Feedback & Suggestions

[frenchsalad]

I've collated some notes from quiz participants and present them here for your perusal.

Issue: Speedguessers

Currently the boints system incentivizes going fast (fastest three answers get boints). This creates two issues:

• Users closest to the quiz server are possibly at an advantage
• Guessing randomly as fast as possible has the chance to yield more boints that someone who read slower but knew the answer.

Possible solutions

• Introduce a "- n boints" for incorrect guesses.
• Measure "time to respond" as the difference between the client receiving a question and responding to this question. This would eliminate any advantage from being server proximal.
• The total boints available for an answer (n) starts at one boint and decays in value every xx seconds that the question is live. This would fix the issue of speed guessing and "right but not fast enough" but would require a higher boint resolution.

Issue: Right but not fast enough

Currently users who guess correctly but are outside the fastest three get no boints. This can lead to users feeling cheated out of boints.

Possible solutions

• Change the scoring function so that correct answers receive a minimum number of boints (0.5 - 1 boint).
• Adjusting this scale might require retuning the boints awarded for fastest 3 (e.g. third place should get more than 1 boint if all correct answers get 1 boint).

Issue: Farming

Currently users who are available to participate in quizzes throughout the day & night will accumulate boints at a rate other users won't be able to keep up with. Furthermore, people risk being irresponsible with their time to "catch up", turning a fun game into something FOMOesque.

Possible solutions

• Sort the leaderboard by boints per game rather than total boints. This would preserve some advantage in being more available, but disincentivise users from randomly guessing in all available quizzes to farm boints.
• Ranked quizzes: a ranked quiz would have a 8 hour cooldown and be unforceable. Users may only particpate in one ranked quiz per 24hour period. A ranked quiz would have a minimum of 5 rounds. A ranked quiz may contain only (hard) or (medium) questions. Ranked quizzes should have a minimum number of participants, this could be achieved by having the bot send a "Ranked Quiz starting, PM me to register" message and recording the responses. If the threshold for players is met, the quiz will begin, otherwise it will not.

Ranked mode suggestions have come primarily from Boocra & tahley, shout out to them ; )

[jbpratt]

Thanks for the feedback @frenchsalad and those who gave ideas. I agree with both issues (mostly) and want to work on resolving them.

My thoughts on the first issue are that my intentions with it being time based was that we would always have people with another tab open, and quick with the fingers to copy+paste the question into google. It is pretty easy to do, I was able to do it consistently during testing. Though even when doing this, they will still lose to the people who know the correct answer and don't have to look it up.

I have a patch attempting to address this with your recommendations of point changes. With this change, 1st place will now receive 6 points, 2nd will receive 4 points, 3rd will get 2 points, and every remaining correct answer will get 1 point.

edit: Thinking more on this, I think I'm going to limit points based on participants as well.

Farming/point abusing is something I thought of as soon as the leaderboard came into picture. I can think more on the ranked mode. In terms of difficult, category, and round count, I plan to expose those parameters soon so that users can create a semi-specific quiz.