Thanx to everyone for the great feedback! I'm sure it will give Terry enough ideas to tweak the game a bit. Thanx, Big Terry (we have a Terry on the Wizards - Kvrad), Wes, Andy and 'Nasty', in particular.

Let us not impugn the motivation of those who have responded. There is the intra-squad nature to Team Heroes among teammates, it's true, but many of us are not competing against our teammates; instead, we play to try to achieve the best team score, even if that means slowing down to insure accuracy. Knowledge over speed is not possible when the categories and questions are largely repetitive as the months and years grind on.

P.S. I have never googled an answer in this game. Wouldn't have the time! Some of us are not speed readers or type 100 words a minute, live on the site, etc. Just thought I'd raise the issue and I'm glad I did.

I've been looking for a thread where the Heroes topics for the last month or months were listed. I know it existed at one time, but I can't for the life of me find it.

Do you have any evidence of that or is that purely from your recollection and/or estimate? Today is the second day in a row that we have not had a “speed demon” category. I play on one of the best teams on the site and we have only two 1400+ scores today. That’s hardly a “speed demon” category.

If the game needs to be changed, then data can, and should be produced to show that. But before we get to that level of changing things, let’s make sure that the data is there to support that. So far, no one has produced any such data other than their own subjective impression.



Are you dissatisfied that you aren’t the best team in every game or are you dissatisfied that it’s that easy for you? Because if it’s the former, I don’t think you’ll win any sympathy here. I guess we should just change all the games so that the Wizards can be #1 in everything.

Glad to hear it, it is cheating using questionable technique and against the spirit of the game.

Which reminds me of something I wanted to suggest to Terry, could Heroes be given the same time penalties as Who's the Expert?

In Expert the penalty is 1 point per second until 130 seconds then it ramps up. I really like this as it allows sufficient time for players to answer but then becomes more punitive if anyone starts taking larger amounts of time to answer.

When lower scoring topics used to come up in Heroes it was very common to see some of the Heroes of each team taken 250-300 seconds to get 14 or 15. That doesn't make me think cheating using questionable techniques alone, but when you know how quickly some players are capable of taking that long it makes you wonder...

If it is decided to do anything to the game, whether it be tweak difficulties or reintroduce more niche topics again, then this would be, in my opinion, a necessary change.

Except that it ruins the Team Record Book as shuehorn noted earlier:
"Another thing that gets messed up with this kind of change to the Heroes game is the Team Record Book. Our team looks at who holds the record for the topic of the day in Heroes and tries to beat it. If the game is going to get harder, that will become a fruitless exercise."
Exactly!

I fully agree with you. And in the other direction, like I was saying earlier, some categories have become easier, thus making it very easy for me to take records in categories by margins of one to two questions or more, scores that originally would have been very respectable scores but which could probably be beaten by four or five players with the new easiness of questions.

I feel like it's like bidding on Ebay sometimes. I've played and scored pretty well, and, suddenly, a few teammates play and knock me down a few spots.

That's FT for ya!!

My biggest complaint rears it’s head again today.

Maths is today’s topic a mere 14 days after it last appeared. Feb 23rd was the last Maths outing.

I would love it if there were at least a 30 day minimum gap or better still 60 day minimum!

*edit begins here...

I have just been looking back through the topic list and I have realised something. The Heroes game seems to cycle through the available core topics in a certain order. Because Heroes never picks from Sports, TV, For children, Entertainment or Video Games there are 14 core topics to cycle through. This actually means that Heroes has picked Maths again at the earliest available opportunity!

And in disagreement with my initial statement above, my biggest complaint is the total omission of TV, Entertainment and sports from Heroes.

If these three core topics were added and no repeats within 30 days then this player would be happy.

Ouch-- shafted again. I can never be a VG hero.

I've never noticed the game cycles through the categories in any particular order. Maybe there's something to Math having a viable amount of questions at a particular difficulty that makes it a reasonable selection versus others in S/T. Considering the content in the category, I can imagine that a lot of subcategories are extremely niche compared to others and, I mean, that's been a complaint about having categories like VG be added.

Hi Kyle,

I thought someone might say the choices are small in sci/tech, but there are still the following:
Astronomy, Biology, Botany, Chemistry, Earth Science, Environment, Forensic science (not sure whether that one has enough quizzes), Health and Human Biology, Maths, Paleontology (again not sure), Physics, Tech and computers and Misc Science.

Based on the current selection of 2 sci/tech topics per 28 day period it would take over 6 months to get through these without a repeat if they all had to be selected before repeating...

This is just an example of randomness and a bit of perception bias. You have identified around 15 possible candidates for the Sci/Tech category (and this should be close to the truth), which gives a 6.7% chance of a repeat in two consecutive Sci/Tech games. That would make it about once in eight months to see this phenomenon in this particular category. A few other, smaller, categories (Animals and Religion), have similar probabilities while others have more choices. All in all, they may add up to a "back to back" (still 14 days apart, mind you) in the game about once in 2 months.

It has probably happened a lot of times in the past with other topics, but math is a polarizing topic with some loving it, some hating it and few in between. Thus, it strikes as an oddity when, in reality, it's very likely we've seen it in other areas before. I'm particularly thinking of Religion here, which also has a relatively small base of possible choices, but a repeat would often pass unnoticed as the majority of them are Bible topics - having two "Old Testament" games in a row does not feel that different from having two different but partially overlapping Bible topics in a row. Getting Hinduism with its Mahabarata and Ramayana focus twice might however get noticed

If you want to reduce the chance of repeats, write more quizzes in the categories affected - the more quizzes we have, the more categories we can add to the game

Would implementing a top 5 (or something along those lines) scores for a particular topic on individual teams be difficult to code? This way no one has to have their scores replaced whether deceased, stopped playing, went to another team etc etc. This would also allow great scores from others on that team to still be acknowledged.

A person cannot hold more than one spot on that list for that particular topic; they'd only improve their previous score/standing. This would bring a new competitive aspect to the game, and I think accommodate even those who are not speed demons, but still put up respectable scores.


Just an idea.....

I know you mean well with the above Wes but I do notice it fairly regularly, probably around every two months, yes, and with the number of topics available I don't see why we should potentially play the same topic twice within the same month. I haven't noticed this simply because it is Maths and I don't like it, that is what you imply when you say things like perception bias and suggesting others go unnoticed because they aren't less polarising. They do go noticed and I've mentioned this before on a different Heroes thread. It just happens that it is Maths that it has happened with now, during the time when I have been thinking about posting useful things to this thread in the hope that someone listens to me! In actual fact the sight of Maths is most welcome for my team, we came in 2nd place two weeks ago! So the perception is, yay! We have a chance of a rare win!



Ahh this old gem! Write more quizzes and all will be well. We both know that increasing the number of categories in the game doesn't actually prevent potential repetition, just makes it marginally less likely. But I suspect you are typing that with tongue in cheek!

I'd be interested to read your thoughts on the missing three categories Wes?

I would be opposed to this because it puts people with disabilities at too much of a disadvantage. Sometimes people get slow scores because they have physical problems. They should not be penalized because of overzealousness about perceived cheating --- And I do want to emphasize that this is a perception and an assumption. You don't actually know whether people are looking up answers, or whether the problem is their hands are shaking, or whether its an intermittent physical issue, or something else. I sometimes get lightning fast times, and sometimes my times are super slow. I really resent the assumption that slow times must indicate that someone is cheating.

Just want to reiterate the part I have put in bold and yes you are right it is obviously an assumption because I am not able to see what people are doing! In the same way that you don't know what they are doing either. But I am not thinking every single slower time means one thing or another. I just think it is naive to think that some players suddenly taking between 200-250+ seconds on 15 questions and getting 14/15 correct when they usually do it in 30-50 seconds isn't incredibly suspicious. But, no, I don't assume it of everyone and every score.

I would ask you whether you have an actual gripe here though or whether you are simply getting offended on someone else's behalf. Since you obviously play who's the expert a lot with 227 topic wins (about 33% more than I have) and 38 champions division wins. Do you dislike the time penalty in that game? Enough to object about it in forums or anywhere else?All I'm asking is that Heroes follows the same penalty. A request that will doubtless not be carried out anyway!

I also find it amusing that my suggestion causes you resentment when the Heroes game is largely exclusive of slower players anyway due to the sheer speed involved in most of the topics (I advocate changing this by including more niche topics).

Edit..

Since there is clearly no evidence of the researching that I speak of then I will apologise unreservedly for making any implications. But if someone does post here at some point to confirm that they have researched answers in the Team Heroes game then I would expect that you might give me some more credit for my original assertion.

"an actual gripe here though or whether you are simply getting offended on someone else's behalf."

Let's not make this personal. Whether I speak for myself or on behalf of others or both, i It's a legitimate objection/concern: FT should be accessible to all. ("Gripe" has a negative/dismissive connotation.) The issue was raised about increasing the time penalty in Heroes, and then an objection was made. These are opinions expressed. It's up to Terry what to do about it. Cheers.

The time penalties on Heroes and TvT are intentionally kept low so that slower - possibly handicapped - players get to at least occasionally contribute. We are aware that this opens up some possibilities for Googlers, but we prefer these games to be less cutthroat than, say, Expert.

Also please everyone be reminded that "cheating" has a meaning on FunTrivia. It means playing the games in a way that violates ToS. Which googling answers does not - for the simple reason that we couldn't prove it without locking everyone in a room with someone breathing down their neck. (Note that using Google or any similar search engine to search out answers located on FunTrivia itself is indeed cheating - and yes, we can detect whether you regularly use the FT Encyclopedia or similar sources during a game.)

You can call it questionable technique, against the spirit of the game or any similar wording. But cheating is something different. Sorry that I have to be a bit nitpicky here, but we will not tolerate public accusations of cheating - they just ruin the community.

I think that FT has gone a long way to be more accommodating to users than a lot of other sites (did anyone notice the colour change to CWs in easy mode to help out colour-blind players?), but if someone is playing timed quizzes and has a physical disability which makes them unable to play at a fast speed, then there has to be a bit of a realistic take-- those people aren't going to be able to compete for speed. We can not account for every single person's unique disabilities.

Wes makes important points about what constitutes cheating on here and we have already built the scoring system into the games to reflect the concerns there.



I recommend not speaking on behalf of others; I feel like I've brought this up before in other threads in this forum.

FT strives to be accessible to all, but again, we have to be a bit realistic here. We're not going to try to recalibrate scores for games or rebuild the games themselves to accommodate for a small subset of people. What we will do is listen to feedback and base changes on what we feel makes sense for the site we are trying to create. Jeopardy! doesn't slow down its game for people with disabilities; they don't change the clues; IIRC they give braille to blind contestants. But I digress.

I think I'm amongst the people who believe Team Heroes operates just fine structurally for what it tries to do, but I always agree that we can use more topics. As was said earlier, the best way to do that is to keep putting quizzes in those sections.

Did I indicate that I was doing that? No. The respondent wanted to know whether I was "griping" for myself or for others, and my response was that it was irrelevant because the concern is legitimate, which is apparent when the sentence is read in its entirety:

Understood. In fairness it is something of a moot point because of the speed in which most of the Heroes games are played. There's barely a chance for many players that you might be thinking of anyway.



Ok, well I had already decided to moderate myself in my edit of the above post and have now amended my original post appropriately too. I like to be at least tolerated.

Still wonder about your opinion on the missing three categories in Heroes though Wes (four if you include Video Games).

To echo what you brought up in the first sentence, what I said didn't need to be taken personally.

As I said (and have said before), generally those with concerns regarding disabilities can come to us directly. Regarding the example I gave very specifically about crosswords, that's an instance where someone sent a direct note and it was changed within the day to accommodate. Some things, like those, are completely doable/ Other instances may not be within the realm of possibility. But again, it doesn't discount what I said. The people with those disabilities should be the ones giving the info we need to better help them; a middleman speaking on someone's behalf is likely not going to be able to give first-hand info we would need to better accommodate the person who actually has the disability, and if they need someone to speak to us on their behalf (ie. they are incapable of messaging us), then they might have a disability which can't be fixed by us changing games or scoring in the first place, which is what I mean by us having a need to be realistic about accessibility. The 100-year-old who is physically incapable of answering quickly because they need time to read, mull, and answer the question on their PC isn't going to have a chance of scoring at the same level as someone who has muscle memory for the games, and no amount of changes we make to try to assist that single person are going to improve that game across all players.

I think that there are multiple comments in this thread where I'm just agreeing and echoing. I apologize if you took offence to me using your quote to convey that.

(To add quickly, in regards to legitimate concerns, this is honestly the first time I've heard this concern, so like NL, I was confused by your discussion of "myself, or behalf of others or both". To date, there have been no "others", in this game, to legitimize the concerns that you've brought up about the physical disabilities you mentioned in your post; you're the first to bring it up, so I would've made the same presumption unless you're the one with the physical disabilities... of which I have no idea. If you do, feel free to send feedback and, if you're not comfortable doing so on this public forum, I would recommend reaching out via private message or via the feedback option on the homepage. We're here to help.)

Way late to the party, but to talk about the original point of the forum post, I agree with most of the points made. I do the same thing as kyleislaive and he put it best, it would just make the rich richer.