New Scaratings

A group of us played a set of Countdown games on Saturday, September 8th which we thought were tougher than "usual" for CD. Days go by and several games of CD later, the level of difficulty seems to remain at the new, slightly higher level. I checked the gameplay history for a few of the higher ranked CD players in FL, and the data supports my theory.

It looks like:
a) CD games in general are tougher
b1) The easier questions may have been grouped into the first 8 to 10 questions, because we've had a lot of games start at 8,000 or 9,000 and end up as shit. -OR-
b2) A new batch of questions started getting rolled in on Sept 8th, and the new questions are backloaded into the final 5 to 7 questions per game.

I applaud the change, and backloading the newer/harder questions is a good way to nail the chronic score dumpers.

I'll attest to this. Since the March 1st changes my countdown average has usually been in the upper 13,000's and even topped 14,000 for a brief moment. It's now down to 13,069. I'm not complaining as I enjoy a more challenging game and they were becoming a bit of a turkey shoot in my opinion. The Late Shift has also been harder of late. My average for that usually hovers around 9,000 and it's now all the way down to 8,100 and change.

I've also noticed more challenging CD for a while.

They seem to really be driving their point home.
There was a game today where we got an ubercrappy 11.3K bar average that came in first and not a single other bar in the country broke 9.9K.
Ouch...
I haven't seen devastation that total since the last time Gallagher visited Carnegie-Mellon...