STRO wrote:
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.
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.