Beta Notes: 1 vs. 100

6/24/2009 7:19 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 3

I want to know my precise score ranking among the Crowd, updated after every single question. I want to know how my average reaction time, number of correct responses and maximum streak length compares to the Crowd's in the same way. I want a detailed history of my rankings presented in a convenient line graph at the end of each round. I want to know my lifetime average ranking in each category, as a percentile. I want to know how many Mob members I would have knocked out if I were "The One," and how many aggregate Crowd members have missed questions that I got right. I want to know which question categories are my strengths and which are my weaknesses, with statistical precision. Basically, if it's measurable, the game should keep track of it.

The whole point of trivia shows is to prove how much useless knowledge you have compared to other people. The easier you make it to do this, the more people will enjoy the game.

Harder questions

See this comic? I'm reliably informed that it describes an actual question that appeared on the 1 vs. 100 Live beta the other day. You question-writers should be ashamed of yourselves!

First of all, this is supposed to be a trivia quiz, not a "general definitions of words every first-grader should know" quiz. Second of all, the multiple-choice answers on this question (and many others) make it incredibly easy to just guess your way through questions using the process of elimination. Yes, it's hilarious to think of using a giraffe as a parachute, but overusing these joke-answer options can make the game easy to the point of disinterest.

I'd be OK with having a few super-easy questions at the beginning of each round -- no one likes seeing the One eliminated on the first question (well, maybe some people do, but they're just cruel). In the beta, though, question difficulty has seemingly had nothing to do with the question's position in the round. I've seen lead-off questions that eliminate a quarter of the Mob and late-round questions that are easily answered by 98 percent of the crowd. The difficulty should ramp up quickly and reliably as a round goes on, to whittle down the stubborn Mob members that obviously know all the simple questions.

While we're at it, tone down the frequency of the videogame questions. Yeah, I love 'em, but if you're really aiming for a casual audience, asking about the names of levels in Modern Warfare is a real turnoff.

Better answer timing

As it currently stands, the multiple-choice answers for each question in 1 vs. 100 are revealed one-by-one, from left to right. Players can ring in with their answer choice as soon as it appears on-screen. I see four problems with this setup:

1. If you want to get the speed bonus for the first answer that appears, you need to ring in well before the next two answer options show up (this isn't necessarily a bad thing if you want to encourage people who know the answers before the choices show up).

2) You can deduce what other people in your group are answering by paying attention to when they ring in (this could be fixed easily by delaying the revelation of their guessing time).

3) If the first two answers are ridiculous (see "Harder questions," above), you can easily get the "instant answer" bonus by ringing in for the third answer practically before it shows up.

4) Your speed bonus is determined primarily by how quickly you can read the answers as they appear, not by how quickly you can ring in.