A Cure for Fat Fingers
Interrupting Cow Trivia, a fun new trivia game that you can play online with your friends, is now in open public beta. Based on your feedback from our first MULTIPLAYER TEST-A-THONS last week, we’ve made some very big changes to the way you play the game.
Here’s the feedback we keyed in on, based on what you wrote on our survey:
- The game is too punishing. It stinks to type in the correct answer milliseconds too slowly. (one player described this as suffering a “headshot” the moment he entered the game. Well-put!)
- Most 10-player games ended with 3 players on the scoreboard, and everyone else with zero points. That’s no fun!
- You should be able to accomplish something in the game even if you’re not the fastest typist.
Seriously – how am i supposed to type with THESE THINGS? (Photo used with permission of BarnP)
Ch-ch-changes
So since this is a fun game and not grade eight gym class, we took your suggestions and made some changes. Here are the Rules of Play for the next iteration of Interrupting Cow Trivia:
How to Play
- You’ll see a hint and up to three clues fill the screen.
- After the clues are finished, the letters in the answer start to fill in.
- When you know the answer, type it into the blue box and press the ENTER key.
Answer Order
- Everyone has a chance to answer. As your opponents answer, green checkmarks appear beside their player names.
- When all players have answered, or the question times out, we’ll give the Streak to the player who answered first.
- All players earn points according to how quickly they answered.
Scoring
- All questions are worth 1000 points.
- The longer the question stays on the screen, the fewer points it’s worth.
- The first player to correctly answer a question gets the Streak – a multiplier that boosts a question’s point value.
- The Streaker’s multiplier increases with every question he answers first.
- Any player can break the Streak and become the Streaker by answering first.
BIG thanks to Squize at Gaming Your Way for specifically suggesting these changes, and to all our other testers who suggested similar tweaks. We’ll try these rules out in our next multiplayer test. If they’re great, we’ll keep ‘em! If they suck, we’ll chuck ‘em!
Everybody Wins!
Er … that should say “gamers”, not “children”. Sorry.
Our next scheduled multiplayer beta test, “Everybody Wins!”, is on Thursday January 14 2010. We’ll do two tests:
- Everybody Wins! at 4:00 PM EST
- Everybody Wins! at 8:00 PM EST
If you’ve played the game before, we’d LOVE to hear what you think of the new rules. If you have a friend who’s never played, here’s a fact: WE ADORE VIRGINS. Invite that special someone along to play with you.
The doors open at 4PM and 8PM sharp at InterruptingCowTrivia.com. See you in the game!
Moo.
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Great call on the new point system. Not sure if I can check this round out… but just by reading it seems much improved.
Thanks, icky. i’ll report back on what everyone thinks of the change.
This is nice, but one thing bugs me:
“The longer the question stays on the screen, the fewer points it’s worth.”
Wouldn’t this open it up to abuse? “Oh, I don’t know this one, so I’m going to let it time out.” Or am I misinterpreting it?
RSkin – i think you’re misinterpreting, but only a little. The question value goes down the longer it’s on the screen, but only for YOU. Player 2 answers correctly when the q is worth 650 points, he locks in at 650 points. Then player 6 gets it when it reaches 345 points. If you’re still guessing, the question value is only going down for YOU, not the other players.
It’s a little bit like NTN pub trivia, except there you can change your answer. No need to do that here – you either answer correctly or you keep trying, and you get the number of points the question is worth the moment you submit that correct answer.
clever. I think you’re eroding my super-human lead, here, but that’s probably going to make it much friendlier.
Ah – but we’re not! The beauty is that the fastest player to answer still comes out on top … it’s just that everybody else gets to play, instead of feeling like they’re rock-bottom with no points.
It’s like what they did with Rock Band, where they give awards out to each player – “Most Gutsy,” “Longest Streak”, etc … but there’s still always a clear winner.
Good system. One thing I’m curious about: do you still let players see other players’ answers? If so, then, after one person gets it right, won’t it just be fastest-finger-first for the others?
MJW – Nope. If you type something that matches the answer, or partially matches the answer, it doesn’t get broadcast.
We’re going to re-write the matching routine (the one we have now is unchanged). So if you’re in the test today, you may notice that the game thinks you’re trying to answer sometimes when you’re trying to chat. It’s a minor fix that i’m not too worried about.
- Ryan
Ah, cool. That sounds great then!
Very cool, hope to make it to the second session tonight. (4pm is still work time.)
Thanks, Pete! If we have one goal, it’s to get people fired for playing the game too much.
With luck, we’ll get there.