New Scaratings

Greetings! Long time no posting, and a post-Covid hello.

This isn't so much a traveling post as a "relocation". In the middle of the pandemic, we moved from Maine to Battle Creek Michigan. Now I'm trying to find a spot to call trivia home - at least until I can actually start traveling for work again. Moonraker sticks out in my mind as a former hotbed of Buzziness. Is there anyone who might be willing to make that the case again? Or should I seek out a different space?

It looks like Moonraker is the only place left in Battle Creek, and they had people playing there as recently as last week. Not much of a Tuesday presence, but there is some recent play on SIX.

If you ever find yourself in the Akron area again, please let me know--we're playing at the Red Fox in Cuyahoga Falls now.

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

Thanks! I'll try to pop in if I find myself in the area.

Six is probably the only prime time game played at Moonraker because it’s an app only bar. There’s someone on here or FB badbart playing there looking to play. Can’t recall at the moment but they are playing Six or was?

Good luck, seems like a cool bar.

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

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

I was pretty much the only player last night. Some had done the sports trivia right before I got there, but left before Brainbuster.

So, why doesn't the app do Showdown anymore? I thought it was before... Is it coming back eventually? I looked at BT's site, but didn't see any indication that the non-console system didn't have Showdown.

Great question. If anyone knows the answer, they're not telling.

I have my theories on this, though. When they brought out the new version of the app a few years ago, Showdown and Spotlight were not supported. At that time, the only major tournament BT was running was the Smartest Bar competition, which was focused on SIX. Because of this, and because that game was two nights a week (so one set of code could cover two premium games), I suspect that there was an imperative to get that premium game coded first.

As to why they chose to do Playback next instead of Showdown or Spotlight, there have been several theories proposed. One of the most common is that the coding was harder for those games because of the interactive aspect of the Category Round in Showdown and the "enter the year" round in Spotlight which are different from most basic game dynamics in Countdown, etc. I don't know enough about coding to know whether this is true or not, but it could not have been an insurmountable problem: the first app supported these games just fine.

So my theory is simply that they just ran out of money. All of this was going on as BT seemed to be circling the drain and looking for a buyer. It had already sold off other parts of the business, was consistently reporting quarterly losses, and its stock price had plummeted to the point where it was threatened with de-listing from the stock exchange on more than one occasion. It even stopped sending out prizes to the winners of the competitions it was running (several teams are still waiting for their Smartest Bar trophies from fall of 2019). I'm guessing that once BT got SIX and Playback running on the app, it intended to do the same for SD and SL next; but by then it had no resources left to devote to it as it went into survival mode. It laid off the vast majority of its staff during COVID and still seems to be operating on a shoestring as the new owner tries to right the ship.

The new owner has been alerted to this issue by several of us, but I would not hold my breath to see Showdown supported in the near future. In the longer term, hope springs eternal, though.

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

SD has been around since I started playing in 1992, Spotlight started in early 1994 I believe. I played the first game of it. These two are earliest of the current premium games and have remained mostly unchanged. Both Six and Playback underwent major alterations after 2000 which was when the network was changing over from the antenna box 49MHz system to the blue box 900MHz system. I seem to remember some games couldn’t be played on one of the systems because it was totally different.

During the last ~10 years of QB1 BT refused to make any changes because it was still supposedly DOS based and nobody was left that had a clue how to code it. My theory is it’s the same concept with SD and SL. Two games with ancient programming that nobody knows how to port it over to the current app. I’d guess that if they tried to, both games would break network wide.

I don't doubt the base code in SD is ancient, but it seems to me that SD underwent a couple of overhauls over the last 20 years: once to add the "bleeding points" on the final question (2002, I think?), and then again a few years later when they reduced it from 75 to 60 minutes and rebalanced points among the rounds a little. Also, the original phone app worked for just fine for SD--doesn't that mean the basic code is there in their possession already? (I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious--have things changed that much in the last 7 years in terms of coding these things?)

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

I think the delay is in 2 areas: one was mentioned, money and employees to facilitate the addition to the app.

Second and this is my thought only, is BT knows all about the rampant GPS spoofing/lag cheaters and does not want that creeping into Showdown as it has the other games. They will keep SD clean for as long as possible, until they fix the lag, if they can.

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

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