New Scaratings

Did anyone who reads General Buzztime participate tonight (April 24) in what might be the lowest scoring Showdown in living memory? Four of our six qualifying playmakers at the Tailgate flatlined on Final Showdown, and we finished 21st. I don't believe there was a single site above 45K, and fewer than ten sites above 30K - confirmation or correction to appear on Buzztime's website in only a few hours.

Of late there has been a lot of unhappiness in my corner of the Buzztime community. From the several stories at my fingertips, I'll relate only one.

Among the several BWW corporate stores in Minnesota to have relinquished Buzztime, BWW-Roseville has been on my radar the last couple years. The Tuesday group that played there has had, until very recently, much better results playing Showdown than Brainbuster. My hunch was that they were googling their Showdown answers, but I never brought the subject up, neither to you folks on New Scaratings nor to any other public forum. Nor did I take a Tuesday off from the Tailgate to peer in on the Roseville players.

If they were googling answers, that would not have marked the end of their folly. Last Tuesday, a week ago, they appeared en masse at the Tailgate, a few minutes in advent of Brainbuster. The 4th and 5th players in my group were cut out, and we eventually hosted eight. I went to their table to remonstrate, and thought to flatter them by identifying their former site. At first they denied being Roseville players, and then asked which site in Roseville I might be alluding to (there are only two). My only purpose in approaching them was to point out that the Tailgate, which hosts only ten playmakers, and enjoys so little traffic that the saloon couldn't possibly recoup its investment in additional playmakers, could not accommodate two competing groups. I begged them to seek elsewhere.

The Tailgate isn't A-list, but Don Denton has us ranked somewhere between 4th and 9th, depending on the metric. I've been playing with BETH for more than ten years, the last seven at the Tailgate. Neither longevity nor excellence of play entitles me to droit de signeur, and playmakers are dished out, first come, first served. But the advent of the Roseville players was genuinely startling. In the past they've cracked the top ten in Showdown (without any of them carrying a 10K average in Brainbuster), but they must surely have been aware that there was an established group at the Tailgate. You always observe the teams who have finished ahead of you, especially local competition. In 2017, we would have finished ahead of Roseville no fewer than 46 tries out of 52.

If our circumstances had been reversed - if the Tailgate had quit presenting Buzztime, and BWW-Roseville had retained it, and any of us favored Roseville as a replacement site - I would have gone there alone, taken a single tablet, asked whether I could join their group; and if accepted, sounded them out regarding the availability of tablets amd the reliability of the equipment. If everything was a go, I would ask whether they would consider merging our two groups together.

Although the Roseville players might easily have verified that the Tailgate hosts only ten playmakers and typically ten or more players on Tuesday evenings, the possibility that they were intruding seems not to have registered with them. So when I approached them, I was self-deprecating, but I was blunt.

A few minutes later, the manager at the Tailgate came to our table and asked, "Did any of you accost the other table of trivia players?"

So I had.

"Don't do that. They have as much right to be here as you. If you have any problem with any of my customers, do not approach them. Talk to me, and I'll resolve the problem."

"I'll take your feelings into consideration," I replied.

Generally speaking, I'm reluctant to accept advice in questions of etiquette from women who are half my age, and whose manners have been refined in so delicate a workplace as a sports bar. There may be a reader of this post who believes the preceding sentence is sexist. Please take it on faith that no man would express himself to me with such effrontery. Miranda, much to her credit, has sized me up, and realizes that while I'm not her type, flattery in kind will get her nowhere. But more to the point, she knows nothing about Buzztime, and still less about the courtesy among its players.

"I don't believe you're listening to me. Do you understand me, Sir?"

"This place cannot accommodate two large groups simultaneously," I replied, as calmly as I could while bitching up Question 13 in Brainbuster. "You can't get your money out by acquiring more of these blue boxes. Let's just stick to the facts."

"YOU'RE NOT LISTENING TO ME. IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, SEE ME. I WILL TAKE CARE OF IT. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME, SIR?"

I had grown weary of repeating myself. The cream of the joke, from my perspective, is that BETH took Miranda's side of the argument.

"Really? You went over there and spoke to them?" she asked. "You had no business doing that!"

Well, shame on me. I thought the most polite and worthwhile Buzztime players were collaborative.

You've been playing there 7 years and this is the respect you get? Holy shit man. Perhaps you should have told her, "No, you're not listening to me".

Regarding the first come first serve for PM's, I do not agree if you are entrenched at a site. We've been playing Tuesday's at Stadium Cafe since summer of 2000 and for most of that time we've used each and every one of the 20 PM's. I would typically arrive by 4:30 and grab however many PM's we needed that night and place them in front of where each player sat. So there would be times that randoms would walk in a be looking for a box and be a bit confused by our table. But they never got one, if asked I would politely explain the situation. Sometimes that was good enough, sometimes it was not, but that's the benefit a group should get after playing at a site for so long.

Next week whoever gets there first just get however many PM's you need and see what happens.

Only respond to this because of first hand experience and concern over the BWW situation. The last couple weeks our group has actually been talking about the ramifications of BWW, even if it is a few corporate stores dropping Buzztime. Our local BWW is a franchise and has verbally committed to keeping Buzztime but as a location End Zone has 9 blue playmakers. For more than a year we have asked management to do something but it seems they have lost one and are unwilling to face the consequences of doing something to replace it. If BWW did drop though it may not affect our Showdown group directly, there are a lot of regulars that would probably be looking for a new trivia home and could cause issues if there are more people than playmakers.

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Homer:No beer and tv make Homer something something.
Marge:Go crazy?
Homer:Don't mind if I do!

How big a group? 20? 10? 5? Yourself? A group of self-important assholes, that is. I can only hope that people like that are given the cold shoulder when their site closes and they are sent begging. Way to make new friends!

Our group has grown by welcoming those who wished to play with us.

Well, I can see both sides of the Gone D story. I agree with BO, to the extent that if you are in a group that has been established as regulars for years at a bar, the management should probably give you the benefit of the doubt in a situation as described. That said, a bar does have to look out for all of its guests. While we love our trivia players we have had "regulars" over the years we'd rather not have had as regularly, if you catch my drift. Often, management has to wait for an incident to occur to have an excuse to try to rid the establishment of such folks. I'd hope that's not what happened here, as you seem like a good guy you're a valued member of our little trivia family here, but I dunno. I also don't know the size of the establishment or regularity of management shifts. That is, if this is a junior-ish manager at a big joint and she doesn't really know that your group is there every Tuesday, etc., I could understand her trying to keep the peace by intercepting herself any strife between patrons.

Most importantly, expanding the number of playing devices can easily pay for itself with only one night a week of play, as long as the players are actually eating and drinking during their stay. For the old Playmakers, it costs us an additional $105/month for every five. If a group of ten is generating at least $50 profit per week, it's a wash. I'd hope that each person is spending more than enough to cover that. How much more would make it worthwhile is a question for the establishment to ponder, but it's certainly ponderable. The incremental cost of more devices is much easier to stomach than the cost of having BT at all.

These have not been people wishing to join us, these were players that just wanted to sit at the bar and bang away at every third trivia question or play poker. All players wishing to join us even for a night have been welcomed, so long as they didn't sandbag of course.

Our group was 12-14 in number. These days we're lucky if we have 5 players, my schedule hasn't offered me the chance to play on Tuesday for a month now.

And again, some people may agree with how we handled things and some may not. But when a large group is loyal each and every week to the same establishment since 2000, we can and will make the rules. And management is OK with that.

I wish Buzztime would have kept the app. (I’ve lost the app on both of my iPhones now, after long-delayed, but eventually forced, updates).

I liked knowing that I could show up anywhere and play without disrupting anyone.

That would be a low percentage scenario. Haw haw.

Not that I play at night anymore, but we have 5 PMs out of a possible 40. Not working PMs, but FIVE total. My BW is dumping BT as far as I know, according to "corporate".

There will but a slaughter of trout if I don't have something else to else to do...EGADS!!!

To respond to AKBAR, BO, and KAUFMAN in particular, the regular Tuesday night players at Tailgate Sports Cafe don't wall ourselves off. Both KAYFAB and I are willing to give up our playmakers to strangers. So if you ever find yourself in Minneapolis on a Tuesday night, you can count on getting a playmaker, as well as a seat at our table. The conversation is generally good, as little as I participate.

We observe two rules: no hoarding of playmakers, and only one per person. If we only have three players, we're playing for individual glory rather than a site score.

So small a group hasn't been an issue in more than a year. I was approached by a group of five players who asked if they could join us, and my response was that it would be tight, but we'd work it out somehow. Fortunately two of the players retain older operating systems on their phones, and still have the app. That said, I wish to point out that the group which jumped sites to join us made a request. The Roseville players did not, and apparently were as startled as the Persians were, to learn that the Greeks were not seeking to be colonized.

$105 for an additional five playmakers would be a steal - if the original ten playmakers were paying their own way. But the traffic through the Tailgate is very light, and I think it would be impolitic of me to ask the owner to examine the economics of this particular customer perk. I'm buying $100/mo in booze, with an additional $30 split between Tanya and Mindy for their service; but the other players tend to be light drinkers. Much to their credit, they do eat. I should learn to emulate them.

Note the operative word “could.” Not that I WOULD show up and play without disrupting anyone, but that I “could.”

Though, yes, point taken, it would be out-of-character for me.

Has anyone ever explained why Buzztime is no longer supporting the app? It's annoying that the number pattern does not match the real playmakers (so you really have to pay attention when playing both simultaneously), but it's certainly better than nothing. And if a real playmaker's battery died, I could get the app going during the break without having to interrupt a server.

Another unintended benefit is that it would show you the closest places with Buzztime, much quicker than looking it up on Buzztime or Don Denton's site. It would also verify if there were none. (The farthest I've been to the nearest Buzztime site, according to the app, was 1435.79 miles.)

I would be willing to pay for the app to guarantee two playmakers.

GYPSY

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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!!!!!

You still have to be there to see the questions! It's an in-venue experience, whether I like it or not.

Gotta go look up TapTV ...