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Welcome, Clint.
I am a longtime player, and also longtime manager at a BT brewpub. The comments so far are spot-on, but I wanted to share more, from the perspective of someone actually paying for your product.
The only reason we keep paying the (relatively large) fee for BT is for the customers it puts into our seats. That means only the customers who come to our restaurant specifically because we have BT, either to play while they're here or for a specific game, including "BT tourists," who visit BT sites when they travel (or even travel to visit BT sites). To amplify, I would group people who pay attention to BT trivia at all into three categories: passive, casual and destination players. Passive players are those who regularly watch the BT TV screen, often commenting on, answering or discussing the trivia. Casual players are those who come to our restaurant for the great beer and food (and, *ahem,* stellar service), and who sometimes grab a Playmaker to play BT while they're here. Destination players are those described above. While we believe those first two groups are important, they're not the reason we have BT. There are plenty of other distractions we can provide for these folks that are cheaper than BT, some of which actually make us more money, like bar-top coin-op games. The destination players are the only justification for continuing to subscribe to BT.
Several factors drive destination players to continue playing BT:
-Solid, well-edited trivia, covering a wide spectrum of topics and at varying levels of difficulty, arranged into satisfying games throughout the day.
-Well-edited and well-thought out premium games.
-The ability to play these games against the entire network and see how they compare with others throughout the continent.
-A sense of community with other BT players around the continent.
-The tournaments that have been discussed already in this thread.
Historically, your company had done a decent job fulfilling these factors. Hell, you pretty much invented the nationwide trivia game and you're still the only people who do it. Unfortunately, in the last ten or fifteen years, your company has done a lot to erode what it had built up. Dumbing down the games was horrible. Switching to all-15-minute trivia all day was horrible. Splitting up the network was really, really horrible. Thankfully, these mistakes have all been (mostly) corrected. Unfortunately, each of them cost us customers. Judging by gameplay numbers, this is the case network-wide.
The forum you used to have on your website, which I understand was taken down because of the staff time it took to regulate trolls, did so very much to build up a coast-to-coast player community. Since you took the forum down, that community continues, but it is dwindling. This forum and the competitions organized here are the last gasps of that community.
You also took down site reviews, I presume because of complaints from sites about negative reviews. Since you took those down, BT tourism travel to our site has dried up.
Finally, your core destination players are not the twenty-somethings that any industry researcher can tell you spend the most time and money in bars and restaurants. Those people will be at our restaurant no matter what. The players you need to court are generally middle-aged or senior. Many don't Facebook or Tweet or Snapchat or whatever social media outlet comes up hot next. Sure, social media are important, but not key for your core players. They also don't generally care about bells and whistles. Cool graphics and badges are not the reason we play. We play because we like good trivia and we like to compete continent-wide. If you want to build up your playership again, you should concentrate on these core, destination players.
Your very presence here is encouraging, as is Jamie's. The corrections BT has made to past idiocies are encouraging. That said, (and I am switching myself into player mode here,) those of us here on Scaratings have seen a lot of BT history and are rather jaded. I hope that you do, therefore, have some thick skin and realize that even at our most vitriolic, we rant because we care. (Back to restaurant manger mode,) I hope that BT continues to remember those of us in the independent restaurant sector and understands what drives us to subscribe.
Sorry for the length of this. I hope some of it is helpful.
Sincerely,
AKBAR/Shawn
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