New Scaratings

I would nominate introducing the BT 15 minute game with no rankings.

Know your Server has got to be up there.

Adding the # round and eleminating the Juebox round in Playback

_________________
Mitch (MTCHWF/WLFFLY)

Co-Home Bar: Buffalo Wild Wings Edwardsville, IL and Time Out in St Louis, MO

Spots 1-10 all already spoken for, split feed.

_________________
Buzztime is a company full of dumbshits.

#11: Closing its forum.

Five years later, I still can't get over Zobmondo and Rip Curl. How anyone with more than 3 brain cells thought people would actually want to play those games is completely beyond my grasp. I'll give honorable mention to:

- Battle of the Sexes
- 3 Trivia Networks, Only 2 TV channels
- that billiards game they had on the poker channel
- getting rid of Get Reel and RetroaTiVe, two of their most popular games
- their inabliltiy to clarify the rules on the Smartest Bar promotion
- Initially there were easy to detect patterns in the answers to Buzztime Trivia. For example, if 1 was the first answer eliminated, the answer was never 2.
- The time they had a live QB1 tournament at Cadillac Jack's. Halfway through the competition one of the Buzztime reps announced that they received word that sunspots might be causing problems with the satellite feed and that we should stop entering plays until they told us it was ok to continue. Of course the game continued to run fine with no interruptions. I'm not making this up.

Duh!

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

_________________
"...It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED...."

Come on now,2nd to the split feed is absolutely the ending of Passport.

That was the beginning of the end, thousands of players quit after the end of Passport in '07 and have never come back.

There were many passionate followers of that game, not as many as Showdown, but enough to make it worth an hour long time slot.

Geography is one of the 6 main staples of trivia, there must be a game devoted to that.

Duh and the rest of those other silly games were just hiccups, the ending of Passport was a major error.

_________________
BUD - Stained Glass Pub Silver Spring MD
OC BUD - Grotto Pizza DE near Ocean City MD

LET'S GO ....Orioles and the 9 and 5!!

The "Wanna Be A Buzztime Star" promotion...EGADS!!!

Nailed that one.

Just adding to the list of possibilities, as I would obviously rank split network (2nd time) as first, followed by replacing Countdown with endless 15-minute BT games as higher:

--1st time network split (specialty games only)
--Dumbing down Showdown and then Six for periods of time
--The Vegas round of the final "Million Dollar Match" game, which was delayed so long in the evening that some of the audience had to go home, because BT wanted to debut its "golden playmaker", but then couldn't get the planned game going so a million dollars ended up riding on a kiddie trivia one.
--That huge promotion re: the poker tournament at the Atlantis that ran so poorly one night that they ended up giving everyone gift certificates--and the poker tournament itself evaporated.
--Academy Awards games that didn't work well, and then then didn't produce any rankings.
--Taking the stance on BadBart that they didn't like to hire as reps anyone with experience playing the game (I'm still thinking there's probably an anti-player bias still, when players are the ones who could most effectively communicate with locations and promote the system.)
--The first version of Sci-Files, "Zealot," whose database of questions seemed to be limited to about a hundred, many of which were minutiae rather than trivia (one of which, "What is Captain Picard's badge number?", got repeated so often that we actually could get it right.
--Splitting BrainBuster and Showdown, and now making the wrong one follow the other.
--Blur.

Brooke/AARDVK

I'm ranking this one high unless there's a plausible explanation of how it could be a glitch:

BT tossing out all guest scores from the HOF rankings currently being shown, thus disenfranchising both long-time players who either chose not to become PP+ or never made the conversion a few years ago, plus newbies trying out the system before committing and putting the time into registering.

Brooke/AARDVK

Letting Wheelie go.

Along with MaryC... egads!!

Ah, Zealot Trivia...
It was Picard's serial number and it will live on with me forever because of that game; SP-937-215.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Brooke.
You're a peach.

Let's see... top ten dumbest BT moves...

10. Running a trivia company with marketing majors
9. General lack of follow through or sound execution on most promotions
8. Never proofreading any of their Six games
7. Briefly eliminating national rankings while apparently under the impression that scoring was unnecessary for competition purposes
6. Putting specialty games after premium ones
5. Eliminating their forums and our invaluable input along with it
4. Eliminating STC
3. Leveling the playing field - all the way to the ground - with this time zone/guest player fiasco
2. Every change made to every premium game since the dawn of time
(With the possible exception of the Final Strategy points countdown)
1. Perpetually working under the assumption that their player base is ignorant to their purpose and irrelevant to their results

_________________

/```\
(o\_!_/o)

The "new and improved" Playback
Getting rid of both Jukebox and Triviaoke as separate games
Not being able to prevent repeat games


But by far, the dumbest thing NTN Buzztime has ever done...

The Jesus and Mary Chain question!

_________________
Malort. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

#5: Input? We don't need no stinking input! We're business majors!

The poker tournament situation was not Buzztime's fault. The promoters cancelled the event shortly before we were scheduled to go. MaryC and other BT reps did everything they could to "make it right" for us. Although there wasn't a poker tournament (and I didn't get to meet Reggie Jackson ), we were provided with five nights at the Atlantis, $100 Atlantis credit, $1,000 cash, a dinner catered by BT at the aquarium in the Atlantis, airfare for the winners and their guests and hotel/airport transfers (I may have missed something).

Two that haven't been mentioned: (1) hiring way too many BS artists -- err, consultants, that is -- who burned money while not knowing the product at all; and (2) overpricing the product to the bars for so many years, thus keeping down market penetration.

No love for the JAMC, eh?

Did they mess up this question or was it just not an appropriate question?

_________________
RABBIT

I'm not bad -- I'm just drawn that way.

That's for sure!!!

Best thread ever on the old BT site...EGADS!!!

That game sure beats asking me if a non-BCS school with make it to the Final Four this year.

Really.

There was nothing wrong with the question. A very large percentage of the network playing base answered the question incorrectly. Obviously, it's no fun to miss the Encore question...but I could list hundreds of stupid things that buzztime has done before I'd ever put a content question on the list. But that's just me

Back on the old NTN boards (remember when they had them?), there was a collective "WTF?" when JMC was the final question of Playback. I had never even heard of them before that question. That was the point in which our friends who we had been trivia partners with for years had finally decided that they wouldn't go out of their way to play NTN on Saturday nights anymore.

_________________
Malort. It's not just for breakfast anymore.