"Could the clues be made more consistent and accurate?"

Well..... tidy consistency is not really possible because of the way the game gets questions from quizzes. 1000 authors, 1000 different ways of giving clues.

That said, ACCURATE should definitely be the case. If the clue is "full name", then full name should always be allowed. If you ever find a misleading clue, report the question. A hint should always lead to the correct format of the answer.

Sometimes alternate answers are also allowed, but these are just to be lenient and forgive those who don't read the hint. Never assume there are alternate answers.

What you will start seeing more of is a hint in bold letters that states "there is only one exact allowed answer". These are my new MC repurposed questions that are starting to get sucked into the game. These have NO alternates. They have one and only one exact answer, so put in the expected number of words and don't pray for alternates.

In fact in this game you should never pray for alternatives.

The new T/F and Y/N questions that have been sucked into the game today do allow t/f/true/n/no/y/yes as answers. The hint makes this clear.

What has tended to happen, over time, is that a correction note will come for a FITB question, suggesting a valid alternate answer. In a case like that, the editors will often add that answer as something that will also be accepted.

We may not change the hint, though, because we feel that the majority of players will find the hint, as originally stated, to be most useful. A hint that says "two words" for something that is usually expressed as two words, can be helpful to players. Having that hint read "one or two or three words" might not be anywhere near as helpful, to most players, even though there is a possibility that some of them will come up with that one word, or three word, answer.

Our standard for names has been to allow both first and last name, and last name only. However, sometimes situations come up where it seems useful to modify this. Playability is what we're usually going for - what gives the best experience to the player?

"Our standard for names has been to allow both first and last name, and last name only. However, sometimes situations come up where it seems useful to modify this. Playability is what we're usually going for - what gives the best experience to the player?"

I think ultimately what we have done is fine... allow alternates to people who are rushing / not reading hints properly, etc, like just the last name of a person.

That said, it shouldn't be assumed that a clue that clearly says "TWO WORDS" will accept one word, even if it's a person's last name. If a hint says TWO WORDS, you had better be entering in 2 words if you want any sort of certainty of getting it marked correct.

If you enter in one word and you get credit, consider yourself lucky, not entitled.

It seems reasonable to me that for quizzes (which are more leisurely) that there would be some exceptions, but for Fill Me In, there would be more exact rules since it is more of a competition.

It sounds like we are right back to where we started...answers being allowed that are outside the clues. There should be ONE answer from the clue. If alternate answers are allowed, then the clue should also include that extra information. Accurate and consistent clues please. When editors allow "t" in addition to the clue that says "true/false", I feel the clue should say so. This kind of short cut to the answer is needed in a timed game like FMI.

Except that authors have already built exceptions into their FITB questions over a period of 23 years. When I see a FITB question in the DB, I see one or more accepted answers. I have no idea which one "best fits" the hint given, so I absolutely must accept all as valid.

You will be happy to know though that with the new sucking-in of MC questions into this game that those definitely have one and only one answer. It is going to become increasingly dangerous to stray from from the hints.

Ah, right. I simply meant that I think it's fair to have stricter answers for the Fill Me In game.

I rarely play this game, but just had a go, and think the current format is much more attractive than previously. Those who play it all the time may miss the familiar, but I like this.

Is it worth our time to just remove questions from the pool that have more than one possible answer (or variation)?

I agree. I hardly played the game. Many questions kept repeating and some were more a test of spelling really difficult words than of knowledge. I'm not sure I'll play it even with the changes, but it will certainly refresh a game which had become stale.

I think that alternative answers are sometimes necessary due to alternative spellings/words between countries. If a one word is used in Britain and another is used in the US, we probably don't want to make people guess which one the author used or require people who speak one to know the other unless that is the actual point of the question.

No, that would be most of the pool. Far more important is adding questions that the average person has a chance of answering.

Three last changes I'm considering making:

1. Changing to a 15 question format

It feels to me like playing that if you hit a question or two you simply have no hope of getting right, that you're effectively done for the set. There just aren't enough questions to allow you to make up for errors.

15 questions would give you more places to make up mistakes, and also reduce the variability in difficulties between questions across different sets, making for fairer competition.

I even found myself feeling like I should switch to another window to google one of the questions I had no idea about. I'm not sure that's what we really want in this game. Which leads us to 2...

2. Increase time penalty? I'm undecided on this, but it seems like googling has outsized reward in this game because you cannot guess. It's a guaranteed zero if you leave the question blank. Do we want to increase the time penalty to discourage googling?

3. Correctness stats -- I'm going to be recording the correctness % for each question in the FITB database as answered in the FITB game, and will tailor sets to be balanced. 30% easy, 30% medium, 30% hard. I can also use these stats to scrape away the questions that are nearly impossible and those that are way too easy.


So I'd be curious to hear everyone's thoughts on (1) and (2) above.

I would advocate for (2); I lost a set yesterday with 9/27 to 10/120+ and that doesn't feel right. I do understand that some people aren't quick typers but I feel 100s per correct question is being much too generous.

Regarding (1), I'm ambivalent. Your points for (1) make sense, but it would favor the speed typers even more. You'd also need to re-scale the Everything Challenge now that there are potentially more points available from FMI.

I think there are arguments on both sides for the time penalties on FITB since research is something to be discourage but accurate typing is a huge piece of the game and there is already a huge penalty for a typo in that you get the question wrong (and knowing the correct answer isn't enough, you also need to know how to spell it).

That being said, I think a good compromise would be similar to the global challenge where it starts as a 1 point per second penalty but then exponentially increases to a 3.5 point per second penalty after a certain time, probably 90 seconds if it remains a 10 question quiz or 130 seconds if it becomes a 15 second - that's 8 seconds per question plus 10 seconds before the penalty increases - enough time to think and type things in but very limited time to look things up.

Any googling of answers will be enough time lost to hinder winning the round. I would vote for leaving the penalty as it is.
I was rather surprised to see the addition of hundredths of seconds appearing in the scoring. I hadn't considered this game to have an issue with too many players being tied in a game. Tenths might have been sufficient. And I would have thought hundredths or even tenths of seconds would have been seen in the Hard game long before here.

I'm in favour of keeping the penalty the same as it is now.

I think that depends a lot as to what division you are in. Last game's winning score in division 2 was 668 for 8 correct in 131.75 seconds. At 1 point per second, that could be beaten with 10 correct in 331 seconds which is definitely beatable by googling.

I like the progressive time penalty as proposed by andymuenz. That way slower players can still get 1 point off per second but long research will be hit hard.

I could live with this idea.

I think a scaling penalty (significant increase after 10 secs per question) is a reasonable googling defense to keep the game at a decent compromise between "correctness matters most" and "you actually have to know it".

As to increasing it to 15 questions, I would be in favor of it IF it could be done without too many effects down the line (Everything, stage games, etc.). The easiest (in my opinion) would be to go to 70 points per question correct instead of the usual 100. This maxes a little higher, but it does not completely unbalance everything. Then a time penalty of 1 for the first 150 seconds and 3 beyond that and we should have an interesting game. I would recommend 5 easy, 7 medium and 3 hard questions in this setup - less memorization possibility on the "hard" section.

I could deal with that...

The game is now tracking correctness stats for each question so we can work out EXACTLY how difficult each question is.... once we have enough data we can pull out the truly awful stuff, and balance sets nicely.

I like the direction the game is taking now. It hadn't quite gotten to the point of asking to spell Eyjafjallajökull, the Icelandic volcano but seemed to be heading in that direction. On the other hand, some of the games I played in the last day have had several T/F or Y/N questions, so it was kind of like playing Fifty-Fifty.

I have the Daily Challenge where you need to play 8 hourly games. I've played 7 and Fill in the Blank making 8 but Challenge still says Incomplete.