I'm not Terry, so I can't speak for his side, but I've seen games on the site come and go depending on almost arbitrary reasons. You're right that there are less people playing the Daily Game now, but that's an hourly we've had on the site for (what?) more than a decade. If it's not one game, it's going to be another. Just a few months ago we were having discussions about low player totals in Fill Me In.

FT has been on the internet in some form for more than two decades-- that's longer than a lot of people have even had internet-- and with that there will always be a struggles with staying on top of an ever-changing frontier. The internet is far from what it was twenty years ago-- heck ten or five years ago. That said, we have a lot going on on the site still, some of which hasn't changed much and some of which really has. And we still have tricks up our sleeves that we're discussing to keep things fresh.

I have no idea about the GMship numbers (Terry is probably the only one who knows), but what I know is that we still have a robust player base who, for lack of a better term, would probably be considered 'lifers'. We also still see new names cropping up (I see them in the queues and I see them playing the quizzes) despite, for many years, having search engines causing trouble with their troublesome ways. Another sign of how the internet changes though.


And as always, we are happy to hear any suggestions for how you guys think we can keep things fresh and interesting. The more you guys ask for an app, for instance, the more we can keep nudging Terry.

Actually, I would believe an app to be a pretty bad idea and rather hasten the downturn instead of stopping it. There are two possible functionality scenarios:

(a) The app duplicates the site with most or all features and has the same user base. In that case, it's essentially a separate UI and extra maintenance effort. In this case, it would probably be much better to keep developing the existing portable mobile interface which is integrated with the main functionality, giving far less overhead. It might be possible to encapsulate that in a "pseudo-app" of course, which would effectively just be a browser kernel hardwired to navigate FT (in order to be present in the app stores) and handle in-app GM purchases as required by Google and Apple.

With the limited development resources, a second (and effectively third, since both Android and iOS would need to be supported) independent UI would probably mean more bugs and a total lack of new features since Terry is already spread thin as is. Seemingly simple projects such as "just" converting the site to https can eat many hundred coding hours, a full function app would probably be a work for several years.

(b) The app would be an entirely different product, offering different games and presentation and having a separate user base. It would just share the quiz/question content - and risk fragmenting the users. We'd have some app players and some website players who don't interact, splitting up the overlap of those who'd play on either device - few players would bother to maintain separate accounts and earn their awards twice. (Plus, this setup would open up a lot of "interesting" options for dishonest players to improve their scores with less than ethical means without us being able to detect it)

The advantage of this concept would of course be that, being independent from the main site, it would be possible to outsource that development (actually writing it internally would run into the same issue as above regarding development resources).

In either case, adding an app that is more than an encapsulated site would also mean massive additional support issues, including the requirement to have the proper hardware available to reproduce problems. Support is already rather difficult with email trivia, private tournaments and the main site using very different internal structures and yet quite often it can be a massive hassle to even figure out which of the three the call is even about! And whether it's a real app or just an encapsulation, there would also be a whole new layer of legal and commercial issues - the terms of the App Store and Play store would apply, significant additional data protection / privacy issues would arise since the effectively anonymous model of FT registrations no longer applies, et cetera.

The bottom line is that the only viable (and even that might be problematic) app I would see is the encapsulated browser accessing the main site, with a well maintained scalable UI for all users, whether they use the app or a regular browser. If anyone can code something like that AND is able to properly advise him about the privacy and terms issues, I am pretty sure Terry would love to hear about it - use the site feedback section for "Use of Content" if you want to propose anything in that direction...

Was discussing the app with Terry tonight after making my post and we came to a very similar conclusion, Wes.

It might actually be a good opportunity for us to look a little beyond an app, whatever that may be. But that said, it should only go further in showing that we're still looking at the towards the future.

Oh, I forgot one more issue - it wouldn't be exactly the first trivia app on the market, some of them offering cash prizes and thus drawing a lot of players (who will rarely see any wins as not all of those are honest). There are also apps out there that use the terms "fun" and "trivia" in a way close enough to FT that we occasionally (rarely but yes) get quite irate complaints from their users about things we allegedly send them in excessive amounts or presumably messed up.

Establishing a FunTrivia app compliant with App Store / Play Store rules under that name would thus quite possibly mean an international trademark registration with all possible ensuing disputes.

I'm not really convinced that would be better than just keeping and possibly improving the mobile version...

Back to the original question, what has the number of people playing the Daily Game got to do with longevity of this website? How many people play the hourly games daily? The other daily games every day? The Duels every day? How many guests decide to register? Right, you have no idea.

You also have no idea what metric Terry uses to decide if it is "worth it" to keep this website running.

That being said, hourly/daily game playing is a good bellwether and I don't think HairyBear is too far off the mark. Lower plays = less players. It's easy to observe.

The feedback is good for us though; if people are worried about diminishing numbers of players, it's a good kick in the rear for us to turn a bit of focus to parts of the site that may be aged and think of a way to stimulate them back into a stronger asset or look at opportunities we have to grow.

On this side of things, I think we have a strong site that always needs work in some way. I'm not really worried about FT fading to nothing, especially with the community with have.

All is well.

As always I would encourage those who are not GMs to sign up and support the site, and to tell your friends and family about our site to keep new interest in it.

Interest in specific games will always go down over time - some people stop playing when they have achieved everything they can reasonably get or simply feel it's getting repetitive. There's unfortunately only so much that can be added to a game without compromising it. The Daily Game is probably a good example - twenty random questions. On the one hand that's a lot of variety, on the other hand it can also create implicit ceilings. If a player just isn't interested in or good at memorizing actors or song vs artist, they'll have a hard time ever getting a 20 on that game and at some point might just stop playing even with more badges and tiers to get. The probability to get a question of one of these types is just high in a quiz like that.

Then there is the dilution effect - if you have 20 games competing for the players' time, each individual game will inevitably get fewer plays. The core of players playing everything is really small (and the list of those actually actively working on improving their Everything Challenge score is even smaller) - most players will pick their favorite games or those they want a badge or tier on and neglect the rest.

Of course that's not the complete truth - a significant part of declining numbers is also a decreasing rate of signups and what I call conversion rate - the chance of a new level 1 signup to still be here and actively playing games a certain time (week, month) later. That part is not at all FunTrivia specific - every single game and site on the net sees this. Complexity goes up as more and more things are introduced to keep existing members interested, which also makes it more intimidating and harder to get started. Even with a perfect tutorial, the intimidating effect of "level WHAT?" is going to turn some new players away who have spent a week just to reach 8 (or 15) and see a profile with a 225 listed. This "I can never catch up" effect is even affecting the industry giants such as Warcraft.

However, even a FunTrivia with only 80 active teams and 600 players on the Daily Game can continue to be a vibrant site for many years to come. We're nowhere near falling below critical mass, and that's on year 19, which is almost unheard of in internet circles. Think of how many MMO games have been around for about that long (and if you really look at it, FunTrivia is an MMO in many ways - it's just that your character is based on your own, personal skills, not some points you decide to spend on virtual abilities). You can count them on one hand. We're not doing badly at all and I don't doubt the site will be around for long enough that I will one day have to make a duel step badge for level 41. Which is definitely not before 2025...

I play these games and I can count them on my hand.

That precisely mirrors my situation. I used to play all the daily games without fail in addition to all the hourlies several times each day and the duels. Now there is so much to do here (grateful, not complaining!) that I simply don't have time most days. The duels were the first to fall by the wayside for me and if I'm really pressed for time, my least favorite games get skipped.

I don't think using a single game as a litmus is valid. I think only actual logins or total daily traffic should have any sort of impact. Frankly most games I'm not even interested in playing, unless it is for the team or for daily challenges. I have games that I like to play and I come here for so I play those and worry less about the others. Even if some people are not playing Daily, they are probably spending their time perusing other portions of the site and that's why using a single game as a litmus test doesn't give you any kind of meaningful result because you can't rightly infer anything from it. Maybe 900 people are playing daily and another 900 people are only playing quizzes, and maybe 900 more people are playing the GC for a total of more than 2000 people. You can't infer from 900 people playing Daily that there are only 900 people on the site. If I have my 50,000 Daily Game Points and have all of my badges and tiers from that game, why keep playing it, except for the Team of the Year rankings?

I don't think FunTrivia is in any danger of being closed down due to loss of a "critical mass". WesleyCrusher makes a number of valid points, but, even if we do use more accurate criteria than play of a single game (such as logins or Daily traffic), there has been a slow shrinkage in the number of active players on FunTrivia, a trend that is likely to continue. Some of the reasons for that were explained well by Wesley. To keep veteran players playing, newer innovations (more games, more badges, upgrades) have been created which do have a "dilutional" effect on newer players and the gap between new players and veteran players on Levels continues to grow which does have somewhat of an intimidating effect. That said, FT has plenty of low-hanging fruit available for newer players to rise up the first 100 levels or so quite quickly if they want to, and FT still draws new players who aren't just "flashes in the pan" but stay around for awhile. Even six years ago when I was a newbie (a Regular member, in fact) with fewer games and badges available then than today, I was able to rise from Level 1 to past Level 100 in less than five months. It would even be easier for a talented, motivated player to do so today. No one is being "held back" by more veteran players. Obviously, FT does have a bit of a generational problem here. There is a need to try to appeal to younger people. But keeping veteran players engaged is every bit as important as bringing in new players. One word of advice, if I may: more Taylor Swift Duels won't help the gradually falling numbers.

To reiterate my response to the OP, it's not a good bellwether because Daily is just one game. And it's an old game that a lot of us already have all the badges. Why keep beating a dead horse and playing a game that we already have the badges for when there are still other games that we don't? Like GC which is a long haul game. My goal is to one day reach Tier 7 for achieving Immortal 22 times. It is a ridiculously high bar, requiring almost constant play for almost 10 straight years. I am only at 7 right now for comparison. I have no idea what I'll even be doing in 6-7 years when I plan to reach Tier 7 and I may never make it. Why when time is of a finite quality would I continue to beat a dead horse and play a game that I have already mastered when I could be working on another badge elsewhere? So it isn't a good bellwether. At best, you would have to take several litmus tests across the site to get any kind of meaningful data to draw a conclusion from, and we still don't even know about the makeup of that test population. For instance, I would like to know if the Daily players are substantially people who have been on the site for years and already have the badges for the game, or is there new blood there, of younger players who are pursuing the badges? That can tell you more than just the number who play per day. If the test taking population are not fundamentally changing, then they are an aging population that will decrease with time. That in itself is a bad thing. But we don't know. And perhaps more useful than several litmus tests would be sitewide numbers at different points in the day. In conclusion, the methodology is bad. People win badges and become less interested in a given game. That doesn't mean we lost them as members. It means we may have lost them to other games, quizzes, etc. Or they may have been lost. That isn't substantiated with the methodology.

While thinking about the idea that fewer people are registering, I began to think maybe another meaningful metric is to look at how many people in each class actually become impactful players. Each class contains 10,000 people, and I went through classes in the 200s up to class 316 and noticed as you get closer to class 316, the time between one class filling up and the next one opening gradually increased from a week or less to a few weeks up to a few months or more between classes. But then I noticed that even though it was taking longer for classes to fill up, there were still a lot of very prolific players in the classes. The early 300s have actually been quite prolific. Class 300 for instance already has 29 members with over 1,000,000 points*. Granted one million is easier to get today than it was in the past, but speaking from my own experience, I was a late bloomer and the first million were the hardest for me to get too. Continued study of the charts I believe will yield much more evidence that even if the numbers are gradually decreasing, there is a lot of new blood and there are more people per every 10,000 that are deciding to stick around longer than people chose to do in the past.

By contrast, many of the early classes up to the 200s frequently have anywhere from less than 10 to around 20 or less, varying from class to class.

And one further point. One thing we don't know is if in the past when 44 teams were playing in the large team grouping of TvT (as opposed to the 24 now), how many of those players were prolific? We don't know. Some of them may well have only played a couple or a few games and not stuck around for very long. That's why it's important to know how many are long haul players, committed and prolific. And that's only conjecture at this point and those data would be almost impossible to put together.

In conclusion, the reports of FunTrivia's death are greatly exaggerated.

I really enjoy reading this genuine conversation about my favorite website. I have been on here quite a bit since 2001 and I think over time the changes have really improved the experience. FunTrivia is extremely reliable in that you know which games well run at which times and the quiz and crossword submission process is outstanding. However, for a lot of people the games likely get repetitive quickly or frustration sets in over not reaching certain achievements. I am amazed at how many people daily play something like HQ trivia on their phone daily. It's not terrible and it has a live host which is cool but it's not on par with FunTrivia by any means. I do think FT could use a hosted game from time to time (maybe once a week or something like that) to mix things up. Everyone wants to feel like they're winning something tangible (with HQ you can win $) and unfortunately with paid type games online (aka putting up an entry fee to win a prize pool) there's all kinds of legal ramifications you have to worry about. The mobile version of FT works very well with many of the games but as many of us have mentioned before sometimes yo get bogged down on a 300+ word question. Having an app would definitely encourage more people to register but what percentage would eventually become Gold Members? For me Gold Membership is well worth it, heck I'd pay 10 times the membership price but I know I am in the minority. I have referred probably 50 people to FT but sadly none of them became long-time members. HQ caters to the casual player while FT caters to the hardcore trivia player and quiz writer. If it ever got to the point where FT was ever in danger of shutting down I would hope that the player base would be engaged to keep it afloat.

Some interesting data from a website traffic site:
Funtrivia.com Website Traffic and Information

April 2019 Desktop Visitors 906,916
Monthly Average 929,415
Pages per visit 4.2


games
10523 competing websites
information
5108 competing websites
fun
2048 competing websites

quiz
478 competing websites
trivia
321 competing websites
quizzes
256 competing websites

useless facts
9 competing websites
factoids
7 competing websites

Also keep in mind that the school year is ending.
Every year we take a big hit in site use from Mid-May through September.

I like to add a new gold member perk every few months to keep continual interest. My current plan is to add "Gold Member Ranks", which will show Gold Members where they rank for different categories such as:

Most Badges Overall
Most Quizzes Authored
Best Score in XXX This Year
etc etc..

A bunch of fun stats that you can try to improve in. Your very best achievements will appear publicly on your profile.

The next big project will be focusing on Teams. That means re-doing the team "size" thing entirely to be performance based. We will have "divisions" for teams just like our hourly games. Size will become irrelevant.

I'd like to add a new team game too, or new team-based daily challenge, or something like that, to help encourage team activity and build up friendly competition between teams.

Looking forward to this
Speaking about perks, are there any plans for new 'Level Perks'?

The Best Score one looks especially interesting to me!

Will there be a Team stat in the Fifty-Fifty game?

I totally agree that TvT is the worst game on the site, (except perhaps point tree or daily quiz) and I too dislike the way the game penalises larger teams having good participation.

I did not, however, read what Terry wrote and automatically think that he wants to make Heroes work like TvT. There may be other ways of making size irrelevant that we haven't thought of. Heroes itself kind of penalises smaller teams (mostly, I do realise there are some very small teams stacked with only super-players) because with a minimum number of players counted towards the score then the more players in a team the more 'free' attempts at making a high score the team gets. Before anyone argues with me about that, I realise there are caveats and anomalies but as a general principle I think it is sound.

So hopefully both games will be adapted for the better! Hopefully Terry has wrote down my thoughts on Heroes from the other thread!

HairyBear, how about not interpreting too much into what you are reading and approaching change with an open mind instead of only worrying about how it might not be optimal for your team's placings? A team division system doesn't have to look in any way how you think it does now.