What can be improved:

You can't tell from this screenshot, but one of these hosts is human and personable and the other is... not.

Emphasize the live host

Sure, host Chris Cashman's spoken shtick during stat breaks and before commercials is a little corny, but he's a game-show host -- corniness is in his contract. That notwithstanding, these live chat interludes are 100 times more interesting than the prerecorded female avatar that narrates the question-and-answer portion of the game like a lobotomized robot. While Cashman can pepper in comments on the One's current streak and his choice of fashion or handle, all the robo-hostess can add are brain-dead comments like "The correct answer is ... X!" or "Let's see how many Mob members just didn't have a clue," repeated ad infinitum. After roughly five minutes of this claptrap, you'll be ready to mute the speakers until that little "On Air" sign pops up on-screen.

Let Cashman out of the commercial-break ghetto! He can keep quiet during the actual questions -- let those stay quiet -- but once the answers are locked in, let him pop in with some easy banter about the question ("Looks like the One thinks Ringo Starr was a member of the Monkees. Let's see if he's right!") and the Mob's response ("Looks like 35 of you didn't know that Brazil was in South America. What's wrong with you people?")

There may be technical or logistical hurdles to streaming that much audio, but it's worth it to work through them. Having a truly live host is one of the biggest things setting 1 vs. 100 Live apart from every other videogame trivia show ever -- don't be afraid to use it to its fullest.

Racking up points is all well and good, but I want to be able to lord them over everyone else!

More stats

While the lucky few that get chosen as "The One" or members of "The Mob" will get to compete for real life prizes, 99-plus percent of 1 vs. 100 Live players only get to compete with each other as part of "The Crowd." Thankfully, the game keeps track of Crowd members' progress with a detailed point system that takes into account correct answer streaks, reaction time and question difficulty. There's only one problem with the system: It's nearly impossible to figure out how your score compares to the rest of the Crowd. What good is having 15,000 "points" if I don't know how many points everyone else has?

Yes, I can compare my score to the other three people in my immediate play group, but who knows if they're representative of the Crowd as a whole? Yes, I can look at the top-10 scorers list and see how my score compares, but unless I'm actually in the top 10, I don't know exactly where I stand. Yes, the stat breaks occasionally break down the Crowd's stats in bar-graph form, but knowing that I'm one of 18,000 people that have a correct-answer streak of five or more questions isn't really that helpful.

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.

Um... who are you pointing at?

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.

To fix all of these problems in one fell swoop, why not reveal all the answer options at once and leave a short gap to read them before allowing people to ring in with an answer? By keeping the answer timing consistent, you remove the hair-trigger frustration that comes with trying to ring in the very moment an answer shows up. What's more, you make it easier to figure out the timing for the "instant answer" bonus, which currently seems a little touchy (I swear I've missed it despite hitting the button at the first possible moment).

While we're at it, it'd be nice to be able to change my initial answer before the timer runs out. There have been quite a few times where a slip of the finger led to a wrong answer for an embarassingly obvious question. I'll take a penalty to my time bonus, but if I know the right answer, I don't want my twitchy fingers to do me in.

OK, we get it, you're happy. How about showing us a different emotion, huh?

More Avatar emotions

Yes, jamming the Y button to make my on-screen Avatar do dance moves was fun ... the first time I did it. Believe it or not, though, sometimes I want to express an in-game emotion that doesn't correspond to one of three different funky dance moves. Even a simple four-emotion system like that in LittleBigPlanet would let me show surprise at a correct guess, sadness at an incorrect answer and anger at a stupid question, while still allowing me to show joy at my regular correct answers. Plus, it'd be nice if I didn't have to see the One make that same nervous face after every single question. Let the One project a quiet confidence or a beaming joy if that's what he or she wants.