Hi, I just wanted to ask and get some opinions. Is there anyone else who agrees with me that the Heroes categories are too repetitive and narrow? It seems like we've been getting a lot of movies lately and these are just not my forte. I know Wes would probably agree that celebrities is not his forte either so maybe you can chime in on where you think the balance is and if it is where it should be. I personally like the old categories that we used to get including Common Bond, Mixed 5, Mixed 10, Mixed 25, and others. I have not seen US Presidents in a while but I can't say for sure that it is not in the mix. I enjoy Math as well which I know I've seen in recent months but it only crops up infrequently. This may have been one of the games that in the first few years of me playing here was actually done right I thought and didn't need any adjustment but I guess I just want to sample some opinions and see if it is something only I have noticed and then maybe it is just a personal preference kind of issue or if other people are kind of bored with seeing movies and celebrities almost every day like I am, or is it all an exaggeration in my mind. I don't know if there is already a thread on this so don't throw too many rotten vegetables my way if this has been talked about recently. Meanwhile, if everyone else is happy, I'm happy. And hopefully this has not become contentious even to ask, because I know in the past, people have been pretty strongly divided over whether this should be a really obscure kind of test or whether it should be very general where average scores all kind of fall around the 1450s-1470s with only fractions of a point of difference in between.

As I reviewed the last thirty instances of Team Heroes (look in "Me/My stats and ranks/Hourly and daily tournaments" and select Heroes), I did find only one repeat: People Themed E-K (February 5 and February 19). It seems quite evenly distributed.

The root categories for Heroes are on a 14-day rotation. You will see Movies every 14 days, Sci/Tech every 14 days and so on.

I've asked for it to be changed to 15 (possibly reintroducing Sports which is not part of the lineup as far as I recall) so we wouldn't get identical matchups between Pot of Gold and Heroes every 2 weeks (which has a negative impact on the Everything challenge).

The subcategory within the same root category is entirely random and has no memory. You can (and occasionally do) get the same subcat 14 days apart.

I can't remember the thread title or how long ago but I agree with you and I have argued for changes to Heroes on more than one occasion. I had specifically asked before why sports (or video games) had no representation and why we couldn't go back to having some more niche topics back occasionally (even once a week). Unfortunately anyone who cared enough to reply seemed to be in total disagreement with me and seemed to think that my suggestions would ruin things..... so I just shut up and put up with the game in its current state....

Personally, I think Math would be a terrible topic for a timed always counts as a team ranked game. (Yes, TriviaFan22, I know you enjoy it and why.). There are too many questions in that subcategory that are not trivia at all but equations to figure out.

"Presidential Trivia" is a topic I also like. However, that topic is actually "American Presidential Trivia". While some of the quizzes are written by by citizens of countries other than the United States of America, when "Presidential Trivia" appears it still brings cries of "American bias!"

I'm not sure what the root categories are but is it possible there is some duplication taking place? For instance, if Celebrities and Movies are both root categories, then wouldn't that mean that on the whole, there are more maybe as many as twice the categories on celebrities/films/etc than science topics? Perhaps that isn't what is happening. And then perhaps if People is coming up, then potentially there could be questions seeping in which are once again about famous people and their doings. But then, I don't know how mutually exclusive all of these categories really are. But it would seem to me that there is enough of a chance of crossover so that it *seems* like there is a much bigger emphasis on popular culture than it would look if you just looked at the categories themselves. This is just something I have noticed but I can't say for sure either way unless I were to religiously compile the categories each day myself and then could draw a conclusion from there.

I think one thing that makes these things difficult at times is people's taste in movies changes over time. And new movies are coming out all the time. It may have been in the early 2000s, people at this site knew who Rock Hudson, and Maureen O'Hara, and Gregory Peck and all of these various classic film stars were but I think in 2020, most people do not really know who they were or what movies they played in. Not that I watch much movies anyway. But I grew up with 80s and 90s movies and they just aren't quite as prominent so to speak because many of the quizzes the questions are extracted from are on films from the 1950s to the 1970s, the era when many of the question writers were coming up and watching film and these were stars that they looked up to. At least when it comes to history, science, animals, and a number of other subjects that we could list, these are things that everyone studies growing up and that never changes. It will never change that George Washington was the first president or that the Pilgrims wrote the Mayflower Compact. Those are interesting and worth knowing for all students of US History. Just like if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck. I know I am at a disadvantage in those categories because I don't watch a lot of movies since I'm kind of ADD but I do watch television.

Do the questions come strictly from quizzes or can they also come from the single question submissions?

And North America has come up again, which has appeared as recently as four weeks ago. So that's two categories (at least) combining for a total of four appearances in a single month.

I'm pretty sure the Team Heroes questions come from quizzes rather than individual questions since the individual questions are only grouped by their root category rather than by more specific categories.

One way to increase the likelihood of questions more suitable to you is to write quizzes that fall into some of the categories you think can be "modernized". Then there is a chance that some of those will come up rather than the ones that are there now.

Out of 20 root categories, there are five that definitely relate to pop culture: Movies, Music, Television, Celebrities and Entertainment. You could also count Sports and Video Games in that area. In addition, some People subcategories will include questions on Celebrities, e.g. the "by name" ones or Famous Women, since those often have crossover (quizzes with some pop culture personalities and some others will wind up in People more often than in Celebs).

Of the 20 categories, Brain Teasers, For Children and General don't fit the Heroes game. Video Games is excluded due to the large number of specific questions. That leaves 16 and the two of those not covered right now are Sports and Television if I am right (both also because they have more specialized quizzes than the others).


So right now, yes, 5.5/14 will deal with pop culture. This pretty much reflects the overall percentage in categories if you also count Sports and VG into that area.

It's also less than the ratio of QUIZZES - Movies (15042), TV (22042), Music (17577), Entertainment (4260) and Celebrities (3305) add up to 62226 out of roughly 148,000 and if you add in Sports (13486), you're already above half.

Do I personally like the concentration of pop culture? No. Memorizing cast lists is about as far from "fun" trivia as it can be for my taste. Does that opinion however reflect the majority in terms of quiz authoring and play? No way. The pop culture quizzes are generally played a lot, rated highly and a lot of them are being written, also because there's far more material to be written about in even one sub-genre of movies than you could ever touch in, say, Physics, without having to go to university level. Science or Religion are small because there are only so many questions you can ask before it becomes 100% duplication.

Bottom line - I don't see any reason to prioritize the "hard facts" categories in the game. Doing so would actually be detrimental, since they have fewer questions to choose from and repetition would increase. The only thing I really see as needing change is moving away from the 14-day cycle, either by dropping one category (Celebrities might be the #1 candidate here since a lot of its Heroes questions repeat in People, Movies or Music) or adding one (Sports) to break the unfavorable synchronicity between Pot of Gold and Heroes. Out of these two choices, I would prefer adding one over removing, simply because it adds variety, even though it would personally hurt my chances of doing well.

I'm with nasty_liar on adding sports to Team Heroes. I don't feel sports is specialized enough to be excluded from Team Heroes. And occasionally having a specific category is better than having a repeat of one of the dozen people/celebrity A-F, G-I categories. I do think it's probably better to exclude video games though.

I've asked for sports to be included for a long time, to no avail.

I've taken the essence of this thread and sent a proposal spec to Terry that should hopefully address the issues. Let's see what he'll say

I'm another who would be happy to see Sports return to the Heroes lineup.

Here's a possible idea. Since General does have some sub categories that would play well, how about a 15 day rotation with the 15th day rotating between General, Sports, and Television? That way those three categories would each show up once every 45 days, more frequently than now but not so frequently as to really annoy the people who don't like them.

Something to keep in mind is that if we have a lot of quizzes about pop culture, it's because people like quizzes about pop culture. Our content is user-submitted - if the Funtrivia membership as a whole loved science above all other subjects, we would have more science quizzes than any other subject.

And we don't.

People like pop culture, and one of the reasons we are here is to give people what they like - that's how businesses work.

And, yes, part of that is paying attention to this kind of discussion, but we also need to pay attention to what we see about what kind of quizzes get written, and what kind of quizzes get played.

We don't need Sports added, it would just end up being American sports.

Worse, knowing the college you've never heard of that was attended by an athlete who is equally unknown for those residing in other parts of the world.

My proposal involves switching over to the expert categories, so the chance to be saddled with "which college did X graduate from" would be very low, if at all. Out of the 21 general subcategories in that root category, only five would be American-centric (Baseball, Hockey, Basketball, Gridiron and NASCAR), so you'd on average see "American Sports" roughly once every two months.

This change would also eliminate the alphabeticals from People and Celebs in favor of more thematic categories.

I have to disagree with you on that. With things like Turner Classic Movies, Netflix, and other sources, people are still enjoying and discovering the classic Hollywood films and know who these people are and what their films were. In fact, because of accesses to those resources, I know them better in 202o than I did in 2000, when I only got to see them occasionally on TV or in special showings on campus.

I have to agree with this, too.

You have to agree with "just American Sports" after I already pointed out from the actual data that it's 5 subcategories out of 21 = less than one quarter?

OK, didn't read that. But I'm still not in favor of it, even tho' I would kick butt in the horse racing category. Why was it not included in the first place?

The original Heroes categories were created prior to 2008 and are based on a list chosen by Terry. I don't think they were ever significantly modified except to remove some of the most difficult ones.

Quite possibly, at the time they were created, Horse Racing didn't have enough quizzes.

We now have the more dynamic and adaptable system used for the Expert categories, but Heroes has not been switched over to it yet. I hope to change that, which will make Sports very playable and in fact would even make Video Games possible - although that one would suffer from a very small subcategory list and thus too much repetition.

I think it would be almost impossible to generate more science quizzes than TV quizzes even if the passion for it were there - there's the duplication point Wesley mentioned but it's also generally harder to write science quizzes in bulk compared to, say, 26 quizzes on each episode in a TV season of a particular show. A lot of the sports and media categories have quizzes loved by their audiences but that aren't at all accessible to the wider playerbase. Heroes can accommodate some of that more niche content, of course, it's just a question of balance.

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If there is a way to include the more accessible subcategories from TV, VG and Sports (couple in FC like Disney Movies Music could also work), I'd be happy to see them in the mix.

That isn't necessarily true. It may be that people who enjoy the pop culture, or more correctly celebrity culture, are more fanatical in their fascination with the stars and film, etc. Therefore they are more likely to create quizzes than someone who is more liking toward science or music or something else. It might also be likely that people who write quizzes on movies and celebrities are more likely to be serial quiz writers instead of people who just author a single quiz to complete some challenge. Overall, I don't think simply saying there are more quizzes in a subject is reflective on the subject's popularity, especially when there are writers who have hundreds of quizzes in a single subject, which is far more than some subcategories even have in total.