created from fresh material.

It goes without saying that their premium sports game consists of fresh material. Some might proffer that it's a little too fresh...

For those not on Facebook, buzztime posted about an hour ago that there's a bug in their system and they don't know what went wrong. They said they previewed the game on Friday, it was Eric Clapton, and all looked fine. They said the game gets downloaded to all the sites on Saturday, and when it downloaded, something caused the file to flip back to the Beyonce game.

I just thank my lucky stars every time I realize that BT doesn't control some really important network system. Can you imagine them running the defense department computers? Every single day would be like the closing scenes from War Games.
"Mr. Krishnan... I've come to the conclusion that your new trivia system sucks."

Barry Corbin plays a decent amount of BT trivia between here and Hollywood, I wonder how many times a trivia geek has asked him to spout a General Beringer line?

For everyone playing along outside of facebook... Buzztime said today they fixed the glitch, but they're still trying to figure out what caused the glitch. They also said the Clapton game will air in early December.

I shudder to think how many times he's been asked while using the john to piss on a spark plug...

Not surprisingly (since they can't identify what caused the issue), it happened again this week. This time it flipped back to the Dec 2013 Norah Jones game. Any programmers on here that can try to make heads or tails of what might be going on?

They are doing whatever they can to kill this game.

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Malort. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

I have a question. Just how committed, or, how much does it matter that we know what the topic
for the game will be in advance?

There are two ways to look at this.......the way we normally do, like complain and whine like I often do that
"Oh, they messed up again!" and just moan about it. Or........we can try and think of ways to save the game
from getting cancelled. Assuming they keep the same scoring format, if they want to use a topic of the
week, they might consider either not telling us what it is. That way, we might not even know when they've messed
up. If the entire game was lifted from a game from last December, I can tell you right now none of us noticed
until "Snorah Jones" was announced as this week's headliner. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to spread out the topic
questions throughout the game instead of all in the fifth round. Yeah, we're used to having an announced headliner
be asked about in that round, but if those questions are spread out it makes one's score slightly less dependent on being
an expert on that particular topic/artist/genre. From NTN's point of view, it might even give them greater flexibility
in putting the game together. If they want to make the game easier or more difficult, they can still make certain questions
(#5, #6) in what is currently the "headliner" round easier or more difficult.

Or they could simply toss out the idea of topics altogether.

I have my doubts about just designing a brand new game. If they are having issues with "maintaining" their current Playback
game, I don't think NTN would have the resources to come up with something new.

I meant Norah Jones. Spelling error, sorry.

I did notice during the game that there were a ton of 2013 questions (and also a good bit of 2007 questions). That should've been the tipoff right there since what constitutes as a "New" game these days is 5-10 questions from 2014 (particularly in the early rounds) with the bulk of the other questions being recycled questions from the database.

I wonder if the heavy reliance on the recycle questions is what's causing the issue. They're probably cutting & pasting a big chunk of recycled stuff, and when doing so maybe they copied some code that the system can't recognize, which is causing the file to reject and throw it back to some other week.

My question is: Does NTN care? Can someone from the company comment at all on this? I am not on scrapings every day, but I do not recall them commenting at all on any of the screw ups recently.

As a result, I have happily done other things. I love music trivia in any form so I use to go out of my way to play. That is no longer the case.

If they don't care, why should I?

The best option is to go back to "Classic" Playback.

But if they are going to have "headliners" and announce them ahead of time, some people make their decisions to play based on the fact that there will be eleven questions about a topic that they may know something about. We were thinking of staying last night and watching movies and having pizza until my wife realized that Madonna was the headliner. We decided to play since she figured she would do well on Madonna questions. Instead, we were given eleven Norah Jones questions and spent the final ten minutes guessing blindly.

I do like the fact that they are giving the headliners ahead of time instead of giving three possibilities. It makes planning a Saturday night easier.

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Malort. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

This is what they posted on Buzztimes FB page when it happened the time before:
, we've experienced a bug in our system, Ugh. Playback was scheduled to run Eric Clapton, and even showed Eric Clapton as we previewed the content before airing on Friday. Something on our end caused the content to change though on Saturday when the files are sent to be downloaded by all sites. We are still investigating what exactly what wrong here, but I'm watching this issue as it gets resolved and I'll post back here as soon as my teams give me some answers. So, sorry and thanks for bringing this to us! I'm hoping to have some answers swiftly. Watch this space.

My home computer's only 10 years old. Maybe I should donate it to BT as a gesture of good faith

I'm sure, whether it's hardware or software, there's something they're perversely sticking with because it still mostly works well enough to avoid breaking down and buying/creating something new

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/°v°\ • Every time Linux boots, a penguin gets its wings
I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I won't stop until I find out what
Why not downgrade Plutonium to a dwarf element?

FWIW, buzztime actually posted last night that they were embarrassed the problem happened again this week, and they identified the problem (and actually gave the explanation of it...that only techies would understand), and they said it will work from now on.

Given the track record, its natural to be skeptical. But at least this time, the PR dept scored well with this post.

Alright, we have a winner.
Who had 12-1-14 in the "What does it take for Buzztime to finally admit that their company is an embarrassment?" pool?

It depends. Are the year's digits before the 14 significant, or does the Y2K bug apply?