Some of these topics are simply out of control.

Today is the third time in about a month that something to do with "Hinduism" is the Team Heroes topic.
No topic should be seen that frequently.
But this particular topic has been impossible to deal with.
The specificity of the questions has made it impossible to come up with correct answers.
Today I had one of the top seven scores in my group--and I scored 286!!

it is grotesquely unfair to the players to keep doing this. I have been trying to do the Eveything challenge and actually had a much better than average chance of getting it today. and I've been trying to get this for two years.
but this "Hinduism" topic destroyed any chance I had.

I don't understand why this keeps happening and why, in particular, this category has such specific questions.
please fix whatever algorithm is doing this. please.

sincerely,
goodreporter

Hinduism is the world's third largest religion after Christianity and Islam. Perhaps you might consider Team Heroes as an opportunity to learn a few snippets about a faith and culture which is as old as Christianity and which is now spread across as many countries rather than as a simple chance to parade your knowledge in other areas. I had several questions about individual gods - why is that worse than the questions I often get under various Christian headings about who fathered whom, who said what, and what a specific verse from the Bible says? I'm neither a Hindu nor a Christian which doesn't prevent me from knowing a fair amount about both religions. I also lived in Asia for a while and picked up some knowledge about different cultures while there; why shouldn't I get the chance to answer questions about it? FT has many members from India and presumably many of them are Hindus. On top of which, Hinduism is practised by 1.5% of people in the UK, I welcome the chance to learn more about my neighbours.

Well, repetition in the Team Heroes game is a favourite gripe of mine and I wish a minimum period between topics could be set. See the topics below for the last calendar month along with my teams scores. You will notice three topics have been repeated in that time period (though Hinduism is not one of them - you have to go back to July 26th to find that).

As for your complaint about the Everything Challenge it is supposed to be hard and some of us were desperate for the Team Heroes to cease simply being a speed contest most days as it was before Terry shook up the categories a bit. On 17 out of the 32 days I have shown below my team had a score on excess of 1400 (the score I always felt I needed a minimum of to remain being in with a shout of the Everything). Do you get over 1400 on 17 out of 32 days in Team vs Team? I don't. Complaining about that game affecting your chances of Everything challenge due to difficulty?

I think that if we can get the repetition sorted that it is great to see tougher categories appear in Heroes.

August 20th - Degrees of Seperation 1447
August 21st - 2000s music 1333
August 22nd - Quotes 1437
August 23rd - Judaism 1094
August 24th - chemistry 1446
August 25th - global trivia 1423
August 26th - cats 1365
August 27th - celebrities E-G 1308
August 28th - Mixed Canada 1274
August 29th - North America 1342
August 30th - world war 1 1440
August 31st - board games 1406
September 1st - Art 1421
September 2nd - animal themes in lit. 1308
September 3rd - classic Movies 1435
September 4th - classic Rock 1434
September 5th - name game 1452
September 6th - New Testament 1429
September 7th - misc health 1431
September 8th - global trivia 1420
September 9th - Dogs 1420
September 10th - celebrities C-D 1235
September 11th - thematic animals 1443
September 12th - Canada 1262
September 13th - Oceania 1212
September 14th - coins and bank notes 1226
September 15th - Art 1431
September 16th - Plays 1293
September 17th - Degrees of Seperation 1447
September 18th - Heavy Metal 1193
September 19th - Art World Figures 1298
September 20th - Hinduism ???

How is asking about the mother of Rama, or about the sister of Vishnu, any different from asking about the mother of Jesus, or the sisters of Lazarus?

For someone who was brought up in India, knowing who was queen after Vashti, and how many commandments were given to Moses, and on what mountain, are probably not answers that roll off the tongue.

This is an international site, that includes people of many many different faiths, all of which are legitimate sources for questions.

Despite my long-running disdain for the frequent Religion topics in the dailies, I agree with this sentiment completely.

I do know the answers to these, but I was also brought up in the United States (the answer to the first is the same name as my fianceé). We cannot just cater to those here, as this is (as mentioned by both flopsy and postie) an international site. Yes, Alexa notes that about 55% of the visitors of this site are American, but does that mean we shut out the other 45% of the site's visitors? Absolutely not. Besides, both India and China have over one billion residents each. The United States is a far distant third at approximately 325 million (or about 25% of India or China solo - each has between 1.3 and 1.4 billion), so therefore, on a global scale, the United States only has about 4% of the world's population. I don't agree with shutting out 18% of the world's population because of one topic (basing the world population at 7.5 billion (per the April 2017 estimates) and India's population at 1.3 billion).

Hear Hear for dg_dave, flopsymopsy and postcards2go.
As for me personally, I couldn't care less about Baseball but I wouldn't complain to get rid of it because it is followed by many Americans and also Canadians.
Similarly us Pakistanis and Indians have a taste for Cricket and our own language movies and people from the west also seem to like them just as we like English movies and shows as well.
One should always be diverse and willing to learn about as many different cultures and religions as possible. As someone from here said(don't remember who exactly) all challenges are not for everyone.

Although sports still don't appear in Team Heroes despite their collective global audiences.....

Objecting to Hinduism as Team Hero topic is akin to the objection as Judaism as a Team Hero topic that appeared in the Forums not long ago. Frankly, I'd rather have either of those topics than another topic on the obscure once mentioned people of the Old Testament. I'm not likely to do well in any of the topics but at least I'd be learning about something new in the Hinduism, Judaism, or Islam topics.

Yesterday in Hinduism one of my teammates got to shine. She set a new team record. The Cats are all very proud of Mariappank.

If you are referring to the Team Heroes categories thread, I did not and do not object to Judaism or any other other religion appearing as Heroes topic.

I was trying to make a point about some very tough categories such as sports never being allowed to appear in heroes despite the fact that a category like Hinduism is equally or possibly even tougher on average (just look at yesterday's team scores). As I have stated over and over I love the variety and relish taking on obscure topics. I just wish we could see all of them.

If you refer to some other thread then ignore me! Haha!

I scored around 331 in that particular topic and even led the scoring on my team for a few hours. The world didn't come to an end and I lost no important bodily parts. The topic may be obscure to a lot of us but so what? Personally I'd welcome more 'obscure' topics in the Team Heroes game.

No, nasty liar, you weren't the one that objected to Judaism at a Hero topic. So now I am ignoring you.

That's good!

all of you need to stop looking at this as some anti-hindu sentiment.
I agree that all of the topics on the bible are a bit much. nor do I know the answers to many of those questions.

yes, the team heroes game is supposed to be challenging. but exactly how much can you learn about any topic when whipping through it in as short a time period as possible.

i would have written the same thing if there was as much seemingly obscure info on a topic involving any religion as there was in yesterday's topic. at least the other times Hinduism has been a topic there have been questions that related to more of the major themes of the faith than yesterday's did.

tell you what: the next time you have one of those "harry potter" topics, i'll complain about that. i know less about that than about Hinduism. and, unlike when it comes to a world religion, i don't care anything about harry potter.

First of all, you don't do the learning as you whip through the questions. That happens afterwards, as you read the extra information, and then do some googling to make it clearer so you can remember next time.

Not everyone playing Team Heroes gets the same questions, even though they are selected from the same pool of questions. My selection of Hinduism questions was pretty standard for the topic - Rama (3 times), Ganesh (twice), a couple of avatars of Shiva, and then a bunch that were virtually meaningless to me, but clearly not to someone more familiar with the religion. I did some reading on the avatars, because they interested me, and left the others I didn't know to remain part of my pool of ignorance, at least for now.

Maybe the key to happiness is just accepting that what comes up comes up, and don't play the topic if you hate it that much - nobody is holding a gun to your head. Or, if your team needs you, or you want the extra points for the game, play it and shrug off the whole experience.

I dont get it though...is this the first time you have struggled on a Team hHeoes play since joining? If so you should be proud of that! If not, I don't mean to be insensitive but the cornerstone of the argument seems to be "it cost me the Everything Badge" and, I am sorry but that is crap.

The system did not maliciously say "i can sense goodreporter is going to go for Everything today....not on my watch dagnabbit!!!...let's see...weak spot...weak spot...ahah! Hinduism...boom!"

We have all had near misses on heavily sought badges and I know this is a big one, in fact it is the badge I probably most want that I dont have. And I have had close calls on that one specifically too. I am sorry but it was just rotten luck of the draw and that's it.

Doesnt necessarily apply to what happened here but in general one thing people may want to do (if you don't already) is play your most troublesome games first to see if you can run them high before even getting started on a run for Everything, green/yellow epics, 15 duel wins in a day, and any others like that, so that if you have a good run through most of the rest of it you don't get your hopes running high only to be crushed by your achilles heel at the end.

Good Luck, I hope you get it soon

Not everyone playing on the Funtrivia site is looking for "a learning experience" or additional knowledge in a certain topic. If one does gain, then that's great! But there also players whose main goal is to score and win badges. So good luck to them also.

Personally, I don't see why Goodreporter's post seems to be difficult for some of us to comprehend. I think we have all experienced frustration at one time or another with FT topics.

Yes, we have all experienced frustration at one time or another with FT topics, but when we go on our frustrated rants it is important to stick to the facts and not embellish them with exaggerated comments like "Today is the third time in about a month that something to do with "Hinduism" is the Team Heroes topic" - this tends to instantly destroy your credibility.

On the other hand, if Goodreporter and others would like to complain about Harry Potter (now there's a new world religion!) they will have my full support ;-)

There's nothing wrong with this post-- this is a Feedback forum, after all. TH topics is a thread we see time and time again and this is the place to discuss it.

I think the point that everyone is hitting on here is that there WILL be specialized topics and that's the point. Our admins and editors do read the feedback-- all of it-- and when tweaking needs to be done it will be.

I've brought up the TH distribution with Terry and Wes within the past month (it'll actually be a month as of tomorrow). Not long ago Terry looked at the topic list and some of the more obscure ones (*objectively* more obscure) were culled out. I think it's apparent that the ones coming up now are significantly less obscure than Authors H-K, 'Buffy' Quotes, and the like.

In the past month (30 days?) we had three religion topics, each one different. That's not too crazy when we think that several categories are not represented (VG, BT, FC). In fact, that seems pretty 'on average'.

GR-- I sympathize; it's not an easy challenge to win. Sometimes the cards are stacked out of favor (like whenever I get Epic dailies).


I think TH is fair in its distribution right now though, and on a more even ground than we've ever had (which might actually be a bit of a problem). But I don't think we can please everyone every day.

We have a member on our team who seldom does well in the more general categories. However, when her rather narrow areas of expertise come up, she SHINES!

And that, to me, is the whole point of Team Heroes. I see zero point in having yet another game that most everyone here can do well at, and the scores come down to who's fastest - we've got plenty of that onsite.

Every TH category has quite a few quizzes in it, which means there is someone here who is an expert at the subject, even if it's just the one person who wrote all those quizzes I imagine there was cheering over on the Indian teams the day Hinduism came up, just as there's a lot of happiness on Canadian teams when the subject is Canadian geography, or on teams of Londoners when the subject is the London underground.

Every time I see a specialized TH topic that I know nothing about, I can cheer myself up by thinking that there is at least one person here thinking "At last! My chance to shine!"

I think the issue here is that the religion category just has a tiny number of viable topics, so those will tend to repeat.

We can remove religion entirely if this is a pressing issue.

Please don't remove religion.

As much as I don't like the topic, I agree, please don't remove Religion from Team Hero.

As for the difficulty of getting certain badges, in other threads some of you have complained or commiserated about just such things, so finger-pointing seems a little hollow.

I'm not particularly interested in the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Queen of Persia or the Duke of Earl. If quizzes on them come up in Heroes I'll play them but only because I want to help my team beat yours.