When did Easy become so difficult? Years ago, I used to could finish those in 13 seconds sometimes, now there is a sizeable percentage that I don't even know the answer to all ten questions. It's my opinion Easy has become too difficult. There are far too many questions in the question bank for that game and they seem to change with quite a bit of regularity so there is little chance of memorizing them like in the past. Easy is scarcely even enjoyable because of this problem.

I guess it brings up the point of 'should this be a game where we should already know the answer all the time and based things on how fast we can submit' or 'should we be pushing new questions into the game to give a more sizeable question pool to give the game variability'?


I personally find that Easy is unplayable at several levels, especially higher up, because it's not about what you know, but how fast you can hit the submit button. At that point, it's a lot less about trivia and more about muscle memory.


Is it a case of only being able to get 13s scores way back when because you knew all the questions in the minimal question pool from repeated play?

"There are far too many questions in the question bank for that game and they seem to change with quite a bit of regularity so there is little chance of memorizing them like in the past."

This is one of the... more curious... complaints I've heard in a while.

There is no guarantee anywhere that the questions will remain the same for eternity and be easily memorized in this or in any other game.

There is no guarantee anywhere that you will score 10/10 in every game.

The only guarantee is that the questions in this game are, compared to the other games, relatively easy.

This is demonstrably and 100% true based on the average scores of players in this game.

I must respectfully disagree. The average score is an extremely misleading statistic, because it is drawn from a self-selected group of people who play the quizzes these questions come from (barring any single questions that may enter the database.) The questions now are indeed far more complex in Piece of Cake than they were for me in 2013, when they were genuinely easy. Taking Sci/Tech as my example because I have logged the most play in that category, and not because it is intrinsically different from any other category (I have seen the same pattern in every Piece of Cake category I have played), a question may have a 90% correct rate, but that is only because the people who play the quizzes that question originated from are people who enjoy playing that sort of quiz, say, Physics. Such people tend to already be well educated in that area. To a person with a degree in Chemistry, a question about physics that takes up three lines may indeed have a 90% correct rate, but such a question is slow to play and probably shouldn't be in the database for the Easy game, at *any* level. No one cares about time in the original HTML quiz, but it matters in Piece of Cake. And no one is demanding a 100% correct rate in Piece of Cake, either. That is a distortion of the position being taken. The point is, too many long and tedious questions are in the database for Piece of Cake, and citing the percentage correct rate for those questions misses the point that is actually being made.

Aren't new questions for our dailies/hourlies pulled from the New Question game at this point and not the specialized subcategories? And if so, then wouldn't that imply that the percentages are from a player base that is, by and large, there for mixed trivia?

I know that some of these questions may be hard to believe as 'easy' for some, but part of the reason these caches are updated is to avoid the same questions from being used over and over. There was a time where playing the POC Literature quiz would always cycle the same twenty questions or so. You could count on that Dickens question being there every single time, and there was no point in playing to test your knowledge at that point.

The catch with the New Question Game single questions is that we can see the percentages for those questions as well as the user feedback. Low-rated questions (ie. questions that players don't find interesting for whatever subjective reason) don't get put into that cache, so theoretically, those being added should not only be questions falling into a very high percent correct range, but are getting consistent positive feedback from authors who like the question. It's not perfect, but there are consistent efforts being made to expand that 'same old Dickens' into refreshing, new content. Before the past couple years, there wasn't a POC Literature question about a book that was out before 'The Da Vinci Code', and that's more than fifteen years old!

I agree with Terry's comments here. It is not a matter of memorization. It is whether a question is easy based on percentage correct. Perhaps if a certain number of plays were given as a minimum to enter the game, then it would eliminate certain niche questions that get categorized as easier than they are because they are played predominantly by those interested in the niche topic, but I don't think they represent the bulk of questions in Easy. It is just that it used to be possible to memorize questions because of the smaller number of questions, and now that is not the case. I welcome that kind of change. I learn more and I don't have to be a speed demon to do well.

You should also remember that the games here are trivia games, not visual pattern recognition and reaction time. If you know every single question in the game from looking just at the two leftmost characters in each line (and that was certainly possible), you aren't playing a trivia game.

Besides, it's not only you who gets slower times. Everyone else gets them too. And if we find that the times are slowing too much all across the board and top tiers or certain stage game achievements become way too difficult to get, we can always adjust those - but we won't do that too frequently either.

I definitely agree that the goal is to reward trivia knowledge and so I don't agree with TriviaFan22's basic premise that "it was better earlier when people knew every question and/or could memorize them." That being said, I think he has a point that the the Cake questions are being a little harder than intended. For example, in a recent Cake Geography game, we were asked to name the capital of Madhya Pradesh (an Indian state), *and* the fourth-largest city in Romania, with multiple plausible answers. Both questions got over 90% correct rates from the quizzes they were in, but I do not think close to 90% of the people playing a timed game would get those questions right.

As brm50diboll has pointed out, the statistic you are using to choose questions is derived from the people who really want to take a quiz on that subject, and thus presumably know more about it. Ideally, the system would keep track of the % of correct responses when offered in a game format, and use that number to select questions. This way questions that end up being too difficult get properly sorted to the proper game (Smartest, Mixed, or Cake).

I think there are two issues here. One is difficulty of questions and the other is length of questions. Looking at the second issue first, I don't know if it is possible, but it would be nice if there was a way to ensure a maximum number of characters in a question or else make it so that each 10 question set within a given hour have approximately the same number of characters. If I'm trying to compete for the fastest time measured to the hundredth of a second and other people have questions that are half as long as mine, they have a decided advantage.

The other point made here is the difficulty of questions, especially related to highly specialized topics. I think there is a way to manage this and that is to update the percentage correct figures based on all plays, not just plays of the particular quiz it is drawn from. Thus, if a quiz has been played 100 times and a particular question was answered correctly 90 times, it has a 90% correct percentage. If it then appears in the easy game and is only answered correctly 50 of 100 times, it now would drop to a 70% correct percentage which might drop it into the mixed game pool next time. Eventually, questions will likely stabilize, perhaps getting some increase from repetition if they show up frequently enough in the hourly games.

Hmm I think Easy uses 2 different question pools. It's possible that in the background the "quiz" data pool needs some fixing.

In theory the idea is to only use questions from quizzes that are not super-specific. i.e. to use "Comedy Shows" quizzes but not "Seinfeld Season 5". In general, the further down/specific a quiz's category gets, the more specialized its questions becomes. This reduces a lot of the "percent correct not matching general correctness" issue. That's how it should work, but perhaps the quizzes it's sucking in aren't quite correct.

I'll take a look at this issue after converting the other games.

Tomorrow Mixed game goes divisions.

There are some good points here, which are much better put than anything I had said but the sentiment is just the same.

Question length is a good point. A question can be "easy" but it can take a while to read, favoring speed readers. It also hampers speed. In many cases, the question can actually be much shorter and to the point if knowledge is actually being tested.

I don't think that's accurate that people can look at two characters and know the answer based purely from memory. But if the question takes up only one line, I can often get a good impression of what the answer is wanting by only looking at proper names or dates, 1776 is a good indicator that the question is on the American founding for instance. But when the question becomes three lines long, it can be difficult to deduce what the intent of the question is, and that is needlessly compounded when questions provide unnecessary supplemental information that is not germane to the question being asked. The quiz format allows for such detours and themed quizzes, but timed quizzes should, I believe, be much more to the point. i.e. the question should be stated clearly in the first sentence and in only one sentence.

If I could, let me provide a couple of examples from the last hour of Easy, in which I scored 9/10 in ~31 seconds:

"In 1917, the newly promoted Captain Patton was in Europe getting his first taste of WWI. An attachment to a particular British division during the battle of Cambrai was to give his career a course in which new military field?"

This question is alright as a question in a quiz format but may be considered to be a bit long in a quiz that regularly is completed by top played in less than 18 seconds. This question alone would probably take me 6 seconds to read.

"How would you translate the sentence "If I were not Caesar, I would like to be Alexander"?"

This is a question that wants you to translate the given expression into Latin. I don't think I'm unique by not knowing Latin, and while I may know a handle of sparse translations like lead - plumbum, depending on the translation being requested, this may or may not be an easy question to answer.

Those two questions are really good examples, better than what I came up with but I think are illustrative of how the difficulty of the questions has skewed up. I do however want to correct a notion that I think that 10/10 = easy and that anything less is prima facie evidence that the game is too hard. It may have seemed that way from the OP and it seems you're not the only one who felt that that was what I was meaning. I would want to avoid those conclusions if I was given a chance to rewrite my sentiments. I don't think that there is any reason the questions should be limited as they were in earlier iterations. For instance, I always felt like Literature had around 12 different questions, which would allow people to complete them in sub-12 sometimes even single digit times. But long-winded questions, and often questions with four long-winded answers, the speediness with which new questions appear so that you're never quite able to assimilate problematic questions from recent sets, and some which I would even describe as quite obscure have made the game overly difficult. It's not just that I hit a 9 or even a rare 8 on the game. It's as many as 50% or more of the games I don't know the answers to all the questions. I understand Terry and Wes don't see my point about time, which have become inflated with longer questions and more varied questions which many of us lack any kind of familiarity with but when you actually have a badge called Speed Demon and rewards based in part on how quickly you can finish a quiz, I don't think that these are mere matters of taste.

Great! Hopefully there is an easy fix to it and one that can sort of normalize the issue that we have been experiencing. I thought I was the only one so it is refreshing to see such members as brm50diboll and eyhung have also had these experiences with this game. Mixed has actually been stable throughout the years I've been here and come to think of it, I think in many cases (others may have another opinion) I find mixed is often easier than the easy game. And Smartest has also been stable. It's only Easy in which I've seen this remarkable change.

I had also noticed that the Easy Quiz questions had seemingly become more difficult. I had noticed that several months ago.

Checking up:

Have the Easy Quiz questions been more consistently easy over the past couple of weeks?

To me, they're easy. It doesn't mean I'm fast enough to get great times, though... i.e. 'normal'

Yes, I believe they have. (thank goodness, lol)

I don't think they are harder than before the change, just less memorized. I'm gradually getting closer to my usual pre-change times on Sci/Tech and other good topics.

I'll have to do a data dump and analysis as soon as everything is converted and settled down a bit to see whether we need to adjust some tiers and/or stage game requirements - the latter obviously with regard particularly to Heracles and a certain hidden area in Ascension.

Hey Wesley while you're here, I think we need new tier values for Winners badges for Obscurity and FITB now that they have changed to longer time periods.

I haven't noticed the difficulty change at all at any point, the game has been consistently very easy in my opinion. So, yeah, seems fine.

Terry, FMI seems fine to me. I am seeing a few people averaging above 5 points in 24 hours. They'll reach max in less than 4 months at this rate. It's a game that can use a slower progression towards maximum.

For Obscurity, 3-10-30-80-150-330-500. It looks like some folks (eyhung in particular) are breezing through this, so I won't touch the upper two. The lower levels however can use some breathing room for the rare cases someone not named eyhung wins

The questions are too long. Is anyone still having a problem with this game or have all of your concerns been addressed? Maybe I am just getting some bad sets. But I am a slow reader and the longer questions have significantly impacted my ability to play and enjoy this game. The questions used to be really short.

One complaint I have is that the topics don't seem to be evenly weighted in terms of how often they come up.

One category, celebrities for example, seems to come up a ton. Whereas Sci/Tech and History don't come up nearly as often. Something I've been noticing for a few weeks.

Are all categories supposed to appear an equal number of times? And if not, could they all be equalized?

I also would like to see a return to alternating between question sets from the Single Question Quest and question sets from the player-authored quizzes. One of things that draws me to quizzes quite often is playing a question in an hourly/daily game. Right now, that pool has been reduced somewhat since Cake & Obscurity are now 100% single questions. (Some others may have changed to that format, too.)