My only problem is that you’re bossing people around again. Don’t do that.
BigT is not complaining about INRS using blue here on the board but in an email he sent to trivia guy.
The vector on the left.
and
7 moultons.
OK, so I can see that the question was unrealistically hard. But you saw the question before you made the bet. You knew how hard it was, and still you bet the maximum? That’s nobody’s fault but yours. The question was testing whether you had the sense to not bet on it. You failed that test.
Well, I’m starting to see the issue. His goal isn’t just to Win, it’s to Finish In the Top 10 Scores All Season. No one is going to post a Top 10 score without getting the final question right, and by making the final question impossible one particular week, the Trivia Master is virtually eliminating everyone’s scores that week from even being in contention.
Getting a bye in the playoffs is a sweet idea - I’m bringing it up to our guy next time I see him.
But where does it say you really need to get the final question right to score in the Top 10. They had a strategy and it failed. Would he be complaining if somebody had gotten right? Since the question was nigh impossible the real complaint is NOT that the question was too hard, it was too hard for everybody. It was that they risked it all and apparently other teams did not.
Interesting thread.
Who are Rehab and O.A.R?
How do you you throw out an email? Print it first?
I agree it was an extremely difficult question. But in my opinion, the only grounds you have for complaining about a trivia contest question is if they gave a factually wrong answer to it.
I agree with all of that except that I never hosted a trivia contest. If there’s a legitimate complaint in that email, it’s buried under a bunch of silliness.
A better email might be something like this:
Edit: Also in agreement with Little Nemo. Indeed, when I opened the thread, that’s what I was expecting.
No, it was NOT my complaint. Munch nailed it.
I should add that I’m somewhat friendly with the person to whom I sent the email, and that we discuss questions all the time. It’s not a random email to a faceless bureaucrat somewhere.
You only need to get the final question right to place in the Top Ten if other top-finishers are also getting it right. Do you really think that there were ten other players who bet the max and who got that question right? If not, then you didn’t need to do so, either. And if you do believe there were ten folks who aced it, then it wasn’t actually too hard after all, it was just a question that separates the good from the great.
I didn’t make myself clear. We were not looking for a score in the top ten for that night only. The top scores are earned during the entire run of the league.
Oh, I get it now. So your complaint is that you guys, stuck with that hard question, were competing against other players who didn’t have to deal with that question? OK, then, in that case, I can see the complaint, since it wasn’t a level playing field. Of course, even without that question, there would always be some basis for complaints of an uneven playing field, since there’s no objective standard by which you could say the questions were equally difficult on all nights.
I once heckled the quizmaster for referring to the “Queen of England”.
I shouldn’t do quizzes. Or drink.
Lizzie 2 is in fact the Queen of England. She’s also the Queen of a Lot of Other Places and Feudal Lord of This and That, but she’s still the Queen of England, too.
I disagree. Clearly an incorrect answer is grounds for a riot, but there is a difference between trivia and minutiae*. ‘What was the name of Thomas Jefferson’s lover’ is a different sort of question from ‘what was the name of Thomas Jefferson’s gardener’s sister’s cat.’
The sort of questions that the OP is dealing with always put me in mind of “what have I got in my pocket?”, and even Gollum insisted on three guesses to make it fair.
*I just found out that minutiae is a term for the identifying features of a fingerprint. Think of me if it comes up on trivia night.
Same here. We’ve played where the questions were unanswerable, or had multiple answers, or the questions were unanswerable and the only group getting them right happened to have the bar manager as a member, or something…then mix with alcohol! I don’t think I would send an email though, I just don’t do them anymore. To be fair, most of these were fairly unorganized, often homemade games.
It doesn’t appear to be the case, since he mentioned he wouldn’t bring it up if he thought that there was even a 2% chance of getting it correct.
I’m still not sure you get it. Over the course of 12 weeks, INRS’s team competes in 10 trivia contests. Over that 12 weeks, there are probably at least 60 individual contest entries per location (5 teams per week seems to be a VERY conservative estimate). Muliply that out by however many locations are participating (which from the link appears to be 12, assuming INRS is in Cincy). If your sole goal is to get a playoff bye by getting a Top 10 score, any particular week where that is impossible is a let down.
However, INRS is presenting this incorrectly. It’s not the Top 10 individual scores that get a bye in the playoffs - it’s the Top 10 teams with the highest 6 game average over 12 weeks. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to have bet it all on the final question - wager something that’s going to give you a shot at the house prize that week. Or if you’re too far behind to be competitive to the team out front, you bet it all hoping to go broke for the playoffs.
So INRS - tell me more about this league. I checked out the league page, and it seems very similar to the league we’re in. Ours is 20 questions - 6 rounds of 3 questions, with a halftime question and a final question. The first three rounds you bet 2, 4 or 6 points on your questions (not “bet”, but put a confident level on). Second half the amounts are 5, 7 and 9. Halftime is a 4-parter, worth 3 pts each. Final question you wager up to 20 points, for the first time you can lose points. Pretty similar? We were in the finals a few years ago, going into the last question we were in first place. The final question was equally impossible - but our final question is “put these four things in order”. Completely guessing, you have a 4% chance of getting it right. We got it wrong, one other team guessed and got it right. It sucked, and we didn’t win the cash, but them’s the breaks.
Aside from the question of whether this knocked INRS’s team out of finals contention or whatever, I think this is a legit complaint, particularly since INRS knows the guy in question and chats with him about trivia stuff on a regular basis. I go to pub trivia from time to time and I think it’s uncool for a question to be basically unanswerable, which I agree the one in the OP is.
I admit I’m still not getting it. Over the course of a season, do all teams compete in all the same matches?
If so, then all teams had to answer the question. If that’s the case the question, no matter how bad, wasn’t* unfair*, since everyone had it.
Or, do teams compete in any 10 out of 12 weekly contests? If that’s the case, having an unanswerable question may not be “fair.” OTOH, what if there were unanswerable questions in the two weeks when the team didn’t compete, and those questions tripped up other teams?
Or, do different locations have entirely different questions? In that case, how can any scoring system be fair?
It’s an insanely hard question and I think the OP was justified in questioning that aspect of it.
However, the OPs complaint that it made it impossible for them to get a high score doesn’t move me at all.