As pretty much everyone knows, when a player "backs out" of a quiz, his score is ignored.

I added this as a feature when we first started, because I always thought that it would be awful for a player whose connection died in the middle of a quiz and who ends up scoring 0 to significantly harm their team that day, no fault of their own.

The problem (at least one could see it as a problem), is that we have entire teams where players are being encouraged (or in some cases, effectively ordered) to back out of a quiz unless they are confident that their score is over some threshold.

That seems to be against the spirit of this game. If you can self-select your scores, then you don't have a team score. Instead, you've got a score that represents not what team is best, but what team is best at backing out of poor scores.


So my question is: does anyone have any suggestions on how we can fix this problem? I really want scores to count. When you hit "play", you play. You're locked in. You're going to score.

At the same time, I'd like to have some sort of wiggle-room, to allow players to erase their score if some disaster occurs. I want backing out to be the EXCEPTION, not the rule.

Perhaps allow players 3 (?) "back outs" per month, or something? You play, you see your score, and if you want to erase your score you can do it up to 3 times a month.

Something like that?

You could make it a level perk and increase your number as your level increases.

Wow, I can't imagine some teams are so concerned about better scores that they would want to manipulate them that much. Here's a thought, kind of crazy but here goes. You could do what they do in the Olympics: Throw out the highest & lowest score & average the rest. That way if a person scores real poorly they wouldn't hurt the team score too much. Sure the person who scored the highest might feel slighted but it would be a much fairer result of the overall team score. The highest score would still count for the team record books & the 100 FT points of course.

Three back outs per team would be more like it. But with the different team sizes, a tierred structure to the number would be needed. Say five per team per month for small teams, ten per team per month for medium teams and fifteen per team per month for large teams. You then (and in your proposal too) need to write code to track and report backouts. Again reporting at the team level would be easier than individual reportings, I would speculate.

Or, as in Heroes, you could limit the number of players in TvT whose scores count, like maybe the top five or six?

That would encourage more people to play and not be concerned about bringing their team average down. I have had terrible scores in TvT that made me cringe when I saw what I had done to my hard-working team and our average for the day. But if my score wasn't in the top five or six and was just crossed out, as it would be in Heroes, it wouldn't sting quite so much and certainly wouldn't harm the team.

When you're battling for those top positions, and it really is a battle and a fun one, you want and need every single point in order to stay up there.

I'll give it more thought, but am anxious to see what others can come up with, too!

A brainstorming thread! I already love it!

I like Blackdresss's (phew, lots of S's!) suggestion. Heroes scoring seems to work very well and gets everyone to play. I don't mind either Terry's idea of once you commit to playing the game, you are locked in. Combining the two might work quite well. Just my thoughts.

Thanks, Ghosttowner, I kind of like it, too! It would encourage so many teammates to play, play, play and not hold back for fear of bringing down the team's average score.

I like to leap into Heroes as soon as the day ends and the new day/category begins, because I'm not worried about an atrocious score, but can beam at a great score! But I hold back in TvT and wait until I really feel "smart." Also? I could be wrong, but I'm not sure most people really want to play "first" in a tournament like TvT where your score could mess up your entire team for the day. Just a thought.

Sorry about all those S's...

Terry, would it be possible to remove a player's TvT privileges for the rest of the month after three (or perhaps five?) back-outs? That way you penalize only the person who's actually trying to influence the outcome and not the rest of the team. It's possible that a few people may have genuine connection problems consistently which would be considered unlucky and perhaps a bit unfair but I've rarely had a misconnection in the nearly two years that I've been playing TvT so I suspect 3 or 5 a month would be a highly unusual natural occurrence.

I didn't actually realise that TVT scoring wasn't limited in the same way as Heroes. As a small team, we're lucky to get six people playing at all, so eliminating the top and bottom scores would knock us out completely. I think the suggestion by Blackdresss sounds like a good solution. I'm constantly amazed at how seriously some people take the competitions, and the lengths they'll go to for a good score. It's actually quite depressing when all you're fighting for is a few virtual points and some online badges.

Well the problem of making TVT like Heroes is.... well... that then it's Heroes.

TVT is unique in that everyone DOES count... that's really what is supposed to set it apart.

Of course, I play with a small team and there is no worry about backing out. We just are hoping to make enough minimum scorers to get a daily ranking! :-)

Oops, didn't mean to duplicate Roosian's thoughts - posted about the same time and it wasn't showing!

"Removing privileges," penalizing" and "penalties" takes all the "fun" out of Fun Trivia.

In Heroes, we know the topic before we go in. In TvT, we leap in blindly and give it our best.

Everyone on a team isn't required to play in Heroes or TvT. Some players don't mostly out of fear of bringing their team average down. Backing out definitely alleviates that fear, but it also assures that you won't be playing in that 24-hour period. Once you back out, going back in later assures a terrible time penalty and score.

If TvT were as user-friendly as Heroes, with only the top however many scores counting, more people might be inclined to play.

Look what happened when you turned POC, WTS and Mixed Hourly into a triathlon. So many people are playing now, sometimes I can't find my score! But the good news is, SO many people are playing now!

I think you would find the same to be true if you tweaked those rules in TvT just a bit, and made it more like Heroes.

What if you tried it for... a month? Or two? Just to see how it went and to get feedback from players?

Or is that kind of pie in the sky thinking, and easier said than done?

Maybe taking that one little aspect of Heroes, 'Today's Topic' and announcing the TvT topic (I know it's a mixed game so maybe that could change too) might cut down on intentional backouts. If the intent isn't to force folk into finding some way around the rules and getting them to consider playing through to the finish, giving fair warning of the topic might help. You could still pull a mixed question quiz but from an announced category.

Then there's earning 'months without backing out' points, good toward a future purchase of Fun Trivia, one size fits all, Ballcaps. (Bulk purchases for special events possible, contact Ralph Kramden)

Or, reverse the normal routine of Fun Trivia. Give everybody an "I stayed in through hell and high water" badge and take them away upon so many backouts.

Terry, how about simply ignoring a very limited number of entries per team that do not count? I would suggest that instead of having the 300 limit, for every 7 people that play - INCLUDING any unfinished games which are then treated as zeroes - the lowest score is ignored.

So a 6-player entry qualifies even if there is a backout (the score is obviously lower but this is better than not having one at all).

7 to 13 players are protected from one back-out, connection problem or other issue.
14 to 20 players enjoy protection from two of them and so on.

This still keeps the nature of the game very close to everyone affecting performance but (additionally to protecting against connection issues) it also prevents a single bad score from ruining the effort of anyone else. I'm seeing it so often that the standing is literally dominated by the last one or two players in a list of 15+ because they have scored extremely low. Considering that today, averages in TvT are about 1250, having a single 800 means that three 1400 scores are needed to average it out. Having a 500 weighs as much as five 1400s.

Keeping the cutoff relative to the team size (the bottom 1/7) guarantees it doesn't become a Heroes II where more plays are inevitably a better score, it just makes high scores and a good middle field more important than the single horrible game. It also automatically makes a back-out a worse play than just sticking with it and doing one's best.

Wes

Edit: One alternate solution would be to compress any scores below 1000 by a factor of 5. A 0 (back-out or other horrible event) would go on record as an 800. A "simply horrible" 550 would be a 910. That way all scores down to the lowest one count, but they have less of a weight compared to the large group of those who are trying to gradually improve their averages in the 1100+ range.

In my eyes the scoring system of Team Heroes is great, because it actually encourages people to play the game instead of backing out. And even if you have a bad day, there is always someone else to level the score. I think this would work perfectly well in the TvT. As it is now, larger teams are clearly at a disadvantage. And except for the scoring system TvT would not become Team Heroes - there is always a specific topic for the Heroes game as opposed to the much more diversified question pool in TvT.

I'm astonished to discover that there are some teams which "order" their members to do this. Talk about obsessive! I'd be looking for another team if someone tried that on me.

But there seems to be a simple solution. Disallow any "backing-out", but allow any scores over a certain (high) threshhold to be omitted. Usually, if you have a blackout then your score will be so obviously very high that it shouldn't be too difficult to weed these out. If you set the threshold suitably high, then that ought to level the playing field a bit.

Or is this just too simple?

There is no way I would order a person to play or not to play a team game, that's definitely not in the spirit of having "fun" on funtrivia.

We are so laid back on our team that we recently had a player leave because we weren't competitive enough

That player wanted us to aim high and try for the top percentiles, and become superb, legendary and unbeatable. I think most of us were scratching our heads thinking percentile? What the hell is a percentile?" I won't tell you what I first thought it was, and it sure as hell didn't regard to the thing on the top of your shoulders

But we are superb, we are legendary, as for unbeatable, no we're not, and we don't care actually. We all do our best and that's the least you can ask for. If we win, we win, if we don't we don't.

To teams who insist on their players "doing something" or rather "not doing something" so they can become number one, shame on you.

Stedman, A simple idea that I think would work the best. You either play and accept the score you get or you don't play. Once you click "start," there is no back out!

I think we should be careful not to just address one particular issue in TvT when in fact there are several.

Firstly, there is the problem of people being encouraged to back out with a poor score. I can't comment on everyone else's situation, but the idea that circumstances could arise that would make me have to back out 3 times in a month is laughable. Occasionally, there is a phone call or someone at the door, but these things happen. Technical problems are so infrequent as to be irrelevant. If you're playing at work, then I think that's your problem!

Remove the opportunity to back out, and there is a strong possibility that the next 'control' on the scores will be teams selecting players to take part in the game. I have been on teams where players have been encouraged not to take part in the game, and even removed for submitting a poor score.

Research is another problem. Looking at the team scores, there are certain teams where the average time is significantly longer that of the other teams. That may be coincidence, but when those same teams also have some of the quickest players in the hourly quizzes it does raise the question of whether the time penalties need to be reviewed.

Another problem is that the game has created a reluctance to play among certain members; they don't want to play for fear of bringing down their team's average. Yes, a switch to the Heroes system would address that, but Heroes is based on divisions. TvT is the only game where all teams compete with each other, and it would be a lot easier for the best 10 scores of a team of 100 people to beat the best 5 scores of a team of 6. I like the idea of a game where all teams play each other, rather than in divisions, but I'm not sure how you handle the different sizes.

I don't have solutions to this, but I thought I ought to mention a few of the other problems, rather than just concentrate on the one that seems to be top of everyone's mind at the moment. It's good to see that attitudes are changing - some of the current advocates of 'doing something about backing out' are the very people who have encouraged it in the past!

By the way, as I am good at crunching numbers, I have done a quick run on last month's actual figures (discarding teams with fewer than 20 scored days) to see how the size of a team (in terms of members actually playing) affects their performance and tried to calculate a correction factor to make small and large teams completely on even footing.

Result: Each additional player beyond 6 statistically causes a loss of 0.86 points from the daily average. That doesn't sound much, but in case of CMM (42 players) or Calculators (91 players), it is actually quite a lot.

So, my mathematical suggestion to eliminate many issues from TvT while keeping the spirit of the game as one where every performance counts would be as follows:

- Disallow back-out entirely. You start, you are committed. No more strategic options.
- Scores under 1,000 are replaced by (800 + 20% of actual score) for team average calculations. This way, a single bad game or connection loss does not completely drag down a team and the performance variance of the majority of members - those playing 1100 to 1400 - becomes a much larger factor in the result.
- If still necessary afterwards, add a size-based compensation factor to the daily average to compensate for the disadvantage faced by the larger teams. This factor will have to be recalculated once the first two are implemented - I could imagine it becoming much smaller once we eliminate the variance that we can remove via the first two means.

Terry, is it technically possible to disallow backouts for this game, but not for other games? Or does it have to be all or nothing?

Good thoughts Wes but it doesn't cure the problem of teams forcing players not to play.
Perhaps you could look at factoring into Wes' equation the number of players who compete. In other words, depending on the size of your squad, you will need "x" players to have competed for your score to count as is, otherwise penalties apply

Wesley, I don't like the 800+20%. That seems much too high. Sometimes, players get 10 right, some get 11 in over 100 seconds... If someone got 10 in 100 seconds, and scores 900, that should not have to be improved by another 80 points. I honestly don't like this system at such a high level. Some teams have quite a number of players who score 8-10 questions right regularly...

I think your system would work best at a lower level, maybe scores under 800 would be better, perhaps even less?


I, too, like the idea of making the game more like Team Heroes. We get at least twice as many team heroes players as team vs. team players. Why? For the simple reason that people are afraid their scores will bring us down; but playing team heroes will not affect our standing at all.

Of course, I also think that disallowing a "backout" would actually REDUCE the number of players of team vs. team. Players obviously play and back out if they think they scored poorly. Some of those players who do that regularly would stop playing; because now they are locked in, as opposed to having the "option" to back out.


Personally, I think the best solution to this problem is to only score the top 80% of players who have played. Now, small teams, do not be alarmed... When I say this, I do not mean that those who get 6 players will "lose" a player's score and only have 5, and thus not be able to count their scores. The NUMBER of people will still allow them to count. The lowest score in that case simply will not count.

And that also means that, for the team with 91 players, only their top 73 players will be counted.

Basically, this system would mean that for every five players on a team, one bad score can be erased.

Of course, with this system, I also would like backouts to be counted as zeros.

For teams who have 6 playing, and all score over 1200, still one is erased, but their average jumps that much more. Good for them.

Salami, either the 800+x or the 15-20% lowest drop works for me. I'd stick with 1/7 drop since that scales better with the 6 player limit (a 6 player team would not have a drop score, thus discouraging a "6 and stop" mentality).

800 was just my choice of number because it is already very far away from the averages being played and a single score below 800 already means that at least three good players are needed to even it out. Going any lower makes actual connection drops and unintentional zeroes too painful, but ultimately dropping the bottom 1/7 or even 1/5 of players ultimately achieves the same result as having a score floor and the dropped players still implicitly count into the average (by making someone else with a relatively low score count)

I don't think that in any format based on averages we can do anything against teams discouraging people from playing unless we'd completely withhold results from teams (i.e. players would only be able to see their score and the quiz info the day after the game). That would in my opinion hurt the fun factor too much to be worth it.

The alternative is Hero style scoring, but for good reasons Terry doesn't want it - it's just one game working differently from the rest and everyone's play should have an effect, if even a small one.

Surely this still would not address the original problem outlined by Terry?

Even if only the top 80% of those who play are included in the team score, undue pressure to not play the game may still be exerted on players who generally score low.

It does address the "start the game and back out" problem which is the one Terry is currently most worried about. The problem is players looking at the questions, deciding they can't reliably score a 14 or 15 and taking advantage of the 300 point "error game" rule by not submitting.

If those games counted but we dropped a small number of scores from the bottom (relative to team size) for the average, we would have no incentive to drop a game this way and still protect teams from an occasional technical or "doorbell rang" score.

I can make this game do whatever I want.

And sometimes a team plays and does not get enough players; because, say, for a small team, out of 6 players, one drops out because of a poor score; then they don't score... Forcing the score to count would give them their six, but that poor score would be dropped, so only the five would count.



Hmmm, another thought occurred to me. There are a ton of teams who do not ever reach their minimum players because they have less active players than the required amount. A lot of teams do not score because they only ever have four or fewer play the game. Perhaps, in cases such as these, we could fill in the games with a score of, say, 800? Some teams only score two or three days in a month; perhaps we could allow everyone to score every day by filling in the gaps with a score... Not enough to make those small teams dominate everyone by getting a terrific score of FT_Quizbots, but just enough so they actually score. It would also encourage the teams a bit more to keep playing the games. I have no doubt some do not play because they never get scored, and it gets discouraging.

Well, remember that Heroes was created *because* TVT was so flawed. I even advocating shutting down TVT entirely, but some people wanted to keep it going.

So, I'm not actually sure there *IS* a solution that fixes the game properly. Its problems may just be a function of its initial design.

The main problem is that as it stands it is neither inclusive (encourages all players to give it a try) or a good measure of anything other than who best avoids submitting poor scores. So it's a pretty awful game.

Here's one thought I had this morning: what if the whole thing was somehow anonymized... That is, you have a "team score" and can only ever see that team score. The ultimate "team game". One score. When you play, your personal contribution to that score will never be displayed to anyone else. Everyone can play without worry about looking bad to their team mates, because the team mates won't even know who played.

To stop gaming the system or sabotage, I could build in some logic to detect and/or ignore really low scores, or perhaps build in something like Wesley suggested, whereby we put a floor on the lowest possible contributing score.