And you get the 75 percent from where? You have no clue how many I Googled. Arguing with you is worthless. All accusations, and name-calling with no facts. I will end this by waiting for Terry's response.

Four options with one right answer. 75% of getting it wrong by guessing.

More than one question being Googled makes it more than 75%


EDIT: And I didn't call you any names.

I'm an English major with a penchant to be bad at math, but if you have ten questions with four answers each, and each question has one right answer, technically isn't it always a 75% chance of getting it wrong by guessing? If not, I am math-illiterate and will succumb to my lack of knowledge.

Or I'll Google it.

Or not.

One question has four possibilities. A, B, C, or D. Factor in another question and there are many more answer possibilities to choose from. A and B, A and C, A and D, even A and A. B and C, B and B, etc. This is why getting 10/10 by just guessing is as close to impossible as impossible gets.

Googled two. Want to change your math?

1/4 answer options correct is the same as 10/40 answer options in terms of ratios. I'm getting myself screwed up.

This is why I don't do math.
No more off-topic for me; I'm overtired. :P

It doesn't work that way, Kyle. lol



AA, AB, AC, AD, BB, BC, BD, CC, CD, DD. Ten possibilities to guess correctly on two questions. Divide by two and we are now at least 80% chance of you guessing incorrectly on one of them. Sure, I'll change my math.


EDIT: Sorry. 80% chance of guessing incorrectly on both of them. Or is it one of them? Either way, that's a lot of combinations and that's a big number.

EDIT: I got it! There's a 10% chance of guessing them both right. ten combinations and only one is right.

Math stopped being my strong suit when they started adding letters into it.
So I took their letters and departed for the world of English.

"Who is the best?" to "Who Googles the fastest?"

"If someone can google and still win the time test in a game like WTS, why are you more righteous?"

"Why is your win more fair because you may have taken a geography course or lived in more countries while I "fairly" beat you using google? The time element is the great equalizer in a game like WTS."

etc. etc. etc.

I have a couple of questions. Being a player that will never be in either the 'elite' ELO raters or a fast googler, is it really necessary to argue what type of strategy deserves, merits or earns a badge? Just observe the recent times it takes to win most of the hourly games at the higher level. Does it come down to google fast or true knowledge? Or does it come down to having played so many times, you don't have to read the questions, just the answers. Is the "skill" of being a fast clicker really a rewarding venture?

As for zipping out a 10/10 score in WTS in 39 seconds is outstanding, then adding in the cut/paste/search factor while googling two questions......whatever.

My motto is simple: Live and let live.

Exactly, Leelee. Live and let live. Let the people play as they want. No argument SHOULD be necessary. Yet some have different rules.

All I wanted was fair play by everybody here. No open books, no cheat sheets, no search engines while we are in direct competition with each other. But, you know what? You're right. Who am I to dictate how other people play? I'll openly say that I was wrong here, and if Terry wants to give me the boot, that's his right. I'll abide by his decision. I'm sorry Bubbles, and everybody else who read this.

You should not get the boot, and I appreciate your comments. Again, we all have a different definition of "fair play".

I'm still in awe of the 39 second perfect score while googling two questions. I mean really? How can others compete with that talent? Not to mention the talent of having played so much, you don't even need a question - just the answers. That was more my point.

Hopefully, this puts this thing to bed once and for all. Good night everybody.

Peace,

Dave

I am in awe of 'fast googling' - I cannot read the questions and answers, pick one, scroll to the next question any faster than an average of about 4 seconds a question, coming down to 3 in the Easiest game. Even without taking time to google, I am not competitive for speed! And I bet I have a lot of company.

If I were omnipotent and could prevent it, yes, I would prohibit googling from many of our games. I personally believe that these games should be a challenge of knowledge and memory -- not answer lookup.

That said, it cannot be policed. It is absolutely impossible for us to ever determine whether someone is googling or not, and therefore even debating whether it's right or wrong is completely pointless. I think it's against the spirit of the game, but some people don't.

We must accept that this is something that some people choose to do, and as such create disincentives in games (usually time penalties) to discourage such use.

What I'd like to know is, what precisely do you google when seeking answers to questions?

What % of the time when you google a question do you get the answer from a Funtrivia.com page?

And what % of the time do you find your answer on a site unrelated to FunTrivia?

I'm with Bubblesfun on this. I rarely google in Hourly games - I'm not quick enough to make it effective, and I've a good memory anyway - but I'm doing it a bit in FMI at the moment. I think there's a skill - as well as a lot of luck - to fast googling, and I don't really see any value difference between that and someone who's played the questions so many times that they know the answers by rote.

When I do google it's no better than 50:50 whether anything useful will come up in time. I bang in two or three key words, hope that the google page will load without a delay, and THEN hope I can read something helpful from the two-line summary associated with the top couple of pages without having to actually open a page up (which I've no time to do). They're never FunTrivia pages because you'd need to open them up to get any info. Sometimes messing about with google badly backfires and I'm left with a low score and a slow time - ah well!

What I do know is that googling at speed mentally reinforces the answer for the future, so if the objective of quizzing is to learn then actually it's a pretty effective method.

If I could work out a method for googling all 15 questions for Obscurity in 300 seconds I'd be well chuffed! How DO people win the Obscure Researcher badge?

Personally I don't have an issue with googling speed is still awarded over research with time penalties but if you really want to prevent at least a good portion of googling why not just get rid of the Funtrivia Encyclopedia page? That is just a giant answer sheet right there, I can find half the answers to my authored quizzes alone on there.

I presume the Encyclopedia page on cheating is supposed to cover this.

http://www.funtrivia.com/en/cheating.cfm

You learn something every day. I've been on this site over a year and, till just now, have never come across this Encylopedia. Whee!

I agree with many others that the best way to control googling is the time penalty on the games. Googling answers under pressure is one of the ways many players build their knowledge base, so it surely should not be eliminated entirely, but it shouldn't be possible to win a Smartest, Expert or Daily Mix by googling half of the answers.

On the other hand, there are slower players around who need more time to play a quiz without google than someone who looks up two or three out of fifteen. However, we have a tool just for this and it's called "levels".

Now what I am proposing may be a bit tough to implement, but ultimately it may lead to better gameplay: On those games where googling should be discouraged, two scores are kept - one is the standard score we use for the monthly average and the FT points (which is calculated the same for all players regardless of level), the other is used for ranking within a division (which is not).

So, for example, Smartest could use

1/second on levels 1-20
1.5/sec on 21-40
2/sec for 41-53
3/sec for 54-67
4/sec for 68+
and 6/sec for Champions.

(Note: It might be easier to code this by not varying the time penalty but by changing the question value for intra-division ranking. In this case, a correct question could be 200, 125, 100, 65, 50 and 30 points respectively with the time penalty always being 2.)

Since inherently slower players tend to stay at lower to medium levels, they will not have their fun negatively be affected by this progression while at the top levels and at champion level, knowledge and memorization will more and more trump even the fastest googling and also add a signficant feeling of playing at a truly higher level in the top tourneys.

This may also require one additional change to be made to expert (which might in general be a good one): When winning any level division but the top one, you are not immediately placed into Champion where a lower level player will be completely out of their depth (in many cases, the winner of the 1-20 division has far less a score than the 10th in 76+ or champ) but only raised to the next higher group for that topic. So a level 34 with 2 wins in Physics would be playing that topic with the 47-60 group and the level display for that person would show something like "34 (+2)".

Wes

The encyclopedia exposes data to google in order to give us deep indexing. We receive LOTS of traffic, and lots of new players through people googling stuff in Google and coming to FunTrivia because of it. While quiz "play" pages are googled, all of the interesting info is hidden. By sharing this info with Google, Google sends us a lot of love.

So it does serve a very important role in keeping FunTrivia a high visibility website.

There are things that I could do to severely impair its use. For example, whenever you click play on a game, your IP address is put on a "temporary encyclopedia block list". Then, for the duration of that game, you will be blocked from viewing the encyclopedia. This would prevent a great majority of its use from active players. Perhaps I'll implement this some day, but it hasn't seemed to be a huge problem to me.

I had no clue about it until now either! I have come across some of the "fun facts" pages along the way, but I thought they were just something random, not an organized encyclopedia.

It is organized, but it doesn't cover everything. If a person were to memorize it would help a ton. Googling can help yes, but its benefits can only take a person so far. For me, repetition has always been the most beneficial for me. If anybody here knows how much I have benefitted from doing things over and over and over again, it's you Alex. And over and over aaaaand over! FMI and Speed Demon in particular favors the obsessive type! lol

Now to get BACK to the discussion I wanted to talk about originally back on Friday. I am proposing a badge or badgelet which covers those who have won a WTS division in mulitple categories. My vision is STILL clear on this, and I think I merits a discussion. There are 15 categories in WTS, I like the idea of 10-12. Something bigger for all 15 maybe. It's like Expert badges for Jack of Many or All Trades. I believe WTS is THE signature game of the hourlies, and I find it puzzling WW has had more new stuff done for it than WTS. Perhaps something similar could be done for P of C. I think it would be really neat Terry. I really like the Da Vinci idea. It's a strong vision I have, and I think folks will like it.

I think Googling defeats the purpose of taking competitive quizzes.

That said, it isn't "cheating" to Google answers. I just think its not that fair to those who play from their mind, but thats just my opinion.

Several people have compared remembering questions from previous games by a few key words, and not reading the questions or answers, to Googling - as in both of them aren't educational.

But there have been efforts to crack down on this. Why do you think we have a Question Quest game? Why do you think we have so many authoring badges to encourage people to submit more quizzes? So we're fighting against THAT problem, just as we should fight against this one.

One thing that people seem to have overlooked:

Internet connection. It is extremely hard for me to score the best in timed games because my computer spend 5-10 seconds each game loading the page or submitting my answers. 5-10 seconds is quite important when you get to the top-three scores.

But I don't think it should be made even harder for me to do well because of my internet connection. I simply CAN'T google it (it would take to long) if I want to get one of the top scores - and neither can all of those who perhaps don't have enough money to upgrade our computers to the fastest modern ones.

Therefore, if there aren't increased efforts to crack down on Googling, its just discriminating against slower-internet connections, and in a round-about way, poorer people.

Now to get BACK to the discussion I wanted to talk about ORIGINALLY back on Friday. I am proposing a badge or badgelet which covers those who have won a WTS division in mulitple categories. My vision is STILL clear on this, and I think I merits a discussion. There are 15 categories in WTS, I like the idea of 10-12. Something bigger for all 15 maybe. It's like Expert badges for Jack of Many or All Trades. I believe WTS is THE signature game of the hourlies, and I find it puzzling WW has had more new stuff done for it than WTS. Perhaps something similar could be done for P of C. I think it would be really neat Terry. I really like the Da Vinci idea. It's a strong vision I have, and I think folks will like it.

I WILL talk about this again and again until it gets the discussion it merits. Period. The other discussion is SETTLED!

Perhaps WTS can get a mini-game of its own like Word Wizard and KO at some point in the future. Right now thought it's a fairly straightforward hourly game.

<< Therefore, if there aren't increased efforts to crack down on Googling, its just discriminating against slower-internet connections, and in a round-about way, poorer people. >>

You have no idea what discrimination is, do you?