New Scaratings

Well, I suppose that headline got your attention. My name is Tom Dietz and from 1995 to last month, I had the rewarding job of writing and editing trivia questions and games for NTN Buzztime. I’ve never been one to draw attention to myself but after putting in a quarter century of work I feel justified in giving myself just a little bit of credit. Hopefully this post doesn’t get too long or sentimental so here it goes.

In over 24 years, I wrote about 205,000 questions (Yes, I did keep track). About half the Showdown and Six questions you have seen over the years were written by me. Over 90 percent of the sports questions were also by me. The game I am particularly proud of was Brainbuster. I became its writer and editor sometime in 1996 and did every single freakin’ game for the next 24 years. The game was seriously threatened in 2008 when some evil people from Hollywood took over and tried to dumb down our content. In their defense, they were hired to do so by the CEO who felt the company had to shake things up and do something different. Anyway, the game won a last-second reprieve and was able to continue at the same level of difficulty.

Sports! I wrote and edited Sports Trivia Challenge and SIQ for several years. The Season, a game both loved and loathed, was mine. The Academy of Football was a project that required my writing over 3,500 questions in a four-month span. Mascots, stadiums, nicknames, colors, bands, fight songs and details about all the big games of the previous week. There was an important legal requirement for all the questions: don’t use player names! The Pulse was a much hated game. Thirty current questions per week, week after week after week. On vacations, I would take my computer and do the game from a hotel room or wherever.

I put together Playback games for about a year. That was way back before the game changed a bit with the addition of the dreaded “pound round.” I wrote some Passport games and a few hundred Topix games. Good Topix games, not the pop culture ones! My favorite ones were Quantum Mechanics and several games in which all the answers and clues began with the same letter. I am proud to say I never had anything to do with Trendalicious, Blur, Duh or games of that ilk. Sadly, I did get stuck doing Glory Daze for about 10 years or so and had to read all those lame jokes.

For about the last nine years or so, I was the editor and writer for Showdown and Six. I would read the weekly Showdown recaps by BEELZEBUB and REACH while praying nobody would find a mistake. When Buzztime had their own message boards I enjoyed interacting with the players on all sorts of issues. Some of you are quite opinionated and things got a little testy at times but it was all in good fun.

So now it’s all but over. It’s public knowledge that the company has cash problems and with the coronavirus lockdowns it’s going to take a white knight or some business miracle to turn things around. My sincerest thanks to Buzztime for giving me a great job for over 24 years and thanks to all you players who made it such a wonderful experience. To borrow a line from an episode of “Get Smart,” “As George Washington said in his farewell address to his troops: farewell troops!”


Sincerely Yours,

Thomas F. Dietz

Well... I've played Buzztime forever, too... started playing in March '94.

Funny thing is, even back when I was first playing and getting to know the best players in the Portland, OR area, there were always dire predictions from these and other veteran players that NTN was "never gonna last", "Going to die by next year", etc.

Somehow, the thang is still alive (barely) over 25 years later.

Dunno how it's going to keep it up... Been a great run, tho...

Thank You Tom D for all those years of good games. Most of us do remember you well from the BT forums, one of the few to inquire with the players about ideas. Thank you for that. BuzztimeNation did as well.

Sad to hear you said as of last month you are no longer with BT. I guess many writers and other employees meet the same fate?

It seems that the games are on autopilot the last few weeks. The prime games are mostly repeats, which I thought was because of the stay at home mandate. But maybe the writers are all gone?

So, we are on the computer generated Lunchtime, CD and Late Shift, all just running on autopilot till BT runs out of money.

Tom, your history of games written is astounding, I had no idea you had covered so many of the best games including my personal all time favorite that ended in '07.....Passport. That was a great game and it ending was the beginning of a long downturn and loss of players when BT decided they had run out of locations for Passport.

We are hoping for a Wall Street miracle to happen and fund BT for a few more years. Hope you land somewhere where your trivia writing skills can be admired by many.

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

LET'S GO ....Caps and Os!!!!

Tom D - I would like to thank you for your years of hard work, especially with my favorite game - Brainbuster. While everyone else moaned & groaned at playing it I was thrilled at the game where not only did you have to figure out the answers you also had to be smart enough to figure out the clues. I loved the challenge!

Thanks again & good luck with your future endeavors...

Tom D.,
Thanks for your bountiful work as a writer of (NTN) Buzztime games. You have left an impressive body of work, for which many of Buzztime's long-time players are thankful.

I find myself in complete agreement that your favorite games to write are among our favorite games to play. We are also in agreement that games like Trendalicious were an abomination. So thanks in particular for both Showdown and Brain Buster. My team, the Ragged Rascals in Albuquerque looked forward to them each week. These games were of high quality, and could be quite challenging, especially during our unofficial, fan-based tournaments.

So given the shear magnitude of the questions you wrote, I find it amazing that there were so few mistakes. I must admit, however, that whenever I got to write "Sic, BUZZIE, sic," in one of my Showdown Recaps, I did so with glee. It was never with malice...it was with the excitement that a student could catch the professor in a trivial error.

Having spent four blissful years as an Associate Professor at a well known military academy*, I can attest to the difficulty of writing unambiguous multiple choice questions. Whenever I found myself explaining how an answer "was the most appropriate" I knew I had written the question poorly. It happens. You can't always be smarter than the student. Sometimes the student sees the question from a different, but valid, point of view.

Speaking of points of view, how did you stay motivated to work on these games for 24 years? I burned out after writing seven years worth of Showdown Recaps. I was running on empty by the time I hung up my poison pen. So in my humble opinion, your longevity is also amazing.

Once again, THANKS and best wishes going forward.

BLZBUB in Albuquerque,
aka Ken Zeringue

*the little school for wayward boys and girls with stars in their eyes in Colorado Springs

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}}}--( (x) (x) )--->
Oh my gawd, they killed
Ken Z.
You bastards!

Tom—where to begin?

I suppose the best place to start is a humble, deep, and sincere thanks to you for the 200,000 ways you have enriched the lives of the NTN/Buzztime Community. You are one of the main reasons I have been coming out to play for the last 20+ years now. In so doing, I have had countless hours of fun and made many important and enduring friendships.

Second, I want to thank you for your responsiveness to the Community over the years. I deeply appreciated your presence on the old Buzztime Forums, even in the face of (I believe) undeserved vitriol from some folks from time to time. From a playership that has long felt frustrated at the fact that the people calling the shots at Buzztime would not listen to its player base, it was always nice to know that someone there actually WAS listening to us. The fact that you continued to keep tabs on us here is not at all surprising and deserves our genuine gratitude.

Third, I want to thank you for the extremely high quality of your work. Paradoxically, it is the truth that occasionally a questionable question or answer slipped through and drew the ire of some players (including at times, I confess, myself) that only underscores just what an exemplary job you did. The very fact that such incidents were so rare as to be deemed worth mentioning at all points to what a very high bar you set for yourself and the content team. If you can write 200,000 questions and only have a handful of misfires, that is a success rate to which the rest of us can only aspire.

Fourth, I want to thank you for being such a Magnificent Bastard—and I mean that in the best possible way. Except for that unfortunate two-month period back in 2008, I have always found the Brainbuster and Showdown games to be unfailingly devilishly—and even maddeningly—challenging, with extremely tough—but fair—questions over a wide range of subjects. It takes a special talent to humble a team as polymathic as ours; but if you only knew how often a question you wrote (especially late in a game) elicited despairing groans from us, I suspect that you would take a kind of perverse pleasure in it. And that is exactly the point: it was the consistent challenge of those games that kept us coming back week after week and year after year. To run that 41-question gauntlet and finish on top provided a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that one could never get from less-challenging endeavors. You have earned the greatest of respect from my team, and our sincerest thanks for bringing both the heat and the curveballs that tested our mettle every week.

So let’s see…in summary, that’s Thanks, Thanks, Thanks, and Thanks. Yeah, that just about covers it. Except for this: in addition to our immense gratitude, please accept our sincerest best wishes to you on all of your future endeavors. I hope that if (by some bizarre set of circumstances) we ever meet in person, you will let me buy you a drink or three.

_________________
Anon
"He may seem like Mr. Rogers but a dark spirit lies beneath."

_________________
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!!!!!

Thank you so much,Tom.You did a fantastic job.I have played a long time.I started at Sunsets in Woodbury, Minnesota when I ambled in and saw a screen with questions.Your sports games were well written.I enjoyed them.I did like the Pulse.Sure,it was not as challenging as some of the other sports games,but I still enjoyed it.The one thing all businesses could learn from this-Listen to your current customers.Too many of my favorite games were dropped.Most businesses do not have enough customers.It is important to keep them.Buzztime in my estimation lost far too many customers both owners and players by not meeting their needs.A job well done,Tom.

Thanks for the memories.

Just one question from us to you before we both go:

Over the last decade or so, the average Showdown score of the top scoring teams has dropped significantly from what they were back in the 90s and early 00s, a trend not seen in Six.

The Final Strategy question is:

Has Showdown become harder the last number of years?

1) Yes, it has and it was done knowingly
2) Yes, it seems that way, but it was not done knowingly
3) No, the players are dumber these days
4) No, the players are older and more forgetful these days
5) No, there are far fewer players and answers playing these days

Thank you again.

Finally, there is one other survival possibility besides a white knight or business miracle: the coronavirus lockdown may make a coronavirus loan/bailout possible.

Thank you, Tom, for letting us know the current status of NTN/Buzztime, as well as for all the questions for all the great games you've worked on for so many years. I remember you from the Buzztime Forum where I was one of the player moderators.

I started playing at Catbirds on Pearl Harbor Day in 1995. My now-husband who had been playing at other places in the Houston area for a year or so checked out the location as it was close to where he worked downtown. Besides a spouse, NTN/Buzztime has given me friends across the country, and friends here who got me into pub quizzing about 6 years ago. Now my daughter and I have a small trivia-hosting business, which is something I would never even thought of doing but for getting hooked so hard on trivia via NTN/Buzztime---not just on answering the questions themselves, but doing so working with other people.

Again, thanks for being part of a business that quite literally changed my life, and best of luck to you going forward.

Brooke/AARDVK

And let me add all the same best wishes from myself and on behalf of the Chicago crowd at Teasers, Walsh's and Sweet Spot.

Best of everything to you and I speak for many in saying that I have looked forward almost every week to the Tuesday night game line up of Brainbuster, Showdown and Glory Daze in one form or another for more years than I would like to admit.

Thank you for providing a product for which I was happy to be a customer. I hope it will continue in some fashion when the dust clears,

Lorin/Merkin

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Merkin

Tom,

I add my thanks to your many contributions to this pastime that so many of us have enjoyed over the years. (BTW, "Pastimes" was one of my favorites -- especially on those rare occasions when our crew at the old Cadillac Jacks/Kettering OH could top NYDAVY, etc.)

If the network does indeed shut down, what I will miss most is walking into a place I've only seen on the big board or on internet rankings, and meet like-minded people who share the love of this game, and enjoy our instant camaraderie over a few game boards and pints. Thanks again for all that you've done for us.

Terry/FOG, aka OBXFOG

Thanks so much to everyone and all your kind remarks. It may take me a few days but I promise to reply and answer all your questions!

It's always nice when one totally understands their audience as TomD did. Why else would he add the factoid "It must really suck to be a Mizzou fan" MULTIPLE times during sports games? Knowing full well everybody was going to laugh their asses off including the insulted Mizzou grad.

While I knew he wrote all the sports games, I was unaware he wrote the Tuesday games as well. Not many players/teams competed both of those nights, but we did each and every week for years. We never had to worry about content, it was always solid.

Tom, something that has bothered me a bit over the years is the Buzztime message board. It was tons of fun having you and other BT employees in addition to the other players. But I was in a position to encourage other players and grow the game among the average players and I tended to do just the opposite. And I felt more than a little guilty when the board was taken down. And for those actions, I humbly apologize.

I started playing in the summer of 1992 sticking to STC then on Thursday nights for the first month before branching out into the other games. I was hooked. From early 1993 when I moved to the DFW area to 2016 I probably averaged 50 games of SD per year. For at least 10 years probably averaged the same on whatever sports game aired on Monday night.

Those games changed my life for the better and I'm very thankful to Tom and other employees at NTN/BT for doing such an amazing job over the years. It's nice to work with people that care.

Other's have said it better than I could. Your body of work is astounding. I'm a bit of a latecomer, only seriously playing with the Albuquerque team since 2009, but I've thoroughly enjoyed the devilish challenges you presented each week. As BLZBUB said, with 200,000 questions and only a handful of mistakes, that's an amazing amount of quality. I hosted pub trivia for 4 years, and wrote weekly questions. I know how hard that is, and I produced maybe 1% of your output!

It was always obvious, the writer of Six and Showdown was a polymath. Your body of knowledge and deep interests impressed us all. I just wish you didn't have such an afinity for Opera. And Charles Dickens.

I still have to point out your most famous mistake. You asked, what is the Venus de Milo missing? In addition to her arms (your correct answer), you included "necklace" as a distractor. I still love that question. We would refer to it when we (very rarely) spotted a slight error. As BLZBUB would say "It's Buzztime, not trivia!". I hope you can see the affection we have in those comments, and thank you, for an incredble contribution the last 24 years.

I want to echo what everyone else has said. Thank you for your incredible work, Tom. Playing Buzztime has given me so much joy over the past six years, and if this really is the end, I don’t know what I’ll do to fill that void.

Best of luck to you!

I'm sorry to hear you are unemployed. As a trivia writer myself I tend to be very hard on other people's questions but I always thought Showdown was superbly done. I hope when the world comes back, so does NTN and that they bring you back.

Most employees, including myself, thought the same. How long can this last? I don't know how many years we posted negative returns but somehow the company survived.

Thanks, Bud. I signed some non-disclosure stuff when I left so I probably can't get into specifics about how many people are left there and how it's operating. Since the games are all repeats one would think it's all running automatically. I've enjoyed reading your insights on the company and its financials and strategy over the years. After a year or so with the company I purchased about $10,000 worth of NTN stock. I sold it recently for the grand sum of $282!

Were you one of the folks who played the NASCAR game? I forgot to mention I did that too. For some strange reason, there were lots of players who felt that asking who sponsored Ricky Craven's Pontiac was a dumb question. Sounded good to me! Well, to each his own.

Prior to working at Buzztime, Brainbuster was also my favorite. Loved figuring out the clues. One regret I had while editing was not having enough time to write more creative clues. If the answers were all countries, it was easy to just write NOT STOCKHOLM, NOT TOKYO, BUDAPEST instead of something more imaginative like NO SMORGASBORD, NO SUSHI, GOULASH.

I greatly appreciated your pointing out the errors so I could fix them in our database. Of course I didn't feel very good when first finding out there was mistake. An editor has a thankless job in that people only notice your work when you screw up. It's sort of like the old joke about being a hockey goalie. If you make one mistake a red light flashes, a horn sounds and 15,000 people stand up and cheer. Not fun!

As far as motivation, I burned out on two previous jobs so I was shocked to last this long. If I had been single and financially well-off I probably would have quit in 2008 but I'm married and had a huge mortgage at the time so there was really no choice - just keep working.

Yes indeed. I did take pleasure in inflicting pain.

Thanks Joel. My apologies to all the players who felt putting LILJOL as an alternative answer in Showdown was not a good idea but when there was a question about naming some evil mythological God, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to make somebody laugh.

Thanks for liking the Pulse. I recall you and your crew getting a ton of top finishes. One thing I never understood was the dislike for that game. There was a time when the premium games were run at staggered times so people on the west coast were seeing a "repeat" game that had run three hours before on the east coast. People complained about that and justifiably so. There was no premium sports game at the time and players complained about that also. So along comes The Pulse: a sports game that was shown at the same time across the network. You would think that would fit the bill exactly but the reaction was: We hate it! Ugh! FPULSE!! I guess our player base was just too difficult to please.

That's an excellent question that I have pondered the past two days and will now attempt to give my theories on.
The only choices that make sense to me are 2 and 5. My tendencies as an editor were almost always to go with a question that had some difficulty to it. It's just not my nature to throw a softball question. I mean, what's the point? Those questions in the first round of Six often irritated me. "Achtung! Berlin is the capital of what country?" So in Six, those freebie questions did not run in the early years of the game. I think they began in 2008 and continued to this year. That would make the scores higher. Also, as the years passed and we had fewer writers, more and more repeat questions were used. They would be eight or nine years old but they were still repeats. Lastly, I would see a lot of matching questions that were difficult or obscure and my reaction would be "Geez, how could anybody possibly know the answer to that?" I would not put those questions in the game. So it's very probable that Six was easier in the past decade.

As for Showdown, except for 2008, I don't recall ever hearing of criticism that the game was too easy. On the contrary, what little feedback we got was that the game was too difficult. I remember one from about 2014 or so that said something like "We are a group of highly educated college grads who have been playing for a long time and we find the game has become way too difficult and obscure." And they were right...I had unwittingly been putting a lot of hard questions in. So from then on I tried to keep questions about 18th-century philosophers and similar topics to a minimum. There was a pool of over 1,000 potential Showdown questions that I would create games from. By the time I left in March 2020, I would say 80 percent of them were unusable for the game. Questions about the Austro-Prussian War, 16th-century British royals, microbiology, thermodynamics, etc. What author (five choices I had never heard of) wrote what book (that I had never heard of). In what state is it illegal to have an ice cream come in your pocket? Stuff like that.

This post is taking forever to write. I got logged off and was unable to post the final version. Fortunately, I saved the first half so I'll have to rethink the final part.

Writing Showdown questions that were "Google proof" was not done deliberately in the 1990s and 2000's. I started to inject a few of them in recent years. I was hesitant to do too many of them for the Final Strategy questions. Yes, they foiled the Borg locations, but they also made it more difficult for ordinary human brains. The best team would win the game but in the few extra seconds it would take to answer, thousands of points could potentially vanish. So it could be that more "Google Proof" questions in the final question
could have resulted in lower overall scores. Or maybe not. Maybe the editor (he was the same from the game's inception until 2008) simply had a different opinion about the difficulty level of questions.

Having fewer players on teams would definitely lower scores. If you had 10 players on your team and over years that dwindled down fo six or seven, it stands to reason that your average scores would be lower.

My conclusions: The Six game was most probably "easier" in recent years. The amount of players (and the answers they knew but you didn't) dwindled. Possibly more Google-proof Final Strategy questions. Possibly more difficult questions simply due to different editors.

If your Final Strategy question would air, choices 1, 3 and 4 would vanish and you would be left at the mercy of the trivia gods.

I think either 2 or 5 would be correct.

This post took like two hours. I'm done for now.