Game Week 3 Review: A Quadruple Triple??
Also a discussion on why you should complain during quizzes, not after.
I’m very late this week so I’m going to try and rush this one.
Question Set for the Week: Game Week 3
All feedback is welcome here: Feedback Form
Quick Stats
Game Score
Game Week 3 played almost exactly as easy as Game Week 2. Does this mean we’ll see just as many musketeers? No it does not.
Seat Averages
Week 3 is the first time this season that we saw a clear difference in seat difficulty. Seat 3 played notably easier than the others, with the lowest average Xs and the highest average owns. Incongruently it still produced the lowest number of muskets.
Incidentally, Seat 1 was all set to play even harder in the first version of the question set, but this became glaringly obvious in the very first playtest of the week and we made some last second late seat swaps to lessen that gap.
This chart isn’t actually seat averages, it’s seat max i.e. the highest individual score scored in each seat. I don’t usually share this chart cos there’s almost never anything interesting to see, but look what this week threw up. Who is this Seat 1 hero who scored 31 points in a 48-question quiz? I need to see this scorecard.
Yep. Pranjal Agrawal was the only player present for the quiz in game #216. His fellow players simply didn’t show up. Rather than walk away with the easiest 3 points he’d ever scored in his life, Pranjal opted to play the quiz anyway and his reader Priyojit Saha dutifully ran it for him. Much respect to both of them, spirit of quizzing and all that.
Pranjal is an excellent quizzer on any day, but these circumstances naturally meant he ended up setting a bunch of records. Highest individual score, highest BA count, highest bonus points, etc.
The game also highlighted a problem in our scoring system. So far in this season we’ve been awarding 3 points to the winner of each game, 2 points to the runner-up and a token 1 point to the player in third place. This last point was being given even if the player didn’t bother making an appearance. It wasn’t really a problem until this quiz gave us a case of 2 players sharing second place without actually being on the zoom call. That meant they’d score 1.5 points each, thus outscoring many players who actually did have the decency to show up for their quiz. Everything about that sounds wrong, so we’ve now gone back and retroactively awarded 0 points to all players who missed their quiz in the first 3 game weeks. Sorry Pat.
Toughies and Softies
Quick dump of all triads and associated difficulty.
Every one of the three questions in the Turkish Motifs triad played tough, which is shame, because I thought that was a very pretty topic for a quiz question. Meander (“like a river”), Palmette (“like a tree, with a suffix”), and Rosette (“like a flower, or a decorative ribbon”) were each ‘workable’ in their own way, but clearly not workable enough.
It comes as no surprise that the Trump questions (Sleepy Joe, Rocket Man Kim, Comrade Kamala) all played easy.
The last of these posed an interesting problem with question framing.
**What word** does Donald Trump prefix to Kamala Harris's name to indicate that she has communist tendencies? The term is commonly used in those circles and also happens to be alliterative with her first name.
Answer: Comrade Kamala
Question setters LOVE telling you something is alliterative, it’s practically their favourite word. It’s a very simple way to give you a lot of info about a two-word answer. Note however that Comrade and Kamala begin with different letters. This is technically not a problem at all, since an alliteration is defined as the occurrence of the same sound at the start of two nearby words, rather than the same letter. But quite a lot of people in our league have learnt about alliteration purely through quizzes, and in that context they believe that an alliteration means “same letter”. We could stick to our guns and use it this way, and we’d be right, but that would annoy some players who miss it and I would get a strongly worded text message from them afterwards. Yes Shankha, I mean you.
Our first solution was this:
…also happens to be syllabically alliterative with her first name.
Over-complicated? Definitely. But at least we’re avoiding confusion, right? Right?
Not right. In our test run, this unnecessarily complicated phrase doubly confused the players, who now believed they needed every individual syllable of Kamala’s name to be alliterative with every syllable of the answer. Like Komodo Kamala or something.
Finally we went with:
…also happens to be alliterative (same starting sound) with her first name.
Parentheses FTW. Unnecessary still, but at least Shankha is happy.
Finally, the toughest question of the quiz this week.
Before Vogue, Rochelle Pinto was the founding editor of **which wellness and culture online media company** started by Twinkle Khanna? Defining itself as a space for the modern Indian woman to rediscover herself, it is named after its suggestion that women should make small changes in their lives to live happier.
Answer: Tweak
It’s really not a bad question, but it could probably have used another clue. Maybe a letter count or something.
Triple Doubles
45 players managed to answer every question of triad this week, and of them, Aniruddha Mitra, Ayush Yembarwar, Madhavi Das, Nitish Khadiya, Praveen VR, Ron Ronquillo, and Sarthak all scored triple-doubles.
Meanwhile, previously-mentioned Lone Ranger Pranjal Agrawal aced 4 triads! He joins a truly exclusive club by scoring the first and surely the only quadruple-double1 of this season of B612. He did this by acing the Russia Subdivisions, Trump Coinages, Startup Acronyms and Goku Technique triads.
Quiz Moments
Just one today.
Wait, where did my win go?
My favourite question this week was from the Goku Techniques Triad.
In Dragon Ball, **which technique is this** that was taught to Goku by Grandpa Gohan, reminding one of a common game? It involves Goku shouting one of 3 words corresponding to either a strong punch, an open palm strike, or an eye poke. Give either the English or Japanese name.
Answer: Rock-Paper-Scissors
You can probably see why I like it. There are at least 3 distinct clues in the question that can get you to the answer, quite aside from simply knowing it from having watched the show.
“reminding one of a common game” - Not a very explicit clue, but it’s still something.
“a strong punch, an open palm strike, or an eye poke” - Practically spelling out how the game is played.
Finally, the image, which again demonstrates how the game is played, showing the punch (rock), the open palm (paper) and the eye poke (scissor).
It really is a wonderful question and you should ask it at your next pub quiz. But it caused some problems in game #176.
The question was Benny Meyers’ direct and he expertly figured it out and confidently answered “Roshambo”. This was an alien sound to the reader, Dhruv Mookerji, so he marked it wrong and went on to the other players. The question then went unanswered.
He’s right though. Roshambo is what the game is called in the USA (where Benny lives), a reference to one Count Rochambeau who played the game during the American Revolutionary War. In fact we’ve asked a rock-paper-scissors question once before, in B612 Season 6 or something, and back then we did have the good sense to check for alternate names and were accepting Roshambo, so we really should’ve known better.
Benny didn’t raise an objection immediately because the question explicitly asked for the English or Japanese name, and he thought maybe the name he knew the game by was neither of those things. He ended up googling it later and learning that he’d been robbed of a point. He mailed us to tell us about it, since the point he’d lost had ended up costing him the (shared) win.
Now, for the record, I am dead against making changes to the scores after a quiz has been completed. It is almost never a good idea. It affects things like passing order and triad-tracking and other stuff, and it’s usually just far more trouble than these things are worth. The right time to raise an objection like this is immediately after the question is answered (or marked unanswered), so that the reader can make an executive decision for themselves about whether or not to award the point and then report it to the organisers later so they can make changes to the set if needed. When in doubt, stick to the PDF. If, as a player, you fail to raise an objection immediately, you’re giving up your right to an appeal, kind of like the 15 seconds a cricket captain gets to appeal to DRS. Quizzing, like cricket, is a human-refereed sport, and human mistakes happen. They can be corrected mid-game, but once the game is over you just need to live with it and calmly send death threats to the referee’s home address (DM me for Dhruv’s).
Benny pointed out though that in this case the question was his direct and had gone unanswered in the quiz. We could adjust the score and give him the point he deserved and it wouldn’t affect passing order or anything. After confirming that this was the case, we relented and made the change to cause a shared win, but I’m still unsure about whether we’ve just opened a can of worms here. It’s a bad precedent, making adjustments to the score post-quiz, and it was noticed quickly by Mansi Sood, who reported an issue with her score on the leaderboard. Why did she have only 0.5 wins this week instead of 1? My bad, I failed to notify her of the change, but the change itself is questionable too.
Overall I think it’s easier to just have a hard line for these things. Reader makes the decision during the quiz, and the rest of us just accept and support it.
Bas na, how much.
See you in Week 4.
I am aware this makes no sense and is straight-up wrong. It’s 4 triads, so it’s a quadruple-triple if anything, but that’s just a mouthful and if I followed that then I wouldn’t be able to put a picture of Pranjal next to Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson, and who wants that life?