What is more, since it is my own quiz, I cannot play it. I tried to play it, and I did not get a green check. Also, it did not mark it with a red x. The quiz is virtually unplayable; so it might as well not even be on the list.

Selection looks a bit skewed anyway - trying to avoid specific musicals yielded a very lopsided set. Maybe refining the algorithm manually by subcategory would yield best reuslts here, so instead of just trying to get 29 quizzes and avoiding certain over-specialized subjects, it could specifically be set up to create 30 quizzes in a nice variety:

- 3 quizzes from Art
- 5 from Mythology & Legends
- 1 from Performing Arts
- 5 from English / Vocabulary
- 1 from English / Idioms
- 1 from English / Etymology
- 1 from English / Spelling Bee
- 1 from English / Varieties
- 3 from Theatre / Musicals Mixture
- 2 from Theatre / Musicals A-G
- 2 from Theatre / Musicals H-N
- 2 from Theatre / Musicals O-Z
- 3 from any subcat not yet mentioned

and a similar list for the medium (15 quizzes)

We could similarly set this up for each other category. If you want me to, I'll run through the categories and do it for each one and put the results here for the other testers to look at. It will probably vastly pay off in terms of playability and fun - essentially doing the same thing that's being done for Pot of Gold.

That sounds great, Wes. More varied would always be nice.

Salami, easy to fix you getting your own quiz.

Unfortunately, it's not too easy to fix the distribution of quizzes selected to be like pot of gold due to the way categories work. It works in pot of gold because I do it once a day, and so running complicated or numerous queries isn't a big deal. But I need to be able to keep things efficient for this.

I can do it efficiently if we take quizzes only from a subset of all categories.

The easiest way to do it in one query is to do a random selection out of a subset of sub-categories. So select 20 quizzes from all those in vocabulary, spelling bee, etc. Just exclude specific categories (so only include musicals mixture).

If you'd like to put together such category lists for the problematic categories (tv,music, sports, movies, etc being the biggest problems), we can improve selection quickly. For the smaller categories like animals we can stick with category-wide. Try to keep the pool sizes relatively large though.

Just need a list of sub-category numbers for each. Note that if you wanted to include an entire branch, ALL sub-categories of that branch need to be listed.

Movies: x,y,z,...

You can actually create entirely new virtual toplevel categories too if you wanted to, mixing sub-categories from different top-level categories under new headings.

Canada : selection,of,subcategories,across,different,toplevel,cats

Terry, can you do this in groups without queries getting out of hand? What would really be useful to balance things out would be to have an option to make certain categories appear in moderation without excluding them completely.

So e.g. Sports medium= 4(a,b,c,d), 3(e,f,g), 2(h,i,j,k,l), 6(m,n,o)

That way the player could be assured to get a nice mix of several things.

Also, is there a way you can automatically (just as a quick and dirty UI for setup) expand subcats? Some of them are extremely fragmented - I just looked at mythology which consists of 54 entries. Getting all those manually from the site is not only lengthy but also error-prone - a simple entry that returns the expanded string for placing in a document would do miracles.

*** Actually, no need for you to spend time coding such a thing, just send me a table dump of the individual parent-child relations (category X is child of Y) and I'll quickly whip up a PERL to do the actual expander myself. Testers who wish to help setting up virtuals could then run it off my server.

Today I have a set of 27 quizzes of which I have to play 20, scoring 7 or more correct. I have played 2 of them within the last month, so I won't be able to play those quizzes to complete today's challenge. If there were a larger pool of quizzes to chose from I wouldn't say this was a problem, but it now means that I only have 5 spare quizzes instead of 7 with which to complete the challenge. I know salami mentioned getting your own quizzes in a list as being a problem because it makes your pool smaller. Is there something that can be done about quizzes you've played in the last 30 days that can be built into the system as well, so that all the quizzes listed for the challenge are eligible for the checkmark?

What does this challenge mean?


Play quiz Still More World Cities and score at least 286 points in game mode.
Haven't played yet. Incomplete  

It's a 10 qn quiz and 15 pts per question (150 pts). Maybe I'm missing something but this doesn't make sense to me.

Game mode - that's the timed Flash mode ("Play Quiz Game") for the quiz.

You get 100 points for an answer, minus time, just like in an hourly. Those points will at the end be divided by six to give your FT points, so 900 game points (10 correct, taking 10 seconds per question) gets you the normal 150 FT points. 286 thus is pretty much four correct.

*face palm* I COMPLETELY forgot about that mode because I'm playing on an iDevice. It doesn't support flash. I'll do it when I get home.

I bought a challenge that said to get 10/10 in the easy game in under 32 seconds. Last hour I got 10/10 in under 32 seconds and I didnt get credit. I think it was 27 seconds. The category was music. I really want to buy another!

You sure triviaking? It shows as being complete

Yeah, Terry. I did another one an hour or two later that met the challenge requirements. So it didn't matter. I just didn't report it when I finished.

"You've found a box of old photographs. Score at least 8 answers correct in 4 of the following photo quizzes."

There's no mention in this task of "You may retake quizzes you have not played within the last 30 days". Is that not important to add with picture quizzes.

It also doesn't look like it is set up this way as I retook a quiz I took two weeks ago and got credit for it. I wanted to check to see if it was counted or not, and it was, so I'm just wondering if it is actually supposed to be, or not?

Also, what's my average time for a 10/10 in the Easy Game? 29 seconds seems a bit beyond my reach.

Completed 17 challenges today. I think that's enough for me. Getting late and time for bed. 2 left incomplete (I do not have the time to spend on the Buzzy Bee, plus I already have the associated badge). Everything worked fine, except maybe the photo quiz one (see previous post). Goodnight all.

Well, you guys are really helping out Terry ! Thank you for spending so much effort in testing those terrific new challenges !!!

I agree with JanIQ's comment. What a great service you're doing for all of us!

We'll send the collection plate round later.

I can't speak for the others but I've had fun doing it. Got a bit tied up the past couple of days and haven't finished everything but tomorrow is another day...

Ill be back to work on it tomorrow. Got a big live fantasy football draft this aft

It's been a blast! I've had so much fun!

And Terry, big fantasy football tip. Get Arian Foster

I agree with triviaking and flopsymopsy. It has been great testing out this new feature. You all are in for something great when it gets released to everyone!

Agreed. And, like Flopsy, I haven't doon much the last couple of days. Holidays and whatnot. Back tomorrow to regular schedule.

I agree, and haven't done much because of work, researching a certain animal, and having just discovered Need For Speed. :-P But I haven't been playing, oh no, definitely not.

LOL, you've got to be kidding, Terry. My "difficult" challenge for today is not completely impossible but if you only knew how much hair I tore out achieving that target the first time round you wouldn't ask me to do it again!

I'm not saying what it is to protect innocent, non-testing, normal people who might steal a look in here.

Flopsy, I did that one once, and it was complete luck. I didn't even read.

Yeah, that one's definitely coming up way too often, especially since it also interferes with some players' long-term goals (ELO). Terry, any chance to reduce the frequency of this particular challenge to about a quarter of what it is now?

By the way, the variants of "Play GC Impossible and score..." also seem to be very frequent. Maybe knock those down a bit as well.

Yeah, I have one of those GC Impossible challenges today.

Just flicked through our challenge pages...three people have flopsy's Difficult challenge. That is definitely a lot.

Back after a good labor day weekend. Will have to catch up on these messages and get back to adding stuff.

The play GC should be no more probable than anything else... it's entirely randomized with everything else... strange. Will have to check the randomize function.

Im thinking I should remove the "score 0" challenge altogether. We can keep it as a badgelet, but I dont think it's that fun to keep it in there as a daily challenge.

How about to turn it around and make it a mini Obscure Researcher. Score 12 or better in 300 secs.

I like Wesley's idea... Getting 12/15 is much more doable on any given day and it's probably more satisfying as a challenge - I actually got the 0 badgelet very soon after it was launched but some people found it very frustrating and took days (and days!) over it. Probably better within the scope of this challenge to set more achievable targets - don't want to drive them away out of sheer frustration, lol.