Improved Basic Team Mode - "Follow Along" Participants

Features
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Thanks for the reply Ross!

For our use-case, adding new teams on the fly is fairly important, as there are new players every week, and we sometimes have new teams join after the game has started.

Regarding the point wagering, it could make sense that the “All” point wager value could correspond to the player, not the team. It does feel like a bug however, especially because the “true” maximum point wager can be entered by typing in 999 into the form. This didn’t seem to be the case until 2 weeks ago however, as the “All” button used to enter the team’s total points into the form.

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Not sure if this helps;

For team games in “Advanced Team mode”, we create one generic team called “SPECTATOR ONLY”.
We tell every player on every team to choose Spectator Only if they DON’T want to commit to answering.
And if they do want to answer for their team, then simply choose their correct team name.
The only tiny pickle with a Spectator Only team is that players who’ve chosen it, will obviously answer the questions and the Spectator Only team appears in the scoring.
We have our hosts zero out the points for spectator only to avoid them winning or placing!

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23

I like that idea!

Thanks for the tip!

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I think what would be handy is basically a projector view (minus all of the control abilities) that people could watch on their own devices. We often have people sitting at tables where one person is answering but the participants want to see the questions as well. Sometimes they are far away from the projector and sometimes the answer is very specific to the picture.

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This is my exact problem!!! Additionally, I went from an average 40 teams using the old construct of players under the team umbrella to over 100 individual players I need to ask to volunteer yo log off!

We need a passive follow along sign up option to coexist with a team captain!

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To give a bit more context on Greg’s issue here, the team configuration that you all had helped us with in this thread is no longer working as expected. After an update to the app sometime earlier this winter, it stopped being possible to have multiple devices join the same team.

The issue that we’re seeing is that once a team has been created by the first device, any subsequent device which attempts to login causes the first device to log out.

To workaround this issue, we’ve been nominating “team captains” to answer on their device, and then other users will create their own team to be able to view (but not answer) the questions. This means that for big groups, we have been hitting the 100 team limit, which isn’t ideal.

Ideally we’d just like to be able to have multiple devices join the same team, which used to be possible.

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I appreciate the ideas and potential solutions being proposed in this thread. For me, as the emcee, I just think about the player experience at the end of the day. I am of the mind that the ideal experience, keeping the descending point counter in mind is this example: Say TEAM AWESOME, with 7 teammates, are all signed in. They can all follow along, they can all answer. The first answer in from a TEAM AWESOME phone is registered for the team, later responses are locked out. The team can read the question, discuss the answer, or if someone absolutely knows it, they can ignore the conversation and send in the response and grab the highest points. Of course, if they blow it, that’s both hilarious and fun.

I host two very well attended trivia nights in a bar. One is near a university and easily brings in 100 players each time. Counting them as individuals, whether passive or not, is not ideal. However, 7 people counted as a single team is more feasible from the emcee/player perspective.

Additionally (sorry this is long winded) the bar would like to implement another 5 week tournament with a high value prize on the line. I can’t risk passive players on “the honor system” answering a question along with The Captain to pad their point total. I can’t monitor the swarm of misspelled (sp.?) answers and do math simultaneously. I start the game with 5 25-point questions. I can tell if padding is going on after the point check break after this round, but after that it’s completely impossible. It’s to the point where players are taking screenshots and running up to me mid game and showing me instances of teams padding points. The fact that this is even a possibility seems flawed.

I feel if the first answer in from any phone under a team name locks out later teammate submissions, we’d be where we need to be for a great experience for all!

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And, if this option already exists, I’m sorry for not knowing how to set it this way. I used to use advanced team mode, but entering 40 team names before we start and entering late players equals nightmare. Dream sign up? Come up, scan the QR. go back to your table, text the link to your teammates, spitball a team name, go! People drinking struggle with matching case sensitive team names and emails. Any streamlining for a Luddite like me (why I host and don’t play :joy:) and buzzed players who don’t want too many instructions would be greatly appreciated.

That said, you have the best platform available, and it has the potential to be ah-mazing!

Lessgo!!

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Thanks for the feedback everyone. This is a good thread. And it’s great to work this out with actual users.

Indeed, this was an update we added to help reduce cheating. The problem we were seeing was for true individual-player games, players were giving out their email to multiple people (e.g. a family member giving their sign-in to other family members). Then they would all sign-in and play, putting their brains together, and all answer as fast as they could.

Our system is designed to lock out duplicate answers to the same question by the same individual/basic-team, but it felt like this was cheating for individual-player games. We’re aware we can’t prevent this in real-life as multiple people put their brains together huddling around one device, but we thought we could at least stop individual-player games from having multiple devices open that can actually cast a vote. So that’s why we did that update. I understand its effect on Basic Team Mode games where you had multiple players signing in (which at the moment, is not how it’s designed to be used).

I’d like to summarize some ideas for moving forward.

Follow Along Mode

Add a simple “Follow Along” button on the sign-in page that can be enabled as a setting. It would be good to allow this for any type of trivia game as we have clients that say they would like this for Individual Mode games too so their stakeholders can simply log in and view the game. We would restrict this participant from voting, but it would count against your participant count as there’s still a resource cost to having X number of “Follow Along” participants. The downside is this idea, like the current Basic Team Mode, doesn’t reflect how many players are truly on a Basic Team. With the below updates to Basic Team mode, maybe this “Follow Along” mode won’t be necessary. But it would still be a nice option to have if the right use-case presented itself.

Join Existing Basic Mode Team (and Advanced Mode Team)

We could add functionality that would allow players to pick the Basic Team to join from a list. Or, if their team hasn’t been added, then they can add a new team. As teams are added, they populate to the “Existing Teams” list for new players to pick from when signing in. Similar to how Advanced Team Mode has a dropdown of teams to choose from.

I don’t see why we couldn’t add this to Advanced Team Mode as well. Any Advanced Teams added on the Experience Dashboard before the trivia game would then populate the list how they do currently. Similar to the above, there could be an “Add New Team” button.

For Advanced Team Mode, having a setting to disable the “Add New Team” button is a good idea. As you may want to have a set of static teams that are pre-made and can’t be changed (more the corporate use-case).

But for Basic Team Mode, you would need the “Add New Team” button. Then in Basic Team Mode, all players on the same team can answer at any moment. Similar to what @boxed_whine mentioned above. This “anyone can answer” functionality would be required as having only one “team leader” who can answer on behalf of the team (ostensibly the person who creates the team) gets problematic if that player leaves the game, their phone dies, etc. That’s the same issue we have now. It’s involved and complicated to figure out how to reassign some “team leader” role.

Basic Team players would just have to either 1) designate one player to answer the question and try not to have anyone else vote or 2) allow everyone to vote and whoever votes first locks in the vote or 3) have one team leader join and everyone else chooses “Follow Along” (basically a more fool-proof version of #1).

I still think there will be some problems with teams registering duplicate teams, misspellings, etc. (e.g. “I put in our team already”, “But wait, I ALREADY put in the team name, you’re on the wrong (duplicate) team now!”). So we’ll need the ability for the host to rename and remove Basic Teams (similar to how you can with Advanced Mode teams). If a player needs to join a different team, they should be able to refresh, click “Create New Player” then join the correct team. The host could also simply delete the player as well from the Experience Dashboard. Then the player can sign in again.

Another problem with this new Basic Team Mode is that it could lead to very easy sabotage. To nosedive a Basic Team, it just takes one new bad actor player to join it and answer the question incorrectly as quickly as possible, locking out all other honest players. There’s no real way to stop this. Unless you implement some kind of password to join a team - this would be complicating things and adding more friction to join and play. Perhaps a way to fight it would be a if a Basic Team starts complaining they can’t answer, we would somehow highlight WHO actually answered and the team could know if it’s a rogue player. Or at the very least the host could see who actually answered on the Experience Dashboard. Then the host could delete the player. However, the damage would be done at that point. We all know it’s near-impossible to go back and re-run question. Thoughts on the easy sabotaging that could happen?

This updated Basic Team Mode would then truly reflect how many participants are on each team and how many overall participants were actually in the trivia game.

I guess this begs the question, do we still need two different team modes? With the above changes, it sounds like it would almost be a single team mode where you can add teams, manage them, and set the option for a “Add New Team” button, but with two different scoring options:

  • First to answer on the team (updated Basic Team Mode)
  • Everyone on the team answers to create a team average (Advanced Team Mode)

So maybe we’ll implement both of the above - a Follow Along mode and an updated Basic Team Mode.

The solution to this is on our short list of things to resolve, as we’ve dragged our feet long enough on it. Please accept my personal apologies. This is mostly due to working on other awesome priority features.

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