New Scaratings

Hi All,

I am having trouble with copy paste from Facebook to here, so I urge everyone interested to go to Facebook Friends Who Like Buzztime for a hopefully constructive proposal I have made to Buzztime.

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Merkin

I’m not in that group can you try to copy that FB post 1st to notepad and then into here?

Thanks.

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

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

I had this relayed to me by someone else, so:

Hello Buzztime Management,
I have been a (very) long time player and will continue to be as long as there is a game. I attended your call last week and am very excited about your new plans and in general very thankful that you have carried the game through the pandemic until now.
As a player, my first ‘priority’ is a game that works, in a technical sense. If you have been reading here, BadBart or Scaratings, you will note that there are many examples of system bugs and player confusion noted. For me, for example, a ‘burp’ occurred during Six, taking away a question value and it’s bonus (Teasers-blue boxes) and our Sports scores compiled locally, but did not post to national totals (Walsh’s, phones and IPads). Please don’t take this as a fix these now request, but rather as examples in a given week. What steps can we as your most dedicated (knowledgeable about the game?) users to help cure the game of these bugs and also have accurate expectations of what will happen next (when Spotlight will be back at phone, IPad bars).
One idea that might improve player confidence and consolidate feedback is a (monthly?) conference call with your representatives and those among frequent players who can report that is happening in the field. BUD in Maryland and STRO in Brooklyn would no doubt join me (Chicago) in this for starters. We could gather questions from the field and report your thought to them to set expectations.
Please consider this. Anything you can do to improve our game experience will hopefully improve your customer base and experience.
Lorin Burte/MERKIN/Teasers and Walsh’s, Chicago and Westmont, IL

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

Sure that sounds fine. I doubt BT will go for it or even read about it. But if they do I can put in my 2 cents on any call.

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

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

Adam replied that could officially join the monthly call and present an organized list with the caveat that nothing would likely be done for the blue box bars as they are migrating away from them.

Gotta get that done at Teasers. System dropped the first Marathon Sports q, costing us 2590 points each.

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Merkin

Sounds good. Let me know where to join. Blue boxes getting decommissioned has been known for a good while. Tablets soon after that I’d guess.

The questions I have are about the vast number of problems and differences with the no box 1st gen site hub system.

The switch from boxes/tablets to the no box system at every bar needs to be seamless and game play should be very similar and it’s not, vastly different experience. Most of the problems can be fixed. (I hope)

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

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

Thanks for spearheading this, MERKIN--it's a good idea and I support it (as long as it does not somehow involve eating children eventually ).

As we finally got our BGN hardware installed this week, we are finally in a position to see and comment on how things are going on the other side. The good news is that we seemed to have fewer glitches this week than we have in past weeks (everyone in the location being locked out of questions, etc.), although a few folks still got randomly kicked out in a couple of games. As STRO has mentioned for Bullseye, we had no choices in the Category Round in Showdown, and I think this more than a little glitch--it does make a small, but meaningful shift in the competitive balance of the game between sites that can vote and sites that cannot. I think it does need to be drawn to BT's attention by someone in one of these calls.

It remains a mystery to me why the original, c. 2011, BT app had no problem letting you play the game and vote on the Category Round, but it seems to be a significant problem in 2025. Unfortunately, my knowledge of programming more or less ended with Fortran 77 back in the last century, so I am not knowledgeable enough to make suggestions. Maybe one of y'all are.

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

This is not a matter of eating children; it's more like eating Gramps.

Buzztime has been doing this for almost forty years. They've used all kinds of different hardware and software during that time, implementing
different and even contradictory ways of providing the game. Much of what was done is still out there and expected to work and interact with much different generations
of product and much different generations of programming (including a lot of what seemed like a good idea at the time to those long gone but wasn't).

The company is a shadow of its former self being run on a shoestring budget, but this picture has become not less but more complicated with two new platforms in the past few years to add to the problem of the old and older stuff, some of which is so old you can't even get replacements for it when it breaks, being run by old programming that isn't really understood by the current caretakers, which nonetheless needs to be synchronized with today's new stuff.

In short, this is a mess, but not an uncommon one for companies that have been around for more than a while. Given the age and state of the old stuff, it makes sense to say, "Enough," junk the old stuff, and start fresh with one universal standard. It will be more efficient and cheaper in the years to come. Great idea, but now try doing that with just a few people. What I think we're going to see are a number of shortcuts being taken just to get the new equipment versions of the game out the door, and go back to restore them later, maybe.

Please keep in mind that this is not Google or Microsoft or Facebook that is doing this. This is being done by just a few people and little money.

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

I've still got my Pascal college textbook among many other useless languages.

BT has always had the habit of only updating their code when absolutely necessary. The last year of QB1 was around 2011 and the game code was still mostly the original from the 1980's, I kid you not. There were some things that needed to be done but nobody would dare touch the code because they had no idea how to do so. When talking to the team in Carlsbad it got to be a running gag.

Same thing with trivia over the years, when the blue boxes first came out all games were using code that was really old. But when they brought Six back, it was the first game with new code. Any other game that was developed after that also used newer code. But they didn't want to touch the other games for fear of crashing them. Eventually they started porting over the premium games and introducing new graphics.

But all that was probably 2010ish and to my knowledge, there have been no major updates to any of the games which should mean the code for all the premium games is at least 15 years old. If that is indeed the case, getting these games to run concurrently and correctly on multiple systems is going to be a chore with a lot of trial and error that will be pretty visible to the knowledgeable player.

The tradition continues . . . . I would only add that the current programming staff is only a smallish fraction of what it was back then.

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“When I see the right and the ability to do everything granted to any power whatsoever, whether it is called people or king, democracy or aristocracy . . ., I say: there is the seed of tyranny, and I seek to go live under other laws.” --de Tocqueville

Thanks for the insights on this. I agree that it must be tricky to keep running a Frankenstein's monster with an old OS and three different heads using a skeleton crew.

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