Today's Team Hero topic is Science Fiction Literature. I thought more than a year ago the Star Wars books were going to be taken out of the possible questions for Science Fiction Literature in the Team Hero game. Today out of 15 questions I had 10 that were from Star Wars books and one from Halo books.

Terry, please check and see why Star Wars books has overtaken this topic again. Thank you.

This may have been for Expert, not Heroes. I remember the discussion, but not what game it was about. Switching question pools in Expert is a lot easier than in Heroes - for Expert, we have a web interface while Heroes must be done manually by Terry. It doesn't look at the Expert pools (although actually using the Expert sets, with only a small probability to pick a "specialized" one, would probably improve the Heroes game).

I had nine "Star Wars" questions by the way, although four of them were really basic and doable with even a very passing familiarity with the saga (naming main characters / locations featured in the original movie trilogy based on clear descriptions). Two were moderate, three somewhat specialized.

We need to get them out of Heroes, too, if so far it's only been Expert.

Or, better, have them be their own topic on a day of their own.

Star Wars books has its own listing in the Team Record Book of Team Jeroes. Since it has it's own listing doesn't it make sense that questions about Star Wars books were removed from Science Fiction Literature?

I went through almost three years of Forum topics looking for the discussion about removing Star Wars books from Science Fiction Literature. I had a headache before starting. I haven't slept yet and it is 11am. I'm giving up looking for the discussion.

Yes I remember the discussion and think that it is sensible that the Star Wars questions are removed from the category.

They won’t be appearing in Heroes anymore once they are removed though because the topic Star Wars Books is no longer selected for the Team Heroes game. It is one of the many topics that was deemed ‘too obscure’. As if obscure quizzes are not fun...

But my point is that they will not appear in their own sub topic, they just will not appear. But I do agree that they should be taken out of this topic because of the way they dominate it. 12 of my questions were Star Wars, great for me, but not good for this topic I feel.

I'm bringing this thread back up because today the Team Heroes category was "Science Fiction" but 11 out of the 15 questions in my set were Star Wars books (and one was Halo). I don't remember seeing this happen for a while. Did something get changed back for this category?

You were lucky. I only had 8 Star Bores but had 5 Halo (along with who wrote 1984 and who wrote The Island of Doctor Moreau). I guess the fact that 253 of 354 science fiction quizzes are in the Star Bores category probably has a lot to do with it.

I'm not sure why people think a computer program that pulls questions from a giant database for thousands of players each day at random is going to be able to tell that it already picked 5 questions about the same thing.

It is called random for a reason. All the questions could be about the same thing from the same quiz by the same author and guess what? It would still be random.

First of all, the reason I resurrected the thread is because I thought something was done in 2019 and I was questioning whether whatever change had been made at that time had been reversed. If I'm wrong and there wasn't a change made as a result of this thread, then I've just been lucky.
Wesley or Kyle or Terry, can you please advise on the technical side whether Star Wars books were ever removed from the Science Fiction (Literature) category in Heroes?

Secondly, the problem is not because the system is pulling questions randomly. It is that all quizzes about science fiction books or series written by a single author but not related to Star Trek, Star Wars, or Halo are excluded from Science Fiction and put under the author's name.
So none of the questions about famous or popular science fiction works are included in the "Science Fiction" category that the system is pulling from.
There are no questions in "Science Fiction" from quizzes about the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. (They are under Authors A-C >> Asimov, Isaac.) There are no questions in "Science Fiction" from quizzes about the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. (They are under Authors T-Z >> Weber, David.) There are no questions in Science Fiction from quizzes about the Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold. (They are under Authors A-C >> Bujold, Lois). There are no questions in "Science Fiction" from quizzes about Robert Heinlein's "juveniles" or "Stranger in a Strange Land". (They are under Authors H-K >> Heinlein, Robert.)

But all the books by Timothy Zahn in the Star Wars Thrawn series are put in the Star Wars Books category under Science Fiction instead of being pulled out as a separate category for Timothy Zahn. All the books by Aaron Allston and Michael Stackpole in the Star Wars X-Wing series are put in the Star Wars Books category under Science Fiction instead of being pulled out as separate categories for those authors.

So the category "Science Fiction" only mentions famous SF works if the question comes from a quiz about multiple authors, but it asks questions about Star Wars books that come from quizzes that are about a specific book or a specific series developed by a single author.
It doesn't seem right to me that Science Fiction (Literature) has more questions about characters from Star Wars books than about characters from science fiction books that aren't media tie-ins. I don't think it's because there are less quizzes written about non-Star Wars science fiction books. It's that so many of the quizzes about traditional science fiction books aren't included in the Science Fiction category but all the Star Wars books are.

Maybe the answer isn't to exclude Star Wars Books from the category but instead is to modify the Star Wars Books subcategory to only include quizzes that cover books by multiple authors and to put the book-specific quizzes into their own subcategory by author as is done with all authors and series that are not media tie-ins.

As a Literature editor, I had considered the idea of moving the Star Wars quizzes by a specific author to be in the author-categorised section, but when I had a look I saw quite a few books with either multiple authors of the one book or different authors for books in the same series. Since the category structure is intended to make it easy for players to find the quizzes that interest them, not primarily to give game players their desired grouping, it felt like a poor idea. Keeping quizzes on the same subject together just makes sense from that perspective.

I will discuss with the other Literature editors how they feel about the suggested move. We may be able to find a way that keeps the quizzes easily found by players. We also don't want to do anything that would make any current category become empty, in case we upset one of the many games that accesses the various levels of subcategory. This issue comes up every time Science Fiction is played in Heroes, but not when it comes up in the other games. Maybe those players either expect it or just don't notice.

Terry has also suggested that he could apply a filter to remove quizzes with trigger words in their titles, if we provided a suitable list of triggers that would remove many (not necessarily all) of the abundance of Star Wars questions that appear in games when the Science Fiction category is selected.

When you play quizzes, you see links in the Science Fiction category directing you to the location of the quizzes about authors who have their own subcategory. They are not left out or ignored. The Science Fiction category, like all the genre categories, is used for quizzes that focus on multiple authors, not individuals. It causes regular complaints when SciFi comes up, but much less so when the other genres get selected. because it is so unbalanced: there are currently 106 Star Wars quizzes, 7 Halo quizzes, 62 Star Trek quizzes, and 89 assorted other subjects. Only those last ones are likely to include questions on authors and books that people "expect" to see.

We have, by the way, done some recategorisation to move quizzes on books by a single author to the author category, and leave a link to that location in the Star Wars folder. There are still a lot left.