https://www.funtrivia.com/quizdetails.cfm?id=386150

The quiz linked above is rated "easy". I have taken it twice now, few days apart, and managed 1/10 followed by 0/0. Now either I sorely misjudge the population of Funtrivia and their knowledge of Ancient Greek battles or the reason for the plethora of 10/10 scores on this quiz were because players were doing it as part of the great quiz race and looked up the answers.

Before anyone says, "so what? We can research in non timed quizzes if we want", I'm not criticising that action. I want to highlight that I frequently see these "easy" quizzes when I'm working my way slowly through a challenge like this and it irks me that the very action of including the quiz in the race means that it's difficulty rating is skewed..

I have a suggestion to counter this. How about members have an option to select when taking a player created quiz that says, "I am researching the answers to this one", and selection of that option would discount that players score as being contributory to the overall difficulty rating of the quiz.

Is this any good Editors? Is it possible Terry?

It's possible, but a bit tricky. I wonder how many of these plays are actually from the great race though?

Good question.

286 players have got the Great Quiz Race 3 badge but on the quiz page it says the quiz has been played over 1000 times.... so maybe the treasure hunts are not as influential as I thought.

Would all 1000 plays contribute to the difficulty even if sine of those were guest plays?

I mean this is real low priority stuff, it doesn’t really make much difference what difficulty the quiz shows up as but part of me thinks that if the difficulty is shown then it should be accurate but you and others may not feel too bothered about that.

Quiz numbers are typically multiplied by 3 to account for guest plays (which can be more or less depending), so there are definitely more out there than have played the quiz for the badge. Guest plays won't affect that difficulty since their scores aren't tracked.

I don't really think we'll need such a box - players might or might not be truthful anyway.

Quizzes that are used in the stage games and scavenger badges are inflated not even because of looking up answers but also because of the retry. A retry deletes the original score so you can try again, so these quizzes will have fewer low scores than those not in such games. The same applies to quiz lists, so I guess over time this will now even out as more and more quizzes get played via those lists.

So the replay score overwrites the original effort?! That makes it even worse then?

I do realise this is minute detail and relatively unimportant but does it not irk you that these difficulties attached to these quizzes are not representative of the actual difficulty? Maybe it is just me! If so I thank you for the time taken to read and consider my posts and I’ll forget about it. I suppose it’s not something that I should be asking for time to be spent on anyway. Just bugs me that’s all

Personally, I have never taken much account of those difficulty ratings, as what is easy for someone who knows anything about the topic (who is likely to have played the quiz) will obviously be harder for someone who does not. It is a rare quiz indeed that is easy even if you aren't familiar with the subject! This particularly applies to niche topics, for which the quizzes probably don't get a lot of general random play - they are taken by players who are familiar with and interested in, that topic. I am acutely aware of my ignorance in many areas of trivia (I won't confess my ignorance here, but it does exist), so when I need to take a quiz in one of those areas, I know it will be harder for me than the rating indicates.

The difficulty ratings are at best a very rough indication, especially when specialty knowledge is required (and twice so it anything pop culture). You will find quizzes on individual books, TV shows and movies that will be marked "Easy" or "Average" when they are actually pure guesswork and often even difficult to impossible to google for the other 98.5% of us who never read / watched the material in question, because simply only fans of that work ever took that quiz.

Also, quizzes who had most of their plays prior to 2010 might be completely off now - we have different players with different interests and of course some information that everyone knew back then because it was at the top of the news and charts might have faded some.

There are a whole lot of factors that can skew a rating and being in a game or quiz list is just one of them - which actually pulls the ratings towards "tough" from both sides as many players who would never have taken that quiz otherwise because it's not one of their favorite subjects will play it and more likely than not score 5 or 6, just enough to pass. If you find a quiz in the Great Race and it's marked "easy", that's an indication that a lot of players actually know or at least cared enough to try and learn. In a typical "research just to get it done" situation, you'd see a tough rating with around a 6 average.

I understand what you both are saying and I don’t want to just argue for the Halibut.... BUT I have to say my experience is the opposite of what you say.

In my expert topic of Star Trek I have always found the ratings showing on the quizzes to be one or more steps more difficult than I judge them. So this flies in the face of the, “experts in that subject take the quiz and send the difficulty rating easier”.

Also, did you look at the quiz I linked? Who’s learning that stuff? Surely that’s at least a challenge even for someone with background knowledge!

Anyway, agree to disagree, it’s not that important... it’s doesn’t affect my experience it just bugs me.

I remember playing that quiz (not as part of any race, just because it came online), and considering it a chance to do some research and learn about historic events I remembered hearing about in Ancient History and Latin classes 50 years ago. Especially since the dates are so close, it is not even possible to make educated guesses because of an awareness of the timeline. It took me an entire afternoon to take the quiz - I didn't just google the battle to get a number, I had a lovely time reading about the events, and the political and social goings on at the time. Now, after a lengthy interval, I wouldn't get 10 again on my own, but I just looked and remembered about half of them. Maybe I skewed the difficulty rating, but I really enjoyed the quiz experience.