GONE D wrote:
Another player disagreed with me, and to prove his point, while I recited the question and another player timed him, he entered 16 keystrokes on his phone and flashed the answer in my face in under seven seconds. This kind of timing is just fine for the low-hanging fruit in the Warm-Up and Pyramid in Showdown, but too slow for a quiz run on the Countdown engine, such as Brainbuster.
Nope. It's not too slow. I've personally googled an answer in the Countdown round of Showdown in time to get 1000 points on my 4 boards. Same with the final question in the Lightning round.
Quote:
If BO agrees with you, that my invitation is a Pandora's Box which ought not to be opened, he is unquestionably taking the high road, and with that I cannot quarrel. While questions of gameplay ethics fascinate me, I don't in fact need to know why BO can google Brainbuster but other players, accused of such, all seem to be...not very good at it.
To clear up a few things about the history of references.....
In the early 90's, many top teams used paper references. Dictionaries, almanacs, periodic tables, whatever. In the right hands in every round, they were effective as well. Later that decade the National West Covina team began the "borg wars" where quite a few of the top teams engaged in electronic referencing. At that time these were accepted practices. This changed as we got into the mid-2000's as many teams stopped the practice and the word "cheating" was used frequently. Eventually, all top teams stopped using references. Then with the advent of smartphones, it started up again. But this time with random ragtag teams who still use to this day.
So why are the googlers so poor? I tend to think that a poor trivia player just doesn't know how to properly parse a trivia question. If they knew how to, they would be better players without references. Also, a laptop works infinitely better than a smart phone. And most of today's borg just use smartphones.
I have zero interest in borging in a team setting. Showdown is harder than it used to be but the questions are just as simple to reference. I think that if we did borg for a year we might win 40 games. There will be an occasional game where there's a key question that is google resistant, but overall it would get very boring very fast.
There is one experiment I'd love to try. Play Showdown solo with a laptop and six boards. I'd have to create six new handles though: 1 of 6, 2 of 6, etc. Jeri Ryan can be my witness.