I voiced my concerns earlier about the difficulty of the Country badge (See this thread, although it's gone off-topic now), but now I've realised how easy it is to cheat on it by reloading.

I've played the Country quizzes a lot since I started the other thread, and I'm still convinced that the Country badge as it is now is virtually impossible to achieve without either Googling or using the above method. Looking at the pattern of results, I suspect that a lot of the recent winners are cheating. Of course, they may simply be Googling, but why would they bother if they can get the answers immediately?

If any previous winners of the badge disagree with my opinion that the badge is currently too hard to get by memorization, I'd be interested to see what scores they can get on it now - and how many attempts it took to get it the first time.
But even more importantly, can anything be done to stop the cheating?

Since you do not deprive anyone else of anything by using whatever means you choose to get the badge, I'm not sure it is cheating. It may take away from the satisfaction of winning the badge in a more straightforward manner, but you have really only cheated yourself. And some would argue that any method that is allowed by the system is legitimate.

I got the badge so long ago that I don't remember all the details, but I do know that I played the four quizzes each hour every hour I was on Funtrivia for over a month - I'm not sure how much longer. That included a couple of weeks of holidays, when I was able to play virtually all day. So I would venture that I played the sets several hundred times before I got the badge. I discovered Googling and retaking quizzes (accidentally) much later!

It could certainly be argued that anything allowed by the site is legitimate, but I'm guessing that the ability to restart with the same questions isn't an intentional feature... So far as I know the other challenges generally don't have shortcuts like this, so winning the badges is usually a real achievement.
And while it's true that winning the badge in a straightforward manner is more satisfying than taking a shortcut, if I know that most people got the Country badge by taking that shortcut, my pride in holding the badge (not that I do, yet!) is diminished.

I guess requiring 40/40 for the badge would mean memorising at least 95% (38/40) of the answers and then getting lucky on the remaining two. Is there any way of finding out the size of the question pools, so we could work out how many plays are required before this situation would occur? (Having said that, I'm not sure the questions are selected randomly anyway - once I had that question about Respiratory Somethingorother Virus for three different countries in the same hour!)

I also got my badge a really long time ago during a period of vacation time when I could be online a lot more than I am now. I didn't use the means you've described here (not sure I even understand the restarting one--and no, don't explain it, I don't want to know!). What I think some people are missing here is that the fun you have on this site depends largely on you and your attitude. There are so many games I haven't got a shot in the world of ever winning, but I play to beat my own records, to improve and to learn something. If the only satisfaction I got here were to do better than everyone else, I'd be a pretty sad camper. Just another two cents, but if you earn the badge the way you think is best and improve a bit each time, how can that be devalued if others are getting badges other ways?

Well, surely the point of getting badges for your achievements is so that other people can see what you've achieved. If some people are getting the same badge by a shortcut, that badge no longer stands for the same achievement.

People just like him.

I don't care who sees which badges I have. I rarely look at other people's badge counts. I play for my own selfish enjoyment and to beat my personal bests. I astonished myself the other day by scoring 30/30 in 110 secs in Mind Melt. (No one was more shocked than I was!) I love getting badges but not so I can say "Woo hoo! I'm better than you!" but I set the badges as a goal to play for. I have a couple of friends with whom I'm in a race to attain certain achievements so we check up on each other's badge/point tallies periodically but it's all in fun, not serious one-upmanship. When someone wins we congratulate them and move on.

As for the international game, googling or cheating never occurred to me. I just played the game until I got a set of questions I could answer... with a couple of guesses thrown in. Keep playing and you'll get the badge

Wow, that's a great score on Mind Melt (which seems to be a strong point of mine, but I've never done it that fast)! Interestingly though, I'm happier if I win my set with 26/30 than if I beat my personal best for 30/30, because some sets are much harder than others. (I like the way most games give badges for both types of achievements!)

I'm sure plenty of people don't worry about badges while others see it as a competition, but it seems to me that the whole point of having badges that are visible to everyone on the site is to show a list of what the person has achieved - if it was solely for the satisfaction of reaching the goal, there would be challenges without badges.

The thing that gets me about this badge isn't so much that I can't get it (unless I Google or cheat, of course) - there are loads of badges that I can't get - but that the bar is set so high (40/40 correct) for a challenge with such obvious shortcuts. What's more, the stated intention of expanding the country question pools means that the bar will continue to get higher and higher, until eventually nobody can succeed without the shortcuts.
As I said on the other thread, the reason I'm flagging up the Country badge for improvement is that everything else on FunTrivia is of such a high standard, so for me this challenge sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb!

Dear Terry,

Can you please fix the International/Country game/badge so that it can't be reloaded? Thanks.

flopsy


PS Please don't relax the standards, at least for a while, because if you do we'll have a load of people coming out of the woodwork saying things like "it's much easier for people these days" and "things ain't what they used to be". One of them might even be me.

PPS Googling? Please, let's not go there again.

Quite.
But likewise, please don't let it get any harder either - possibly by limiting the size of the question pool, so if new questions come in, old ones have to go out.

Or you could just happen to know the answers.

I just ran through a set (and I never play this game or many others that its pool come from - no memorization likely) and got 8/10 in one game, and knew half anyway of the answers in the others. Heck, three of them were spelling questions. I can easily see, if one plays with any regularity, having the combination of a question selection that fits one's knowledge base, a few questions that one has seen before, and a couple of lucky guesses. Bingo, you've got the badge.

We assume that players come here with a wide knowledge of trivia to begin with - that's why we're here, rather than playing Bejewelled or Angry Birds or whatever.

I'm sure that some members are using methods that could be considered dodgy to get this badge. So what? I'm just as sure that many others simply know the answers because they are good at trivia.

It's the difference between 8/10 and 40/40 that's the problem. I know the answers to about half the questions, but about 30% of the questions are about things that almost nobody would know if they hadn't seen the question. Like whether some Aussie Rules footballer made his debut in 1969, 1970, 1971 or 1972. I don't know and don't really want to know, except for this quiz, but even one new question of this type out if 40 and you're stuffed. If it needed 10/10 then I'd agree with your analysis, but with 40/40, the odds against getting 40 questions that you know or can guess are phenomenal. So it comes down to learning answers, but as I said above, statistically you'd need to learn around 95% of the answers, so I maintain that the size of the question pool is the crucial factor.

By the way, I appreciate your taking the time to give it a go. I see that you got 22/40 overall, which is quite similar to what I get. After a couple of plays at those levels I thought the badge was achievable too, but after a couple of hundred goes in which my average barely rose, I started to feel differently!

I loved this statement. It rings so true.

I know that I started playing FunTrivia because I wanted a game to exercise my mind... I wanted to test what I knew. Yes, I was getting 10 on some games right away; others, most definitely, took memorization. It is very possible, as agony stated, that people actually do know the questions in the international game.

And I will echo whoever said this earlier, on whichever thread it was...

Researching this game does not hinder anybody. It's a game that should not have any arguments about Googling or whatever AT ALL. If you think about it, 1,000 people could win the badge in a single hour, technically. And that is what makes this badge unique. It is a competition for yourself; you do not have to fret about what other people are scoring. If you don't want to memorize or Google, don't. Nobody else will stop you from winning the badge the way YOU want to win it. There are 3 ways to win the badge; choose one, and do it. Nobody will prevent your win; only YOU can prevent your OWN win.

I agree with Salami - win it your own way. There are at least three ways to win, so for me, that doesn't seem like much cause for a rehaul of the game. 40/40 may seem pretty high, but look at some other badges, e.g. 15/15 in the Obscurity game! Plenty of people have managed to win the Country badge already without problems - as to whatever method they used, only they know. If you feel like Googling or something similar would cheapen the badge, as I would, simply don't Google. If that makes it near impossible for you to win it without a huge commitment like other players have mentioned, then that's what it takes to get the badge! Everyone retains trivia at different rates - it might take you six months, rather than one. I think the key is either to decide to commit to a long haul for the badge, or decide that you won't bother with it just now. I will go for the latter for the moment for me. :P

I very much enjoyed and totally agree with reeshy's post.

You could also look at the Daily Game or World Game.... You need to get 20 right AND beat all the other players in your set to win a badge in most cases. :P 40/40, taking your time, doesn't sound so bad. Often, you see scores of 20 in 75 or less seconds in the daily game, and to win the daily badge, you must have the highest score in the fastest time... You can take 58 minutes to get 40/40 and still win this badge. :P

Xobbo, I've been a gold member since last February and have been playing the Obscurity monthly and Gold Member madness games religiously. I came close the other day to getting the Researcher badge in obscurity - 14 in 98 secs - and nearly had a stroke when I saw the result. So close and yet so far. Yet I persist in trying for those two badges in my own way and nothing should stop you from doing the same. My badges will come in their own good time with a little bit of luck thrown on top of what I've memorized and what I already know. That's as much as any of us can hope for in some of these games. Keep plugging away....you'll get it eventually.

There's a massive difference between a badge being impossible to win and extremely difficult. As looney tunes said, if you play every hour during daytime for a month then not only do you have many chances, but with all the quizzes recognise answers until most do indeed become as familiar as your family. The daily quiz winner competes against about 2000 players and is only once a day, and I played it for a few years before winning it. But getting 40/40 is far from impossible, the questions are selected not to be harder than a certain percentage as all pools are depending on the quiz, and the internationals are not that bad overall. In fact you've just reminded me of one I need myself, but focused on the others one or two at a time and totally forgot that was still waiting, so have a new plan as well now for myself.

There is another aspect of the International Game, one that didn't exist a year ago.
It used to be the only game that wasn't offered in HTML or Fill-in format. Now that the 'Play' mode exists, it (the International) should seem harder to those who are used to playing the 'Play' way. Hard because you don't get second guesses? Isn't that (second guessing) like the 're-booting' option mentioned above?

I must say I'm surprised that nobody (except flopsymopsy) agrees with me that reloading the same questions is not a legitimate way of getting the badge - especially when nobody seems to have used that method themselves.

I want to reiterate that I'm not asking for the badge to be made easier because I haven't been able to get it myself. Clearly I could get the badge by reloading, and asking for a challenge to be made easier so you can achieve it is just silly.

Let's simplify my point and forget Googling - we've been through that before.
There are at least two ways to get the badge - the hard way (memorization) and the easy way (reloading).

Why choose the hard way when an easy way exists? The answer in the responses above seems to be for personal satisfaction, to know that you've achieved your own goal. But then why do you need a badge for it? Why don't you set yourself the task of getting 40/40 without having a badge? The badges should mean something.

To answer some of the above points:



As I said above, it's not the difficulty of the badge per se that's the issue (although it IS in the "Challenges for Everyone" section - is playing every hour for a month really "for everyone"?), rather it's the fact that the hard is getting harder while a (pointless) easy way exists.



Avoiding the topic of Googling, I do think reloading cheapens the badge. However, I think the badge is cheapened by allowing reloading whether I personally do it or not. You might say that I should do it just for the challenge and not care about the badge. But then the badges would have no meaning. If the badge is irrelevant for you, why would you mind if the criteria changed?



And there are no shortcuts! It's a tough badge, but it shows that you actually did something difficult.



Appearances can be deceptive. If you know the answers to an average of 80% of the questions, you would get 10/10 once in 10 plays. But you would get 40/40 only once in 10,000 plays. If you raised your knowledge to 90%, it'd only take 67 plays, but how difficult it is to raise it from 80% to 90% depends entirely on the size of the (growing) question pool.

mehaul - I've never used the "Play" way, I use the HTML option for other quizzes.

I honestly have no clue what reloading is. Can you explain? Are you talking about taking the quiz and then taking it again right away? I thought FT had things in place to prevent that.

If you click the "reload" button on your browser during a Country game, it will start again from the first question but with the same question set.

Gotcha, I already have the badge -- and I am pretty sure I happily googled-- but I had no clue what you were talking about. I agree, that should be fixed.

Someone has pointed me to the announcement of the Country badge on the chat boards which has made everything a lot clearer!



Unlike the challenge description, this makes it clear that the intention was that the answers to these questions should be researched. This explains why the criteria are so strict, why the challenge is listed in "Challenges for Everyone", and why it's not a problem to make memorization harder by expanding the question pool.

It seems that memorization is a bit of a red herring - even if you have set yourself that task and completed it, the fact is that it is getting harder and harder, so even if you did it when there were fewer questions, you couldn't necessarily do it now. It's certainly something to brag about if you do it though, as it's harder than getting the Country badge the "normal" way!

I think the note about research should be included in the challenge description though - it's the fact that it wasn't there that made me confused about the point of this challenge in the first place.

That leaves the reloading problem, which I'm convinced is unintentional and should be corrected. I don't know the technical difficulty of fixing it, but I can't see any reason for wanting to keep it.

I'm confident it's unintentional but it may be a more difficult fix than expected. All of the Flash quizzes on the site operate in this way (regular quizzes, for example). While a block has been put on certain quiz modes for players who've already commenced playing on another, no such block has been available in the past for games in the same mode. I wonder if it's doable.

I have to say I am not a fan of the Flash quizzes. They can't be done on the iPad and now it seems as if they can be replayed instantly? Odd.

I was hoping for a more titillating topic after reading the heading "Cheating on the Internet"
Doing Research and Learning are a perfectly acceptable way of winning this Badge, IMHO.

This is another thread that should probably wait until the holidays are over and someone more in the know can give their opinion on how to fix the reloading issue.

Actually Kyle the only reason I wrote what I did about asking Terry to fix it was that I had a vague memory that he did do this for something... only I can't remember what. Some game somewhere where reloading no longer produced the same set of questions or just recorded the score as it was at the time of reload which stopped people bothering to do it. Or maybe I'm still feverish, lol.