Couldn’t agree more! I think mostly we agree, any minor grumbles or requests are in the main just to try to help iron out any wrinkles that crop up during or as a result of the changes.

There are 3 types of changes:

1. Things that I intentionally change for a very good (in my mind) reason, and believe it to be in the best long term interest of the site. The division changes (and lengthening the time periods of some of the games) are in this category. No amount of whining will change my mind on these because these are things that just have to be done, and I am certain that once they are in place for a while far more people will gain than will lose by the change. Yes, perhaps I lessen the impact based on feedback (doing 2 hrs and seeing how it goes in Obscurity, for example), but if it needs to happen, it needs to happen.

2. Things that are accidentally changed and I don't really care about. The WW scoring change is one such issue. The division system default is 2* seconds for time penalty. I never intended it to change to 2*, but it did. Honestly I don't care what the time penalty is, because the relative scoring is still mostly the same. I feel that the "letter game" was too easy before the change, so I was content leaving the 2* change in place. But, I don't really care. Getting letters a little more easily is not a strategic issue for the site as a whole. It's not a battle I'm willing to fight.

3. Things that I change for reason (1) above but don't turn out, so I change it back or otherwise alter the change. Adding the "old style" option for Homepage layout fits in this category.

Overall though, websites need to change with the times, with the shifting populations and technologies, to stay alive. We need new blood and new players coming in constantly to keep everything going. Online since 1995 (!!) we have outsurvived EVERYONE in the trivia space, and scores upon scores of other websites with far more funding and hype.

Here's a fun Terry fact: I don't play much trivia at all. I only play our games on occasion and while I have very good knowledge of a couple of topics like science & technology, my experience is what a new player probably feels when playing our games.

The division system came about when I played a few games of GMM and Smartest a few weeks ago and felt "wow, I don't have a HOPE of ever coming close to a victory". That made me really dislike many of our hourly games and feel the need to change that experience. Now when I play in my comfortable division 1s, I see that I have a hope at least for a near-top finish.

So, when I do *force* a change on the site (not what I'm doing in WW), I hope people realize that although it may not immediately feel like a great change, it's being done for a reason that is likely in everyone's interest.

I actually think that with the right threshold, a 1-penalty gives a better experience for the letter game than a 2-penalty.

If we use 1150 as an example, the possibilities with the 1 penalty are 12 in 50 seconds (rather fast) or 13 in 150 (a casual time). That 50 may be a bit too fast for most, but it gives two distinct options. With a 2 penalty, we have 12 in 25 (unrealistically fast), 13 in 75, 14 in 125, or 15 in 175. This hits the casual, slower player far worse than the fast ones.

So, what would be a good number if we want to make it a bit harder? I'd say stay with the 1 penalty and move the threshold for a letter to 1240 (60 seconds = 4 per question) or 1225 (75 seconds = 5 per question). So basically a pretty fast (but achievable) 13 or a casual 14 gets you the letter in this scenario. The 1225 is probably the better one of the two. 13/75 or pretty much any 14 means you have to concentrate but will still succeed most of the time.

Why does it need to be harder?
It seems just fine the way it is, and there are plenty of people playing it.
Making it harder is not going to attract more people.

As an example (and I know this is a different game from this thread), Fill Me In has one of the lowest attendance records of any of our hourly games and it's one of the only ones not to have a cache update since it was introduced. Effectively, FMI has been cycling through the same questions for years and years. By that logic (and judging from some of the responses in this and the other threads about hourlies in this forum from the past week), it's a speed-centric game. The players who are playing it know most of the answers and aim for high speeds. Midday, with 20 mins left to go, there are 3 players in the FMI 1-50 division.

I bring this up because I don't know where you're pulling the info that changing the scoring system for the game is going to cause the player base to stagnate, but based on the games as they are, some of our objectively easiest, longest-standing games are actually shedding players. In other words, we keep going, shedding players, or we try to make changes. Some work and some don't. Believe it or not, some of these games were potentially up for retirement before Terry started making fixes.

At this point, the majority of our long-standing players have the badges for that game except for, maybe, the highest tier (Word Marathon), which is not meant to be easy to get in the first place (it's a high tier badge...and still it has 171 winners). If the goal is simply to preserve the easiness of claiming letters to make it easier to get the Word Marathon badge than these penalties are suggesting, then yikes. Maybe it's better incentive to keep everything as it is in the game, but let the top few players choose the letters they get. At least let there be some incentive to make the competitive game a competitive game. Because if we're keeping things at the current level, it's a multi-year grind with minimal incentive to improve at the game.

I don't play FMI very much anymore but the few times that I do, I'm seeing new questions that have been added and others that were common are not there anymore. So there has been some refreshing of the database.

I think most players abandon this game because they would rather "click and go" in the other games. Playing FMI on a tablet or mobile device is not as easy if you are a quick touch typist on a keyboard.

ALL the hourlies are speed-centric games...eventually...once the database is familiar.

And now, back to the WW thread.

When I was a GM I enjoyed playing WW and found it challenging enough as it was to get that letter. When I would miss the threshold, I couldn't wait to play the next hour to get it. It was that extra little reward to play the game within the game, the building of words...and those extra badges.

Just MHO.

In my opinion when an accidental (or an intentional) change happens, it is usually worth giving a try for awhile to see how we like it rather than automatically complaining. However, one thing I would like to see done is to make sure it doesn't throw some of the non-obvious things such as the Ascension Quest and the Great Quiz Races out of balance. In the case of any changes to time penalties, it behooves the team to go through these games where a minimum score is required and update that, along with the amount of daily drop in requirements (if any) so that the overall difficulty of the quest/race is not significantly affected.

Umm, I have over the past couple of days done a couple of internet speed tests, after seeing that, in addition to the increased penalty per second, I have in fact been posting slower times (not FT's fault that Australia has one of the slowest internet speeds on the planet). A couple of tests showed my download speed to be 1.89mbps, with a high of just over 11 mbps. Upload speeds about 0.8mbps. These are actually much slower speeds than I used to enjoy.

Think I'll just step across to Singapore, where the speeds are over 65.

So forget my bleating; I'll take my protests up with the Government Minister for Communications instead! It's his fault that WW is ruined for me!