xtrain wrote:
Just my two cents worth. The increased difficulty of the Showdown game on Tuesdays, obvious to all who play and evident in the sharply lower scores, can only have the effect of discouraging all but the most skilled players, hence reducing the number of players--also evident in the line telling how many boxes were played. (Don't forget, many players, especially on small teams, multibox.) I can't imagine that a casual player in a BWW would be encouraged to continue playing after confronting a question like "What literary character has a sister named Grete who plays the violin?" which appeared last week. Is there some rationale for the increased question difficulty?
XT
I'm guessing their rationale would be something like: "Played in six unique rounds, Showdown® is the ultimate trivia challenge: A 60-minute game that touches on everything from pop culture to science and history to the culinary arts!"
Tough questions certainly contribute to the game being ultimate-trivia-challengy. And I say this a someone from a team that collectively had no idea on the Samsa question.
Whether or not tough Showdown games have contributed to a drop in playership I couldn't say, but according to Don Denton's site, average annual Showdown scores actually took their most dramatic plunge in the years between 2004 and 2012, and have largely plateaued (or even bounced back a bit some years) since then:
2004 49,437
2005 46,753
2006 44,963
2007 42,753
2008 44,381
2009 43,374
2010 43,283
2011 39,981
2012 35,364
2013 35,920
2014 37,238
2015 36,822
2016 36,330
2017 34,520
Any loss of playership subsequent to 2012, then, probably has more to do with factors other than with difficulty of games, which has actually been relatively consistent since then. Whether before or after 2012, though, I can think of several possible contributing factors off the top of my head: the ill-advised broad game changes made in 2008, the institution of the split network in 2012, the declining number of locations carrying Buzztime, and perhaps even the introduction of the new tablets. As mentioned, "playership" has always included multiboxers, and in nearly every location I am acquainted with, when the old blue boxes went out, they were usually replaced by fewer tablets. BWW-Kent, for example, used to have 30 blue boxes, but when the new tablets came out we only got 18 of them (I think--there have never been more than that working properly, anyway). This is anecdotal, of course, but I noticed a similar thing at other locations, too. If multiboxing is part of the equation, a fewer number of the tablets will naturally reduce "playership," even if the number of actual people is more or less the same.
Again, I don't claim to know what the all the reasons may be, but looking at these data--and knowing that playership has also dropped in non-Showdown premium games, too--leads me to believe the most important factors probably lie elsewhere.