Dear All

Merlin one of the Validators has made some proposals that he believes will make quiz party better for players and more efficient for validators. Most categories can be left as they are but with these few changes I believe everybody on the English section who plays Quiz party will be much better off.

MERLIN'S PROPOSED CATEGORIES

1. GEOGRAPHY

2. HISTORY AND POLITICS

3. MUSIC

4. SPORT, GAMES AND HOBBIES

5. NATURE AND ANATOMY

6. LITERATURE

7. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

8. CINEMA

9. TELEVISION & MEDIA

10. TRADITION & BELIEFS

11. ARTS AND CREATIONs

12. COOKING AND GASTRONOMY

13. LANGUAGE & WORDS

14. SPACE AND ASTRONOMY

15. POT LUCK

Many people have commented in the past that the categories for Quiz Party should be changed but until now nobody has put forward a suitable proposal. Many have already commented that 3 television categories is too much and many if not all of the team agree. Box sets and cartoons can be moved to Television and Media and there is no-need to change the name of the Television and Media category. I think it will make things clear for everybody, if it is Movie related then it goes to Cinema and If it is Television related it goes into Television and media.

Politics can be moved from Geography to History. If you look at quizzes on the internet they put both of these subjects together. When Quiz party first started everybody was sending questions about Presidents and Prime Ministers to the History category.

We have struggled to get good quality questions on Games and Entertainment. Many have been confused with the word entertainment. I even had to move about 20 questions that should have been either in the Cinema Category or the Box Set and cartoons category. I believe you mean Hobbies or what we call pass times (what you do when you have free time) To make up the numbers we have accepted many easy questions. In many Quizzes such as Trivia Pursuits they have a Games and Hobbies section. If we Have a section called Sport, Games and Hobbies we will cover all the questions that we have already.

Taking away 2 of the existing categories leaves 2 more categories 3.

14 should be Pot Luck as many have suggested. The idea behind Pot Luck is to cover subjects that do not fit into any other category. Hopefully people will also send questions that they may have left out as we have no category for their question. The other reason is some questions if you put them in their own category will give away the answer or make the choices even more limited. We do not want people putting questions in Pot Luck because it is easier for them and that is the same for Validators. We want Pot Luck to be as difficult as any other category with the only difference being that you will not be sure on the Category of the question you will get. Pot Luck should never be used as an extention of categories we already have.

We can live with 14 categories as they cover all the categories and that is why I added Space and Astrology with Merlin's help, he suggested Astrology. We have a lot of questions on Space and I have many more so I think this will be popular and interesting.

I think Merlin's suggestion will improve what is already an excellent quiz and I reccomend to people Merlin's suggestion.

Nothing is set in stone so it will be good to see what people think.

PLAN OF ACTION

We do not need to stop the quiz, Merlin and I can quickly move all necessary questions quite quickly.

STEP 1

Move questions in Box sets and Cartoons to Television and Media and move Disney Movies to Cinema. In the short term Pot Luck will still have some TV Questions.

STEP 2

Move questions from Games and Entertainment to Sport. Sport will be renamed to Sport, Games and Hobbies.

STEP 3

Move questions that come under the Category Science and Technology that fit into Space and Astrology.

STEP 4

Move questions from categories that should have been in Pot Luck as they never fitted into the category they were put in.

Step 5

Move Political questions from Geography to History. This will be left to last as there is less urgency to move these questions as we will already have enough questions in both categories.

Please note to ensure that there are enough questions for everybody to play Quiz party that we will leave enough questions in all categories to ensure the game is playable. We do not want to leave subjects with 0 questions. This means we will have to do some of the work suggested in steps 1 to 4 at the same time.

People say this will create extra work, this is not a problem as we are going through all questions at the moment and that is why people have noticed many changes for the better. We are not building Quiz Party for 1 year but for 20 years if not more. If we take Scopa for example the classic version has been going for a long time but Scopa has had more versions added and some subtle changes such as the last card announcement but Scopa is still as popular as it has always been. I would be shocked if I found Scopa removed say 20 years later because nobody played it. I like the Multiple choice element with 4 possible questions. Some Quizzes have 4 possible options and others have 3 but that is something I would never change. I think the game as it is is fantastic or if you like more french sounding Magnifique but if these changes are made then things will be even better.

THANKS

Quiz Party Team

Oh here you go, pot luck suggestion for 5th time. Yep, many people did suggest it, which is about 2 or 3 persons. Is it so hard to understand that the quiz isn't supposed to be luck based like that? You get 3 categories, and you choose the one you think you're good at. With the pot luck idea, we would be able to choose from just 2 categories, and one totally random and god knows what can we get. About the other suggestions, I don't know is it good to merge sports with games and entertainment. Even right now as it is, half sport questions are about NFl, NHL and such sports, so this would reduce the chance of getting a good sport question even more. Just keep in mind that the quiz existed in French for 2 years, and that categories are probably well thought out and that there was probably much more discussion.

Hello,

I won't again argue about pot luck, you already know what I think.

In the french version, nobody proposed to mix games, entertainment, and sport. There are other sports than ice hockey, football, basket ball and tennis. IN french, sometimes we have questions about more rare sports, and sometimes about rules or history/origins of a sport. I'm pretty sure that the subject range is big enough to keep a single category.

If anybody puts up a fair argument for changing the subjects then I will always put it forward. Parts of our quizz are weak and that will always be the case while the subjects are what they are. From experience quite a number of the questions have not been good and that is why they were deleted. It has not been anything to do with the language barrier but simply an understanding of what is required for a good quiz question. I will make the quiz to the level as I originally suggested and once that is done then someone else can take over. I think these proposals are very good and it is sad they have not been accepted as we really need these changes.

What is good for the French section does not mean it is good for the English section. What is the logic for example of having 3 television categories when many of the people here don't watch English or American television and even in the blind world people who watch television is limited. Merlin and I have worked really hard to ensure there were at least 500 questions for all categories when some were very difficult to fill.

See, your opinion is not every player's opinion. How did you get an idea that in the blind world people don't watch television so much? Firstly I've never heard of the blind world, and second Here is your reason for different television categories. I might watch cartoons, but not necessarily general TV shows. The same thing can be said about the cinema category. Also, why do you think that what's good for the French part wont necessarily be good on here?

I have played many quizzes for more than 30 years so have seen enough to know what is a good quiz and what is not a good quiz. The format for Quiz Party as I said is excellent with people having a question with 4 possible answers. You can look at "Who wants to be a millionaire" on youtube to see a good example. I have taken some questions from that show as some others have.

You said that the Frenchh had had the quiz for 2 years. I don't know what level of experience in quizzing they have. I know from what I was told that the standard of questions are good over there. You have 3 categories for telivision related questions and that is 20% of the questions that people can get questions from. I cannot say if people have 3 of the TV categories at any one time but I have had at least 2 of them. if sport had 3 of the 15 categories then people would complain there is too much sport in the quiz. Nobody is denying that the 3 categories are different but we do not need 3 categories for television when 2 will be more than enough. To enable the quiz to have enough questions for Television then we dug very deep in the Barrel to find enough questions.

You misunderstand Potluck Aminiel Maybe the word Misalanious is a better word or best of the rest.

Here we should have questions that have no categories and yes we would include questions that would be from existing questions only if putting them in their own category would give away the answer.

I have spent 7 months and counting on the quiz so I can assure you I only want the best for the quiz. Merlin made these suggestions and he is almost a semi-pro in quizzes and I guess he won't thank me for saying that so that is why I have backed his suggestion. Personally I would only want just a sports category but having listened to Merlin's reasoning and having experienced the poor quality levil in the Games and Entertainment section have backed this suggestion. We want all categories to be of very good quality and if the categories stay the same than that cannot be ensured by anybody.

Nikola I take your point that there may be too many questions for some Sports as we have just focussed on adding questions. Sport is my field so that will be addressed.

Yeah, it's pretty easy to write long messages without answering to the main points. The fact you watched quizzes for so long doesn't have to mean anything, and there is a reason why every quiz is different. We could have took who wants to be a millionaire and just used that format of 15 random questions, but that wouldn't work at all. Millionaire is not meant to be played online, and has no categories at all so I don't see where your comparison is coming from. At the end we all do want quiz party to be as best as possible, but some things you suggest are just not realistic. You can't compare we have 3 different categories for television and compare that to sports.

You might have 30 years of quiz experience, but your overgeneralization about blind people and their supposed lack of watching TV speaks volumes. Yep, experience isn't everything, folks.

The point is that it is the same format, You just create categories. Aminiel did say we could change the categories and I have just put forward Merlin's suggestion. People will agree or not. I have experience in not just watching quizzes but taking part. I have worked a huge amount on the quiz and am pointing out its difficiencies. I don't worry about a lack of support as I never got much from people when I was the only person pushing to have Quiz Party in the English part of the playroom. If I did not push for it we would not have had it now!

If we do get the improvements then people will see in the long term that these categories will make the Quiz Party even better. Any person can propose their suggestions for 15 categories as they are welcome to do so!

Oh yeah, here you go. Perhaps one day I will see a topic about quiz party which doesn't include Ynwa praising himself. So what if you've started quiz in English? Someone had to do it, and we all thanked you multiple times, so I don't know what else do you expect. To be honest with your attitude you shouldn't even have started it. What if you took part in quizzes? That doesn't make you a categories expert in any way.

Wow, that's rich. If you go back and read all the countless topics about people wanting quiz party to be in the English part of the PR, you will very quickly discover that you most definitely weren't the only one pushing for it. Your posts are getting more ridiculous and further from the truth by the minute, so I'd suggest you stop giving people more reasons not to take you seriously.

sorry if I sound rood or anything, but the developer has replied, he's given a good reason I think. So why are we starting a flamewar or such? I know that developer should lisson to his players, but a no from the developer meense the end of the discussion. Again, sorry if this came out a little bit to harsh but just wanted to clarify my points before this gets out of hand.

@Everyone I believe he ment something like people who wanted to actively work on it, but even in that case the staff page clearly lists 8 validators.

I agree that it is up to Aminiel to decide in the end. I have put forward the suggestion one of the team has made and that is part of my job. There are categories we will struggle to add many more questions and that is why we wanted to make changes for the benifit of everybody because some categories we were just making up the numbers. Games and entertainment is an example as is Television and Media. As I said if you Merged those 2 categories then that leaves 2 categories empty hence coming up with 2 new ones. I think it is worth a try, if Aminiel really dislikes the new categories they can always be put back to what they were. as we are not proposing to delete those questions.

For the TV category, I understand the point of YNWA and it sounds perfectly valid to me.

The difference isn't due to blind watching or not watching TV, but about the difference that the english language has against others.
Many people come to the english playroom because they don't have their own language, as a default. IN the opposite, people come to the french, spanish or italian playroom because they speak one of these languages.

This makes a big difference. I will take an enormous shortcut (sorry for this) but it's basicly so: if you speak french, whether you are from Quebec, or you are from France/Belgium/Switzerland; whether you have been exposed to France or Quebec channels. Belgium and Switzerland are small countries so one watch a lot channels from France even if one isn't french.
Same for spanish where you can basicly be from Spain or from South America, I don't know in fact but I think that people from Argentina probably sometimes watch Venezuela, Chil, etc. TV and vice-versa.
Since people from all over the world come to english playroom and not only UK and Americans, we can't similarely assume they know whether one.

To be fair in this case we should put question about TV channels from all countries over the world. OF course it's very complicated, and anyway we have a good reason to not do so: a polish person probably don't care at all about sweedish programs.... so the category is annoying and totally uninteresting.

More generally, in the english quiz, we must take more care in putting less country or culture specific questions; because America and UK isn't the whole world.

I accept the same argument to mmove politics into history, because the questions about politics that are really worth it and known world-wide most often coincide with major history facts (exemples: world wards, US vs URSS in 60-80s, french revolution, etc.)
AGain because the small political event of a particular country is probably not very interesting for people outside of that country.

I don't agree in the same reasonning with sport because sport is quite international; games as well, especially if you think about videogames. A lot of card, board, dice games are known all over the world even if there are a lot of totally unknown regional games. A lot of common entertainments other than games are also certainly quite internationalized.
For cinema as well as for music and literature, greatest stars and blocks busters are also known all over the world.
I really think that this shouldn't be a problem for all these category.

I think that is pretty good reasoning.

The Quiz Party Team and I include myself in this criticism does not have a good enough knowledge of computer games to say if a computer games question is good or not. I know nothing about mudding for example so I find it difficult to say if a question is a really obscure question or if it is a really good question that most mudders should know. That goes for many of the other computer games too, some questions were very difficult and time consuming to validate. I would have liked to have validated more of them. Where I could find out information about games I was able to validate questions knowing the answer was correct. It was much easier to validate card and board games as it was possible to find out enough information.

I do not think we should scrap games and Entertainment as there are good questions in that category and some people are interested in them. If you look at the long term then the games and entertainment will not rise much and this is why it is better to move them to Sports. There is a natural crossover with sports and games. Is chess a Sport or a game? the Bridge governing body went to court recently to make Bridge legally a sport but lost the case as the judge ruled that sport should contain physical activity. The natural connection with these categories is the reason why Merlin put them both together. Aminiel in your original suggestion you put Fishing in games and Entertainment. You are correct to say it is a hobby but it is also a sport and given the name of angleing.

I think the article you wrote Aminiel is good. People will know about Brazilian footballers or Indian cricketers for example. Many artists, such as Pacasso are non- English or American. Even in some English quiz books there were questions on French cooking terms and Italian Wines. EIf you look at Littrature there are questions on Russian novelists such as Dostoevsky or the French Auther Zola who wrote many excellent books.

The changes that have been proposed will work and at the very least should be given a trial. It is not impossible to change things if you are dissatisfied with the new changes that we have come up with.

Merging the 'sport' and 'games and entertainment' categories? Makes no sense in my opineon. The two are completely different. Sure you could debate all day about the television and media and cinema or whatever else, but merging those two would make no sense at all

Sport is a game, you do them as a pass time/Hobby. If you have played many quizzes you should know they are put together and have been so for many years. Yes Quiz Party has been going for quite a time but at the time when they chose categories the English section was never consulted. Merlin who has a lot of experience in quizzes knows what he is talking about and his proposals will make what is an excellent game even more professional looking. What is nice is people can play this game for free and this will be the best free quiz that anybody can play that includes sighted websites on the internet.

I have now moved most of the Politics questions from Geography to History. looking at the Geography questions while going through them I can see that there a huge amount of questions covering almost everything from around the world. That database is a tremendous wealth of knowledge so I would like to thank everybody for that.

I think sport is already enough messed up. With some sports that I am sure nobody watches. But nah that is just me. History also not my taste, so many question about years, if I would be validator half of them I would not accept. It is difficult to make some good questions, not that easy as it seems but really those numbers in history really annoy me.

So, you moved questions from politics to history even before the categories are officially changed?

Doing that without authorization, it can be called abuse of power. lol

It seems some validators are bored because somehow the people stopped to submit and due to this they come up with funny proposings.

By the way, the validators should stop deleting our questions which were already validated.

Or maybe some of them do it on purpose, because they like to think that quiz party is their and they can do all what they want.

There's no logical point to delete what they validated already.

It is my personal opinion, I do not intend to offend anyone, so, do not bite me. smile

Oh come on, but they have so much quiz experience and know the best so can validate what they like, not what's good.

Only that one as Aminiel said they could be changed. It also demonstrates how quickly they can be moved with little disruption as possible. I don't intend to spend a lifetime on quiz party as I said previously. Once it is up to a very good enough level with plenty of questions I will look to do something else. Quiz party 2 would be good as I am sure people would love a sports quiz. Also clean up the PR is an option.

Yes there are some questions that cover minority sports. Not everybody likes football and other major sports. The category would be called major sports if that was the case. Remember there are a lot of people that don't like sport at all but love other subjects. I am not so keen on nature but from the questions I have seen there are some very knowledgeable people here that have sent in some excellent questions on that subject.

Today for example I deleted 2 repeats about who was the 65th president of the United States? I deleted a couple more as I am sure you don't want just questions on American Presidents. You can't have it both ways complaining there are too many American questions and when some are cut you complain. I and the team will do the best to our abilities and if Aminiel wishes to sack us then he is free to do so!

I think you have a great misunderstanding of your job as well as the whole quiz. You aren't the developer, but a validator so I don't know what kind of quiz party 2 you're talking about.

I think you are not reading my message properly and you are interpreting it to what you want to read as some have for their own needs. I said what I would like to do not what I am going to do.

If people really were observant they would have noticed that I deleted one of my own questions today. I had been away for 20 days because of computer problems and it was pointed out to me that 2 of my questions had been deleted while I was away. The person who deleted them had done the right thing so I just added some different ones. People wrongly validate questions, and have validated with errors that people can quite rightly report. Validators do their best and act in good faith. As I said there is no regulations we have to abide by but do the best job we can on behalf of the playroom.

I don't really worry because I know we are doing an excellent job, It would not be nice if the teams questions had to have a double approval by 2 different members of the team before those questions reach the public. When you do proofreading again and again you go through the questions and make changes if you need to or take the appropriate action. I gave people warning when we got to 10,000 that everything would be checked properly so it is surprising when people ask why questions had gone down.

If people think they can do a better job and put in the hours then they are more than welcome to do so but from what I have seen those people are not out there. Most talk the talk but are not prepared to walk the walk.

Quiz party belongs to everyone. In the end it should be something we all enjoy. I also think there shouldn't be too much merging of categories and to many changes. It can get confusing. Just my opinion.

That is why we want to make the changes now for the better, many categories will remain untouched. We are hardly going to make tripple work for ourselves for the sake of it. We ask people to trust in us, we are experienced people that know what we are doing, I think the work we have done proves that already. It is the same for the validation, do you want us to leave bad questions in? Do you want us to leave in bad Spelling, Poorly worded English, repeated questions, too many of the same type of questions, do you want us to leave in questions that are obscure even to those that know the programmes or books for example? do you want options that have so bad possibilities that to most the answer is easy, we try to make the options as authentic as possible. I know people don't like to hear the truth but it is better than lying to people. If a question has to be deleted or changed then iit is our job to do it, otherwise people will just validate questions in fear of offending people even if they know in their heart of hearts it should not be validated.

Merlin and I want to make these changes for the benefit for the whole of the English section of the playroom as we fully believe that what we are suggesting will only make things better. You saw how quickly we changed things and they could be put back perhaps even faster than they were moved if Aminiel doesn't like what he likes in a few months time. I am so confident that he won't because I know how good these changes will be for the quiz. I love the quiz and enjoy working on it and I just only hope Aminiel backs us with these changes. If I went behind Aminiel's back I would not be waisting my time trying to put my point of view forward I would have just done the changes regardless of what people think.

Well, that's all of us put in our places, people. Don't get it into your head that you should make any suggestions or have any input in the behind the scenes workings of Quiz Party. The validators know what they're doing and are experienced, therefore the only way to do it is to run the thing as an anarchy with only one party in power. Well, fair enough then.

What are your proposals for the 15 categories? Aminiel has said that it is possible to change them provided there are 15. 14 as I said were possible as they covered all subjects but Aminiel wanted 15. As I said I was prepared to listen to the team if someone comes up with them. If you have something then let me know and I am more than happy to look at them. If someone has something better then I am more than willing to listen. If someone has better ideas than that will be great.

I am looking forward to hear what your suggestions are for the 15 ccategories!