Improved Basic Team Mode - "Follow Along" Participants

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I currently play trivia regularly at a bar which uses the Crowdpurr platform to run the game.

Overall, the platform works great for this use-case and we like the instant rankings, quick pace and mobile interface.

However, there are a few cases where the platform doesn’t totally mesh with our needs.

We compete as small teams sitting together, with each team submitting one single team answer for each question. We do not have a projector set up in the bar, so the questions are only displayed on our mobile devices. We play with a Decreasing Points Timer, therefore we need to answer the questions quickly to get the most points.

It sounds like this use-case would be a good fit for the “Basic Team Mode”, however the limitation of displaying questions on a single device is not ideal for us. Team members may be sitting across from each other, and therefore displaying the question on one single device would make it slower for everyone in the team to get a chance to understand and answer the question.

We currently use “Advanced Team Mode”, and the host informs participants that only one team “captain” should answer questions, while everyone else is logged in simply to see the questions. This tends to cause some amount of confusion for new players, and if someone (not the captain) on the team submits an answer, the teams score is irreparably damaged by score averaging.

Another issue we sometimes experience is that a captain’s device can run out of battery and turn off, forcing them to adopt another team member’s device to enter answers. I think that this works okay with “Advanced Team Mode”, but In my testing of the “Basic Team Mode”, it seems that you cannot reconnect to a player’s account from a different device. In fact, it seems that a duplicate team with the same name is created. This behavior seems like a bug and came up in a recent thread on this forum.

I’m not sure whether your technology “knows” whether a player’s connection has timed out/disconnected. But if so, perhaps it’d be possible that if another device tries to join a game with the same username as an existing team, they’d be:

  • Rejected with a “player already exists” if that player is currently connected
  • Take over the existing player’s session if that player is currently disconnected

In summary, to better support our use case, I have two feature requests:

  1. Provide a passive “view only” player option for the “Basic Team Mode” configuration. This would allow non-captain players to see questions on their phones without the option of answering the question.
  2. Make it possible to reconnect to a player’s session from a different device if their device dies.
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We use basic team mode. We tell players that they can have more than one player at the table sign in but only one team member uses their phone to answer. That way, players “across the table” can see the questions in real time. Hope this helps.

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Hi @boxed_whine,

Thanks for taking the time to provide all of this feedback!

Based on your use case, it sounds like you (and/or the host) may be interested in enabling a feature currently offered on Crowdpurr. You can even use this setting while using the Basic Team Mode. The Allow Participants to Sign Back In feature allows players to sign back into a previously created account by using either their *Email Address or Phone Number. This setting is especially useful to account for situations where a player’s device may disconnect from a game due to connection or low power issues as it even allows players to sign back into the same account from different devices throughout the event.

This setting is located under the purple Leads tab → Lead Capture Settings → then Returning Participants section.

For instance, when a player signs into the game and enters an Email Address or Phone Number, Crowdpurr will check if there is a participant account matching one of those lead capture pieces. If it finds one, it will sign them in as that participant or basic team and continue their session playing using that same account.

Allow Participants to Sign Back In Enabled.png
We also recommend disabling the Allow Multiple Sign-Ins setting, which would allow players to create a new profile every time they sign in to the same Experience. When this setting is disabled, the Mobile View will not give the option to create a new player.

For more information on these settings, please have a look at the following page:

Advanced Participant Settings

Secondly, as @doc.proctor.sc has mentioned, this workaround would work well if you would like non-playing participants to sign in to the same game just to view questions without answering. With the previous Allow Participants to Sign Back In setting enabled, if a player tries to answer a question that has already been answered, they’ll be notified that an answer has already been submitted by a player for the question as displayed below:

ErrorVoteCasted
ErrorVoteCasted393×820 51.8 KB

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Thank you so much @doc.proctor.sc and @jemma! Both of your responses have been super helpful.

I wasn’t aware of the “Returning Participants” and “Allow Multiple Sign-Ins” options, but I just tested them out and I think they should work for our use-case! The one downside is that we’ll need to add an Email or Phone Number input, which we weren’t using previously. But I suppose adding that requirement isn’t a huge deal.

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And then all the players on that team would just need to know the email or phone number if signing in on a new device.

This is a good idea actually. As at the moment, we create a duplicate Basic Team if someone signs in with the same team name because if we just allowed them to “take over” the account, then you could have malicious takeovers happening that are unwanted. So perhaps the idea of checking if they’re still connected would help with this.

Indeed, this will work if Allow Participants to Sign Back In is enabled with an email or phone number. What happens is it allows multiple players to all sign in with the same Basic Team (and also inputting either an email or phone number) but will only allow the first vote and reject any following that.

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We don’t really use this type of feature but as I sit here and think about it…

How about a checkbox or a link at that login screen that would allow someone to to select “follow along” and just be provided with a mobile projector view that doesn’t allow for entering answers?

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I like this idea. A feature like this may also be helpful to share the social media/photo wall options

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Also this would be a great option to share a live game as an embed on a website for people to follow along without being able to join

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So wait, enabling this feature, i can have all six players on a team sign in to one email and any ONE person from the team can answer the question?

If so, thats awesome because then everyone is involved not just the team phone handler

This also sounds like it could kinda be cool as it might entice someone who thinks they know the answer to submit before their team agrees, resulting in mayhem amongst team members! I like it!

Am i understanding this correctly by my decriptive?
TIA

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Hi @ssedjs, it sounds like you’ve got the workaround down. As Ross mentioned, this workaround requires that the Allow Participants to Sign Back In setting is enabled with either the email or phone number fields enabled under the Lead Capture Settings.

So if all players enter in the same email, this workaround allows multiple players to sign in with the same Basic Team. When voting, Crowdpurr will only allow the first vote for each question and will reject any following that.

Please feel free to try it out and see if this workaround may be ideal for your case. :slight_smile:

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An easy solution is probably to just allow anyone to log in and follow along. They don’t even need to be affiliated with any existing team, player, or participant. Then that avoids malicious takeovers, cheating, hacks, etc.

The only problem is leaves is if someone’s phone dies and they need to “hand off” control. But that might be an edge case we have to live with for now.

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Hey Jemma or Ross

So in basic team mode, does the TEAM name have to be the same as well as the phone number? or does it just ask for a number and then automatically goes to that team?

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As long as they enter the phone number, it doesn’t matter what other fields are entered. They will be replaced with the original account once it is found using the phone number or email. You can test/practice this.

So no, just the phone number is needed. However, any field that is required must still be entered. So they must still enter a basic team name and it doesn’t matter if it’s not the correct team. I know, a bit confusing. We’re going to address all this soon with an improved design.

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All good! I tried it last night. Worked great!
No need to adjust, i just told them to put their name and same phone number in and it would add them to the original team.

Thanks Ross

Any update on full trivia database search as opposed to just the titles of each group?

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Seeing some other threads with similar requests about having multiple players being able to join a Basic Team and use their device to actually play.

If we wanted to add the ability for a Basic Team to add additional players on their devices, perhaps we could do the following:

  • Players enter a case-insensitive team name upon signing in
  • Crowdpurr checks if the team exists, if not, it asks player if they want to create a new team
  • If the team is found, it sends a notification to the team’s creator, if they want to allow a new player to join their team
  • If a player is added to the team, then the first player to answer on that team is who’s answer counts
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Thanks for all of your great responses!

We’ve been using the settings that @jemma recommended for a few months now, and a lot of the problems that we were having previously have been resolved. But of course, with all changes, come new issues.

Our trivia MC @gregstudley mentioned some of these issues in this recent post. I think that this is one of the requests that @RossN mentioned above.

It sounds like there are changes and new features in the works which may help to improve our use-case. But I figure it’s worth listing the issues (including those which @gregstudley reported) that we’re still experiencing in the hopes that they may be addressed in future releases:

  1. We’d really like to be able to have users join teams without having to enter email addresses or phone numbers. Some of our players are concerned about the privacy implications of providing emails. Using fake email addresses is an option, but it’d be nice to just use a case-insensitive team name.
  2. We’ve seen issues with linking players to teams if the case of the email addresses are different. This seems like bug that would be pretty straightforward to address by doing a case-insensitive comparison.
  3. We’ve seen an infrequent issue where scores on individual questions can be double-counted. For example, our team may gain 50 points on a question worth 25 points. My theory is that there’s a race condition where multiple players submitting the correct answer at the same time could be counted as correct, resulting in an award of twice the maximum amount of points for the question.
  4. We’ve started using point wagering recently, and have seen an infrequent issue where the maximum amount of points which the “All” button sets is substantially less than the team’s total points. For example, my team had 809 points, but the “All” button populated the wager form with 81 points. Entering 999 manually into the form resulted in the wagering amount getting set correctly to 809.
  5. It’s difficult to rectify issues and merge points when two players have accidentally create two teams instead of joining the same team. My belief is that instead of making the fix-up process easier, it’d be best to do whatever possible to make it near-impossible for players to wind up in this situation.

We really like having the ability for all players on a team to be able to answer questions on their own device, rather than just following along as the team leader enters answers. So the proposal that @RossN posted above isn’t ideal for us. The second proposal is more or less in line with what would be ideal for us. Another option would be that a team leader could create the team, and then send out invite links to all of the other players. That could resolve the potential security issues, and be a pretty intuitive UI for players.

Please let me know if you need any more information on any of these issues, or whether it’d be best for me to report each separately. I figured it would be best to report them all here, as this thread provides the context of our use-case.

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I LOVE this idea!
I had a couple teams who put the correct phone number in, but the system generated a new team for them - they did not link with the main one. happened to 2 different people on 2 different teams. But it worked for everyone else on their team.

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oh and like @boxed_whine , we did points wagering with multiple players and it only allowed the “leader” to bet THEIR total points. So for example, I am not the leader, just another team player… when wagering the last question, not all of the teams points were recognized. The leader had 800, i had 230 and the third person on our team had 45. clearly it’s only acknowledging the points that came from each phone individually.

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Copy all to the replies. All good stuff. I will reiterate what I’ve added in other threads, using Basic Team Mode like this, at least right now, is plugging a square peg into a round hole.

Multiple players, on multiple devices, all playing together, is what Advanced Team Mode was designed for. It just so happens you have to add the teams ahead of time. That’s the one drawback. For now, is it too much to enter team names ahead of time?

It could even be simpler to have the audience have a method to add Advanced Teams, though I feel there could be complications with this as far as knowing who/when a team is being added.

Basically, you’re saying it’s really important to have players be able to simply sign up a team, on the fly, and play together with multiple devices?

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its not REALLY important! lol - I’m just going to have them “follow along” from now on and not answer. I just liked the idea!
I will try having them register their team name with me beforehand and use advanced. Latecomers will just have to sit tight until I can get to them.

Thanks as always Ross!

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