New Scaratings

Prior to split, as you well know, Spotlight and Showdown were above 10k. Death Spiral folks, without BWW this company would have been dead long ago..

1 thing we can agree on, The Pulse sucks balls..

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

When I win the lottery, I will open a sports bar that will proudly advertise that it will not show any NFL. Put those arrogant bastards who aren't satisfied with their rightful share in their place.

Take last Thursday. The local BWW should have had Mets-Dodgers game 5 and the local NHL team on the big screens, but instead they shoved down the throats on 70% of the screens in the building, including bunches next to each other, a mediocre football game with minimal local interest. Of course they put it on the sound system and crank up the volume too. Clueless.

When I go play buzztime at the BWW near me, I often have to request they turn nearby screens to trivia (for that slight delay advantage v. the tablets). Yesterday I told the waiter who eventually came back to tell me "the bartender says trivia's not on, poker is." I had to explain to them that they are two separate channels, even pointing to a far away screen that did show trivia at that exact moment. And of course I have to explain each week this month why three or four people need five tablets on Sundays at 7:30 PM.


There should be more in depth training when it comes to Buzztime trivia. It's a facet of the restaurant... it makes no sense to not train people. Just a quick 20 minutes. BWW may be keeping them afloat but it's doing jack shit to help grow the game.

There are those of us who have been preaching this very thing to NTN/BT for 15 years now. One member here has even offered to create a training plan for new sites only to be ignored.

I am really excited to find out which location is the Smartest Bar winner after Sunday's final game. Any predictions?

I would assume a team currently in the top six positions, really.

Which means all 3200+ locations (except for six) were eliminated after three weeks of play in which there were really only two meaningful games and one pointless one.

That's more a formula for alienating people instead of exciting them. But what else is new at Buzztime.

I was being optimistic, too. It's mostly a game for the top 4, and only more if a top team has a fluke screw up. The 5th and 6th teams are about 3k behind.... to win they'd need to outscore all the teams above them by over 3k. It can happen.... it just hasn't happened in this tournament after 3 weeks. The 6th place team had a little bit of the magic they'll need this past week, outscoring most teams above them by 2-4k. They would need to repeat what they did... but to a greater extent. The issue is last week was the easiest game so far, and so far their highest score by 8k.

I just think with competition this tight, the 2k gap after the top 4 is a pretty big deal. But it's so much in the air, to a degree. Only one team has even cracked 60k for a game that wasn't last week's. A pretty interesting fact indeed. If Week 3 is the only week to see giant scores, then perhaps it's more open than we might think?

Actually, BO, it was almost worse than that. I was finally invited to put together a proposal for the player outreach program to new locations, which would have included the location manual. I submitted a proposal/outline as scheduled, but never received any response. It would have been better to be ignored before I put in that totally wasted effort.

Wonder how many new locations since then have gone through the revolving door: put the system in, fail to train anyone in the place on how to use it, never have it showing on any screen, then getting rid of the system because it's not paying for itself, much less generating income. Or not-so-new locations that need revitalization.

Brooke/AARDVK

Well I learned the hard way that it sucks to use 5 tablets.

It seemed clear our third man wasn't going to show up. The thing is, I only had three accounts and so I needed to make a new one to cover him. Actually had to use an email address that wasn't mine to make it. And then it became clear my dad wasn't going to show up and so I made yet another account right after the game started. Between missed punches, forgetting to punch all five tablets and botched split strategies I had 0 experience on and was making up on the go... I lost a few points along the way. For example, the first question in matching I got correct. However, my scores were 1500, 750, 750, 750, 500 because of goofs on my end. A bit of a stressful way to end the competition. 0 teammates and very busy hands. Poor scores... poor enough to make THIS our drop week. Sigh.

Congrats to the top teams, though.

REALLY, BUZZTIME???? "Chordates" are defined by having a "digestive system"???? No! They are defined mainly by having a notochord, a hollow dorsal nerve chord, pharyngeal slits, and a tail at some point of their ontogeny. "Backbone" was a much closer answer, even though that's Vertebrates. Jellyfish (Cnidaria, not Chordata) have digestive systems. So do single cell animals. I guess I'm only surprised that you didn't give the answer that the defining characteristic of Chordates was a 19th Century Opera.

Or, as the Six writer would express it: "a XVIII century opera".
But I kid...
















or...do I?

Yes, I had the same challenge. Last week was abysmal, to say the least, and the experience as a whole was hell on wheels playing five at once.

Unfortunately, I had to do it again last night. And at least I had a week's worth of experience to learn from my mistakes. While it wasn't a perfect experience (two boards missed out on the bonus in the speed round) the scores on the whole were quite good. I don't know what kind of setup you had, but the image shown below is how I did it. While not recommended by any means, it is possible to run five at once with tablets.

I actually thought that was a rather unusually good question for Buzztime. If I recall correctly, they didn't ask what defined a chordate, the question was more along the lines of "If you're a chordate, you must have ... ?" Out of the answers I saw, "larynx" and "knee cap" were obviously wrong, and -- despite the need for a little out-of-the-box thinking -- "digestive system" was correct (i.e., all chordates have digestive systems, even though not all creatures with digestive systems are chordates). I wish there were more questions, especially in premium games, where they weren't looking for the obvious "pre-call" answer, but made you think a little harder to get it right.

I had a 2x2 then one to the left of the square (middle line) once it was clear my dad wasn't showing up.


Great scores man.

Now that the top three winners have been posted for Smartest Bar, I would love to get your feedback and ideas on how to improve the competition.

First, Jamie, thank you and BT for bringing back Smartest Bar. As an admittedly minor contributor to the 3rd-ranking team, and having participated in many previous BT events, I feel that Smartest Bar is the most interesting and fun of all BT's promotions.

As to how to improve it, let me get the obvious out of the way and suggest that you:

1) Return to the original, multi-month format with some prizes based on region. I think this generates more interest in the game, especially among teams that think they might not have a shot at #1, but could maybe do pretty well locally.

2) Pick pretty much any day but Sunday. That's a day when sports tends to dominate (making both parking and TV "real estate" difficult to come by at many locations).

A final thought, though one I'm not really sure how easy this would be to implement: Decide in advance what difficulty level you want the questions in the game to tend toward. This year seemed to be a mix of insanely hard and pretty easy (more so in some games than others). I personally like the questions to be on the moderately difficult side, but you might attract more players with somewhat easier questions.

&

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liljol, still residing in a humble lil abode in Buzztime's Backyard, San Diego County, in The Horribly Site-Poor Golden State, California...

<--805 NTN Buzztime sites visited as of 11/13/2018...

F CUBS!!!!! FBOSOX!!!!!

FPDRES!!!!! FCHGRS!!!!!

1. Give a longer lead time between the announcement of the competition and its beginning. COOGS and I would have been interested in playing, but we'd booked (pretty much at the last minute) a nonrefundable trip that we could have taken at a different time if we'd known it would be over two tournament nights and thus eliminate any chance we might otherwise have of being competitive.

2. Don't have it on a Sunday during NFL season. Even if the football is technically over before the tournament game begins, locations that overrun with the football crowd don't clear out immediately, and even if they do, frequently are out of or at least running low on specific beer, menu items, glasses, etc. Absolutely the best day would be during the regular Wednesday night SIX. There you would get not only the people who usually play, but inactive Wednesday players lured back by their teams or just the desire to try for the gold by putting a new team together.

Brooke/AARDVK

Six is usually too easy for the top tier of teams. Smartest Bar should be a cut above and promoted as such. Even just a faster pace, shorter response time, would give the perception of higher difficulty. Also

-expand the matching round from 4-way to 6-way. The name of the game is Six after all.

-make a special effort to Google-proof the final six questions. Although the top tier of teams do not look up answers, the lower tiers of teams believe they do and are incentivized to try it. I saw this firsthand this year. Cutting the response time by a studied fraction is part of the combat against this as well.

-the three month structure over the five month span, with the ten zones and the 80 location final pool, were the entire charm of the tournament. This year was a gutted inferior version that charmed no one. Pick three nonconsecutive months in 2016 and announce them well in advance. I'll open the opinionating with a suggestion of April-June-August and right now wouldn't be too soon to start promoting it. You might consider using your software structures to run and promote month-long simulations beginning immediately.

The arrangement of different zones across the country in the past was indeed a draw to compete for that divisional top spot, as Whales said, before the finals. The spread across many months with breaks did help with player attendance and support.

The difficulty level this year was plenty tough in the one game on Oct 11th, I was able to play. I think that game would have met the approval of any team. I don't know how the rest of the games were difficulty wise.

The reason I was only able to play one game and the same goes for all of the others team members from BWW Gaitherburg...it was on SUNDAY. That's the worst day of the week.

Thursday would be the best for next year.

Jamie, thanks for asking for player input, it's quite a new experience in my 25+ years of playing NTN/BT.

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

LET'S GO ....Orioles!!!!

Oh, Whales, much though I agree with all of your points in principle (especially your point about "Google-proofing" the questions), be careful what you wish for when you ask BT to make technical changes to a game. Historically, they just haven't been very good at it. In fact, if they tried to change Smartest Bar even slightly from the current format, I would predict at least one of the following scenarios:

1) Some locations and/or players would be locked out of playing, for at least the first week or two. I've seen this happen once or twice before. (Buzztime's usual response is "That's why you get to drop your lowest score" ...)

2) The final scores would not be reported, or mis-tallied, or at least not displayed. (This appears to be happening with other games right now, judging by another thread in this column. And it has been suggested that the reason for the problem is that BT isn't running the Smartest Bar promo any more!)

3) Some bizarre/exotic problem crops up, like the intended questions are replaced by some years-old specialty game that doesn't fit the format and makes no sense. And yes, I've seen this happen, too, when a format change has been made. It was pretty hilarious, but not what you want to see during competition time.

So, much though I'd like to see it tweaked, I'd strongly suggest that BT keep with the current Six format for Smartest Bar. They're just not very good at attending to details when things change. Hell, even during the first Smartest Bar tourney a few years ago -- which was just a re-skinning of Six -- they had a "Macthing" round instead of a "Matching" round. I don't even mean this as a slam against BT any more -- it's just how things are. Over the past few years it's actually become kind of endearing, like watching a Mr. Magoo cartoon.

&

I agree with pretty much all of the previous comments.

Sundays should be taken off the list of possibilities, go back to the regional competition like previous games, Thursday would be a better day. Make a game plan, and stick to it. It may take a few years to build it back to what it once was.

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http://www.buzztime.com/profile?pid=4095712
http://www.sixchallenge.com

Sadly yes, technical changes can show to be disastrous initially. A few months of pure simulation could help with that, since Buzztime already put so much resource into building new pages for compiling Smartest Bar, they could put those to use year-round to get people acclimated to the rhythm of a qualifying month, discovering who their local rivals might be within their zone, selecting and settling into a comfortable supportive location to play, and finally dryrunning any technical changes they might make. Why not aggressively commit right now to an April-June-August structure and begin simulation months as early as December.

Definitely not on Sundays during NFL season; I think otherwise Sundays would have been acceptable, although the best night in my estimation would be Wednesdays. (Thursdays would be good too.)

-- RWM

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"...It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED...."