Indeed, I hit the upper 8 key in the dark rather than the upper 6 key that I see in the light.
4^15 = 1073741824



And that is wrong. Somewhere I was misled on the 64 possible arrangements for each question. Yes for a, b, c & d there are NOT 64 arrangements:
abcd
abdc
acbd
acdb
adbc
adcb
6 total=6
bacd
badc
bcad
bcda
bdac
bdca
6 total=12
cabd
cadb
cbad
cbda
cdab
cdba
6 total=18
dabc
dacb
dbac
dbca
dcab
dcba
6 total=24

24 not 64 nor 1,000,000+ possibles
But there is only ONE answer per Q not 4

or

1/4(1) + 1/4(2)... + 1/4(n) = 1/4 x 15 = 3.75 ?what? Possible correct out of 15!


The solution should be the number of Questions raised to the possibility level (4 in this case).
giving the permutations of 15 questions with only 4 possible answers is 15^4 = 50625 arrangements (NOT 4^15th!)

This Statistics is tough. That's probably why it's left up to liars who figure.

50,625 answer set possibilities in a 15 question, 4 multiple choice answers picking one of the 4 possibilities.

Made a bit of a meal of getting to the 24 ways of arranging a,b,c,d !
4 objects can be arranged in 4! ways = 4*3*2*1 = 24 :-)

My records go back to June and I didn't find Les Mis (although I can recollect playing it at some point and must have because a 5th place appears in our team record book), but as I said on a previous post 'Rent' appeared on November 9th, a mere month ago.

Depends where you live. You do know that a lot of the world doesn't watch much American television? Whereas those musicals, especially Les Mis, are shown in theatres worldwide? And form the bread and butter of many local amateur dramatics groups.

I'm with you there, why have we got things like individual musicals and manga and Eurovision Song Contest when we don't see individual tv programs or any sports whatever or video games (that's for you Kyle ;)). I would love to see a greater variety in heroes. Partly selfish because my own team seem to perform better when it's more obscure topics but then surely that's a good thing to break up the status quo at the top of the ranks every so often.

Oh and yes I agree that the term recent or very recent is very much relative isn't it!

The thing about musicals is that people can know a lot about the show from the original cast recording, which tend to be big sellers. Thousands or millions of people therefore sorta kinda know the musical who have not had a chance to see it.

I still don't see how a "strategy" really works in those games. I mean the answer orders are randomized, which would invalidate and strategy.

If your team submits by strategy, you've done your best not to insure correct reply arrangements but decreased the odds of submitting error filled replies (eating the dragon by the tail end first not going to the head first). If you submit abababcababab and your teammate submits abababcababab (the same) and all the answers are wrong, you increase your % correct probability if that second set was abababcababad instead. And, since we don't see the same exact Qs each time a teammate plays a game, the odds are better that the arrangement of a, b, c and d repeat. Therefore, pre-arranging each teammate's answer arrangement ahead of time increases your odds of having correct answers, not much but having that one good score in 15 seconds could win the day.

Of course in non-niche categories where each teammate plays to a known correct answer, the chances of 100% correct exist. We're (I'm) talking the times when you're best odds by guessing alone is that 3.75 correct answers per game. Your team will have a better chance of getting a high % correct if all submit a different arrangement. The supposedly known quality of the Heroes game is that the Q sets are different, NOT that the answer arrangements are different. For all we know, for computer calculation simplicity, the answer sets may all be the same, just the questions different but of the same difficulty.

But it has been expressed that this is a topic thread about category variation, not answer set variations.

No one has said anything about the arrangement of the answers. And I doubt the assumption that computer calculation simplicity would depend on a template of questions and answers in the same abcd order (even when the questions are different). It seems strange to even speculate about that. That also assumes that teams would have to coordinate a way of answering based on a slim possibility of this type of thing being in place (and again, there is no indication that it is). It is also counterintuitive to think that players would prefer to play a blind sequence of answers in the interest of speed with no consideration of the players' own knowledge might not contradict the predetermined sequencing. Frankly, this whole train of thought seems strange to me.

Some people play fast because they are fast readers and players. Some people have played many games here and have become familiar with some of the questions and can answer faster that way. I seriously doubt that there are teams strategizing on how to answer in patterned responses to game the system somehow when this has not even been shown to be how the answers are put together.



And then there's this. Yes, the discussion is about why certain topics do or don't come up. I would love to see more topics, even ones that my small team knows next to nothing about. We laugh afterwards at how poorly we do, but it is probably someone's area to shine, and why not let them?

Sue

Please see the "Heroic Strategies" thread.

Um, while I have no objections to the category, we have Religion Mixture as the day's Hero Game topic -- making it the third time it's been used in less than a month (11/29, 12/13). We've seen a few topics played 2+ times in fairly recent months, actually. With a few hundred categories available, couldn't the system (when it randomly chooses a topic) be tweaked to factor in, say, the number of times a topic has recently been used, or for that matter, topics that haven't been done in a long time?

Yes, that's what I thought. While I'm no programming expert, I think a few extra lines of code could be added so the selection process doesn't give "equal chances" to all topics but rather downweights the recently used topics, and likewise upweights the ones that have cobwebs.

When you buy a challenge and the system chooses an Epic, it's specifically NOT coded to factor in recently drawn colors—you could draw the same flag ten times in a row—it doesn't "remember" Epics, so all eight flags always all have equal chances of being drawn. But that's deliberate, to make "Totally Epic" that much more challenging. By contrast, the Hero Game ideally should be "biased." With hundreds of topics in the list, it gets dull to see a topic reappear after a fairly recent play. By the same token, our team [among others, I'm sure] is seeing topics that haven't been used in so long, our team didn't even exist last time the topic was played!

I have to agree with you on that one!

The thing is, and we've discussed this at great length in the past in regards to other subcategories, is that people will always have their least favourite niches out there. We had tons who tried to get Languages out of the games. We've had people try to pull Pro Wrestling out. If we pull out all the sections people find to be niche or 'not the definition of trivia' (as some have argued) then we're not really left with much of anything. Terry drew the line with VG and Sports a long time ago, and I think pulling out even more would only continue to go against the goal of including as many people as possible.

Fun is subjective. We all want what we want. We don't want to create exclusions though. There's no fun in that.

One of the main ideas (and charms) of the Heroes game is that different members of your team will get to shine. On a niche topic, your General trivia know-it-all may place 17th out of 18 in the team while the player who normally never gets over 8 right might be the one saving the day with a 1465.

Yes, that is very much what happens with our team, and I would be very disappointed if the niche categories disappeared and the game was just the same old thing as all the other games.

The niche topic games of Hero and Expert are the only ones I play - I find the more general categories boring. If that's what you like, there are plenty of places onsite to play that way, let's keep a couple of the games a little weirder.

I guess I will just say again that while for some Harry Potter may be "niche", for many others the multiple Bible questions and Christian-related topics (of which there are many) are the same. One man's niche is another's comfort. While I went to Catholic school for years, I would far prefer a Harry Potter quiz. I know far more about musicals than I ever will about invertebrates, WWII planes or transport.

Okay, at some risk of irritating people, I'm going to re-post here to reiterate what I said before: I think the Hero Game could use a good tweak in how it chooses the day's topic. It's "Thematic By Name" today. We did that all of two days ago.

It's on the short list of things to look at as we start the new year.

Will you also be looking at why the team records that show each day at the top of the Heroes page always shows our small team size records ignoring our records since becoming a medium size team? It would be nice if what was displayed there was accurate. I have mentioned this several times. Today's is a bad example because we obviously never played the topic as a small team so it does actually show the correct info.

A similar thing happened with the Regal Beagles. We had a team record of 1447 in Thematic Names as a Medium team, but last week, as a Small team, a new record was achieved, of 1454. The new record did not show up in the record book, nor is it showing today, at the top of the page (back to Medium team status).

We are still the same team, and the top score should still be the top score, whatever the team size.