I'd like to address the issue of the topic in the Heroes Game occasionally being too narrowly focused, as it was yesterday, 10/13/12, when the topic was: "Stephen King (Literature)".

I noticed that about 10 players on my team purposely avoided that topic, knowing that they were completely unfamiliar with Stephen King's work.
There were even some negative comments about it.

It's one thing to have a narrow focus on the same author in one or two questions, but devoting an entire Heroes quiz to one author doesn't seem appropriate.

Any opinions on this? ---Sea

Bear in mind that it's probably similar on other teams. Personally, I like having a more "specialist" category every so often, and you certainly see some like "Star Wars" that I don't have a clue about, or even broader categories like baseball, where not many people have knowledge of specifics, especially as the questions are often numerical. But that's the way the cookie crumbles, I think.

Because Team Heroes only counts the top scores from your team, everyone should have a go anyway - getting a bad score will not bring your team down unless only a few people are playing, so basically the more who play, the higher the team's overall score should be, and the impact of a bad score from one player will be decreased.

I can proudly state I once scored 0/15 in Team Heroes. The topic was Star Wars so I'm not surprised I scored poorly but zero? There's nothing else to do but laugh and I'm sure none of my team mates think I'm a drongo because of that score. It's only a game and I certainly improved my score the next day! There are always going to be topics that don't suit a player but you can't please every player, every day. To attempt to do so will only drive a person nuts

The whole point of the Heroes game is that everybody is a specialist on something, and even players who are not very good generalists might be able to shine for their team in their one little category. If a sub category (or even a sub sub category) has enough quizzes in it to qualify it for the Heroes game, that's a fairly good indication that many people are interested in the subject.

Oh my, I wouldn't think of Stephen King as an especially "obscure" subject. He's certainly been prolific enough to have his own focus a few times a year. Not that I do well on his q's when they come up, but I can think of loads of other subjects that I'd do even WORSE at lol.

I could "sort of" understand complaints if they were related to TVT instead of Team Heroes. But, as Reeshy pointed out, the more folks who play, the better. You should encourage your whole team to play the Heroes game, no matter what the topic. Can't hurt anything for sure, since if nobody plays, your team won't get credit for any points anyway.

I like agony's phrase "might be able to shine for their team in their one little category". Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses.

I've noticed that on the most-complained-about topics, that generally (with the exception of geo-specific subjects, including sports), relatively few teams have a "standout performance". So we're all in the same boat - you can either row/paddle like mad - or jump overboard lol. It's always about choice : )

I can't say I'm a fan of the category, but it IS randomly picked, so there's no bias there. I DO wish Movies-based categories came up more often. It seems to be a little underrepresented.

Stephen King is one of the most popular authors on the site and one of the most prolific fiction authors of the last century. Sure, if you haven't read him it may be narrow, but the same can be said if you don't eat out and a quiz about Fast Food comes up. I, for one, like Stephen King. I don't think he's narrow. But then again, I work in a bookstore and have read half of his bibliography.

On the other hand, I haven't watched 'Star Trek', read the 'Star Wars' books, or opened a Bible. Someone else has. They'll carry the team that day-- we can't all be heroes every day.


The Heroes game is completely random-- sometimes there will be categories in your favour and sometimes there won't. If the category is not, the great thing is that playing it will not hinder your team whatsoever-- in fact you'll still receive points for whatever you happen to randomly get correct. There's really no point in not playing, as people have said.

Your points are all very well taken.

However, I must stress that I find it extremely unpleasant to take a quiz which focuses on subject so narrow that I know absolutely nothing about it.
So I prefer not to take the quiz at all, even though it costs points.

Thanks for listening. ---Sea

There are lots of quizzes I don't take because I don't like them, and thereby I don't get points - but I always play Heroes because no matter what I don't know there may be Llamas who know less than me in which case my score might be useful. It's a team thang. And sometimes it's funny to score so badly... although 0/15, Tizzabelle, really? LOLOL. Although yesterday because of a blip I got 2/10 in Easy and in one of my best categories - that made a few llamas laugh.

I've never read any Stephen King, the only thing I knew about him was that he wrote the story on which The Shawshank Redemption is based and as I have watched that film dozens of times I wish he'd write some more like it. But the Horror genre is not my thing so I avoid spooky cars going to the prom in graveyards. Kyle can keep those.

I generally don't like taking quizzes or playing games I know nothing about because of my abysmal scores, but I can't afford to be picky in the team games. Yesterday, the second time I've seen Stephen King appear in Heroes (and that's very little considering I've seen many other categories more than once) I figured I should play for my team. Now, I've not touched a book or movie that has anything to do with this author, not from any aversion, but because I simply haven't. I guess I'll get around to those books someday. Well, I scored 8/15 by random clicking, good enough to up the average. I never expected to get such a score. You never know, your score may surprise you. So, play every category, and maybe you'll find a new topic that interests you from playing it!

I'll try.

I agree totally with Agony here. The occasional highly specific topic is fine (and SK books are a good example of this). I do like the opportunity for various team members to shine when their pet subject comes along. We can all commiserate together when we put in a shocker. Isn't this meant mainly to be fun and a team-building activity? And if you're in a highly competitive team, then the chances are very strong your competitors will fare just as well (or as poorly) as you do on these more specialized quizzes. I think the Australian Players favorite (haha) is the quiz on British railways :-)

And Tizzabelle, I'll race you to the bottom next time Star Wars comes along - except that don't our scores get recorded as technical glitches, when in fact they were legitimate attempts? :-)

Yep, scores under 300 are ignored, assumed to be the result of a technical glitch rather than complete ignorance of a topic In all the quizzes and games I've played I think that's only the second time I've scored zero while trying to score something!

Scores under 300 ARE counted in Team Heroes. They're ignored in TvT. However, only the top 5/7/10 (depending on team size) get counted. :-)

Oops.. you're right Salami. Thanks for correcting me. I knew that info was somewhere so when I found it in TvT I assumed it was in Heroes.

The main point, though, remains - play, play, play since your team might just get a benefit from your score,and cannot be hurt no matter how bad the score is. If you don't particularly like the subject, just close your eyes and think of England.

Or the Eurovision Song Contest, lol....

I always play regardless of the subject. It does not harm anything and I can learn something from it (although on some subjects the learning curve is quite steep I have to confess). And if at one time the score is bad, there is always tomorrow.

And besides, sometimes you will surprise yourself with knowledge you did not know you knew, and score well enough for the team to help them out for the day! Those are quite rewarding.

If you'd like some other author coming up in Team Heroes, just write tons of quizzes on the subject. The only reason why Stephen King has a category of his own in Team Heroes, is the quite large number of quizzes available on this site.

So be prepared if you don't specialise in a particular literature author - chances are Agatha Christie or JK Rowling are in the rotation, too - as well as Tolkien.

My problem with Heroes categories isn't with the narrow or specific topics, it's the ones that "lie" about being broad but in actuality are very narrow.

Today is the perfect example...the topic is supposedly 'Music Industry Awards' yet 13 of my 15 questions were Eurovision questions. And it was this exact same way the last time this topic came up in Heroes. The topic should be called Eurovision instead of the broader 'Music Industry Awards' it is labeled as.

The reason for that is likely that a vast majority of the quizzes in the subcategory "Music Industry Awards" are quizzes on Eurovision. Here comes that old advice again that if you want to see a change in distribution of subjects within a broader category, the way to do it is to write some quizzes in it, or if writing's not your thing, then it wouldn't hurt to make the suggestion to your team, for example.

Thelancinator:

This was addressed on our team board, so I will post it here for all others to see.

There are 103 quizzes in the category.

2 are about the Country Music Awards.
6 are about the Grammies.
12 are Rock and Roll Hall of Fame quizzes.
10 are uncategorized.

That leaves 69 quizzes out of 103 in the Eurovision category. Naturally, one will see mostly Eurovision questions in a question pool dominated by Eurovision questions. It happens sometimes.


Perhaps we need a few authors to write a couple quizzes in the category to broaden the question pool a bit.

If you look at the quizzes in Music Industry Awards, you will see that there are 69 on Eurovision, 16 on Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 6 on Grammy Awards, 2 on ACM, out of a total of 103 in the category. (Yes, I went to see after getting 12 Eurovision questions out of 15.) Obviously, there are going to be more Eurovision questions than any others! As was mentioned when people complained that Science Fiction seems to be almost all Star Wars, that's because of the actual number of quizzes filed in that subcategory (since, in Literature, quizzes on a single book or series by an author get filed under the author, not in the genre). Get some friends to write quizzes on other awards, and the topic will broaden.

OR! OR you could post topics on the Challenge Wall (eg. 'Grammies of the 1990s') and see if anyone will pick them up.
http://www.funtrivia.com/quizchallenges.cfm

I must agree with the majority of people on this thread---it's far more interesting for Team Heroes to be diverse in the number of topics that appear. There are only a few topics I won't play (like math) and as others have mentioned, you can sometimes surprise yourself in a topic about which you know nothing. For example, I have never seen the Eurovision contest, don't know a thing about it, yet was in the top ten of my very large team several hours after taking it. It's amazing what good guessing can do! Do I wish every day the subject was one about which I'm very knowledgeable? Sure! But that's neither fair nor reasonable, and having specific categories is what differentiates Heroes from TvT.

Or, just give me a list of categories that are inappropriate / misleading in title and I'll remove them from the Heroes rotation.

Thanks

Please don't do that Terry! I think most of us agree that it isn't broken, and therefore doesn't need fixing. That's my reading of this discussion anyway.

Agreed, Liz.

Perhaps a link to the quiz section would be nice, though, so players can click it so they know what to expect? So when, for instance, "Civil War" appears, players will see that 95% of the quizzes involve the US Civil War, and therefore they will see almost all US questions.

Perhaps that would prevent threads of people asking for a title to be changed because it leans too close to a certain category. If we had a link to the category that might prevent some confusion.

Or, alternately, perhaps there is a system that detects the quizzes in the section, so for today's, for instance, it will say in the "approximate number of questions" thing... 70% Eurovision. 2% ACM Awards. 12% Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. 6% Grammies. 10% Other.

That might be a bit too lengthy of a list for some categories, though, say... "Authors T-Z".

Or we can just get to know that Music Industry Awards will bring up a load of Eurovision questions, and not worry about it.

I like the Heroes game as it is. Half the fun is groaning when you see the topic.