New Scaratings

Has anyone else tried this app? It is an intriguing situation because theoretically you could end up on tv playing for money. You play on the app answering trivia questions against another person in a ten question competition. Each question you have 5 seconds to answer but you see the question before the choices for a second or two like with Buzztime. The first five are worth 10 points, 6-8 are worth 20 and 9-10 are worth 30 points. I started playing it and I'm getting almost all of them right. I'm not the best trivia player, I mean if the questions they ask were on Buzztime I would have several perfect games, so some might find it not very challenging. Then again if you are not up on pop culture then you won't do well. Maybe it is because a lot of the questions on this are current events, music & musicians, tv shows, movies, and some general knowledge that I have been getting them. I mean the hardest questions I have seen is "What is external otitis?" and "What does Fi stand for in the Marine motto Semper Fi?" I mean I got both but I had to stop and think for a second, it wasn't as easy as say "Which of these 2013 movies starred Adam Sandler?" or "Which pope retired this year?"

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I played the web version. I agree the questions are pretty easy. I won all but two of my matches and qualified for "Line Jumper" status in about 30 minutes.

It was somewhat interesting, at least. Like most quiz shows today, it was kind of staged like Millionaire in the sense that the first round are gimmes, the middle round is slightly more challenging, and the last round is the round is somewhat worth watching.

As usual, it didn't seem like much 'reality' as they made sure the 'pretty' people got on TV. Even the "we're flying you overnight to play on TV tomorrow" seemed very much staged.

I was surprised they didn't get the Insects question. I can't remember when that one was in the news but it didn't seem like *that* long ago.

I was also surprised they didn't get the Volcano one, but at least that was a lot more recent news.

I take it the Doubler can be used as often as you wish? You'd think they'd have a limit on the number of times a player can use it.

On the final question of the night, I thought the woman made an error by choosing not to answer it. She figured out she had to get it right to win, but if she was paying attention to the guy in the money chair, she would've known he was a computer science guy (someone very likely to get that question right). So even if she didn't know the answer at all, her 25% chance at guessing it right would've given her a better chance than passing it back to him to answer.

Does only one player win money? Or are the final four on winners row all guaranteed to win money? I'm not sure the viewing public likes a winner-take-all show. The appeal of Millionaire is at least everyone in the hot seat wins money (except for the few that fail to get out of the first round). Since production costs for a show like this are extremely cheap (at least compared to what it costs to air a scripted show), you'd think they'd give everyone who got in the money chair at least some money. But since NBC is the last place network, maybe they can't even afford to give away chump change

I submitted an application for screen testing within two hours of the opportunity opening, and I did get as far as an actual screen test (ahead of qualifying for line jumper, ahead of attending a cattle call). My life story interested the casting crew, particularly the career military/burn survivor aspects.

I nailed the screen test. I did well. I haven't been called.

Two points:

1) I'm not, nor have I ever been, especially good-looking. I'm older and heavier than almost every contestant on the show thus far.

2) I got 50 out of 50 on my online qualifying test in seven out of twenty allowed minutes. I hit the answers fast enough that they know I didn't Borg.

One or both of those factors is why I wasn't called.

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By the way, pardon my not spreading the word here: I sincerely believe that most of the men and women who could reasonably beat me at such a game read this Board, and I preferred to try to win.

Edit: OK, my wife has watched this quite a bit, and I've watched for a few hours online. Observations:

1) There are two huge advantages to being in the New York area. One is logistical support from friends and family to stand in line for days (and to spruce up at the end of the line). The other is that most off-air games have a New York-specific question. All four players on Winner's Row are currently from the New York Metro Area.

2) Linebreakers only appear once per day. From all of the screen tests both before the simulated games and of those who excelled at the online games, only twelve of the several hundred contestants are or will be linebreakers brought in from outside New York City. Given their performance, it seems that those chosen weren't the smartest.

3) The several hundred contestants DO NOT include everybody who waited to get to the head of the line. There are scenes of the Subway Sandwich waiting room, and most of those shown don't later appear on the streamed show. The screening is not on knowledge: the contestants are 50:50 male-female, with males having an average BMI of about 26 and women having an average BMI around 32, but with the average male destroying the average female in performance. Furthermore, few chosen to compete appear to be over 40 years of age.

That Beatles question they both missed last game was a former Encore question in Playback

BTW, the ratings for this show aren't very good. The media has been blaming the show itself. Which surely is part of it. But I think a bigger part of it is NBC has been a total bust of a network for at least the last half dozen years now (except for Sunday Night Football and The Voice). And the funny thing is no matter what rating this show gets tonight, it'll probably double or triple the rating of NBC's normal Thursday night lineup. That's how far NBC has fallen.

But one of many criticisms of the show is that the rules don't seem to be made clear at all. Take tonight, for instance. I thought for sure the semifinals would be 1st vs 4th, then 2nd vs 3rd, then the winners meet. Instead they played 3rd vs 4th, giving 1st a bye into the championship. That makes it very important to finish 1st. Had the contestants known that, they may have tried a different strategy

You missed the biggest problems: they constantly changed the rules to have henpecked players on the show (Rishi and Brandon), different rules for the games not on TV, only bringing in bags of boobs as supposed live jumpers, and finally having a never ending parade of dipshit New Yorkers that couldn't fight there way out of wet paper bags at trivia.

Why should I, in Nevada, or any place outside if the Tri-State area give a flying fuck about a show they i can't appear on unless i foot the travel bill (except the pretty, young, and blonde girls from Utah)? They also had a 'casting interview' at a trivia tournament in Vegas about a month ago, and it was painfully obvious that most didn't have the knockers to qualify.

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

The casting team (which I believe was independently contracted as a group) was under the impression that the show wanted the best trivia players, with a strong bias for knowledge base. They thought that the secondary facets were appearance and "life story." Candidly, they thought that my combination of military service, burn survival, and extensive volunteer work rocked, along with my ability to walk into a bar and rank first in the nation at Buzztime once or twice before departing.

They were wrong. The producer, Ryan Seacrest, had other priorities.

There was no way for the average guy to make it on the show, period. As the entire nation now knows, the "line jumpers" were chosen for being telegenic, with little regard for whether their trivia knowledge really matched that of the local champions picked from line. Of my group interviewed and tested for three days in Washington, DC not a soul was chosen to appear on-air. But there were videos of the line, there were videos of the Subway sandwich waiting room, and there were streaming videos of the off-air competition. The demographic mix changed as the line hit the waiting room--meaning some, apparently many by observation, were turned away before that point. The demographic mix changed again before people were chosen to compete off-air. Here's what I observed:

1) Young women with very pretty faces made up 50% of those chosen to play. Women without pretty faces were culled from the line, as were women over thirty. I saw one woman approaching her fortieth birthday competing well--but not quite well enough--off-air. She was the outlier.

2) Slender and fit men were chosen to play. The eventual champion, Andrew, was among the heaviest chosen to compete. He's got a 36 to 38 inch waist--he'll get big with age--but he's a young law school graduate, and he's still near the national median of BMI for men. A very few older men competed, but the weight issue was an absolute disqualifier. (As an aside, when I applied, I made it clear on the application that I was overweight, and they had a recent photo...the independent company brought me to the screen test, anyway.)

3) Being White Hispanic may have been a disqualifier: neither my wife (who watched on-air) nor I (who watched online) saw a White Hispanic selected to play. Also, all African-heritage Americans who sported anything other than business-appropriate casual professional or professional attire were denied the chance to compete. Whites and Asians in very casual garb got to play...but not Blacks. The line apparently had lots of both of those demographics (casually-clad African-heritage and White Hispanic individuals), and they never got to play.

But the bottom line is that unless you met certain criteria--which neither you or I would've met because of our weight, LEWSER--even standing in line was a waste of time. I found that misleading. From the pre-production blurbs, I'd thought that most of those in line would advance to compete for the money chair. That wasn't true. By casual observation of the demographics of the many line interview shots versus the demographics of the show, a substantial majority were disqualified because of age, weight, or ethnic appearance even before competing.



Pretty and young were the two qualifiers for women, and it seems that more women than men were screened to get that 50-50 male-female mix...yeah.

Many old/fat trivia players were shown, but never during probe time. They would never make the telecast, they had who they wanted and had them sit around until it was time for TV.

PS, don't tell me you are using this 'white Hispanic' crap as well?

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

Que?

LEWSER, I never saw any old women or fat men in the several times I glanced at the online stream. I didn't watch 24/7, nor even 1.5/7...if you saw old women and fat men by watching online, great. I didn't see them compete. I only saw them in line, waiting.

Regarding "White Hispanic," those are the words that communicate the meaning I needed. If you felt a visceral reaction at reading them because of their use in a Florida incident recently, well, I did at typing them...but it was the best way to communicate the point.

I did see a well-dressed thirtyish woman I'd guess to be Dominican who competed online with some name suggesting Hispanic origin.

Now if you meant to convey they didn't make the prime time slot, that would be true. I didn't watch more than a few hours, but I do know about 20 or so that made it into the chair. None of them were a part of the target demo. Quite a few of them were fat and old.

Oh, what is wrong with using the term Latino? Is it cool, to now use a stupid ass term that the media made up to raise the ire of the Black community? You will never catch me using one of those stupid terms that the PC Police like to make up.

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

"Latino" denotes Hispanics of both European and African ancestry. I saw no White Hispanics; I did see a Black Hispanic. I was attempting to convey that aspect of my observation.

It did seem, and still seems, odd that in a city that's over a quarter Hispanic, with many of those Hispanics being light-skinned, I saw not one on the show, either on-air or off-air.



Wow! Not only did they have a completely different contestant group when you watched, but they were going WAY faster! I was only seeing four matches per hour, or five contestants per hour. Each match was 500 seconds, or 8:20, and there was a little dead time (about six or seven minutes) between matches. They went dead air, showed Subway ads, and switched to live Winner's Row footage in those moments. If you saw 20 fat and old contestants in just a few hours, and I only saw about 50 contestants total in ten or twelve hours, they must have been both choosing very different demographics and working at remarkably different tempos at different times.

Anyone here ever heard of Ed Toutant? Steve Perry? Diane Tenery, Shane Whitlock, Jean Cui, amongst many others. It is quite, whatever.....

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Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.