HQ Trivia

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rouquinne
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by rouquinne »

Suddenly very, VERY happy I have downloaded none of these as a "study guide"!
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squarekara
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by squarekara »

And at some point, Cash Show asked what political party Teddy Roosevelt was associated with, and the possible answers included both Bull Moose and Republican. Again, we had to guess that they wanted "Bull Moose" even though he only actually served as a Republican.
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Blue Lion
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by Blue Lion »

I'm not having much success with HQ trivia. My best showing was Q6. Almost invariably a pop-culture question eliminates me. I'm not complaining, I'm merely stating that work needs to be done in that department.
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mikebdoss
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by mikebdoss »

Blue Lion wrote: Tue Feb 06, 2018 12:21 pm I'm not having much success with HQ trivia. My best showing was Q6. Almost invariably a pop-culture question eliminates me. I'm not complaining, I'm merely stating that work needs to be done in that department.
I haven't gotten past question 9, and I like to think I'm very good with pop culture and the type of stuff they ask. The problem is that they almost always include questions that you have to guess at (olympic gymnast heights, etc.) - it's not even "obscure" as much as "random statistics that people don't know". Most games have around a million players, and typically just one or two thousand people win - around .1-.2%. With questions like those, it's not a matter of being good/smart, you have to be really, really lucky too.
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by rmfromfla »

Yep, Squarekara: Dr. Suess, aka Alan Sues, best known as "Uncle Al, the Kiddies' Pal" (watching too much of that infomercial for Laugh-In DVD's) :lol:
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by MinnesotaMyron »

rmfromfla wrote: Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:15 pm Yep, Squarekara: Dr. Suess, aka Alan Sues, best known as "Uncle Al, the Kiddies' Pal" (watching too much of that infomercial for Laugh-In DVD's) :lol:
Aaaaah, thank you for explaining that reference.
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Re: HQ Trivia

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rmfromfla wrote: Tue Feb 06, 2018 1:15 pm Yep, Squarekara: Dr. Suess, aka Alan Sues, best known as "Uncle Al, the Kiddies' Pal" (watching too much of that infomercial for Laugh-In DVD's) :lol:
I always called him "the poor man's Paul Lynde." Once I saw him as the harried film director in a stage production of "Singin' in the Rain," and he was very fun.
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by seaborgium »

9,046 winners splitting $2,500, getting 27 or 28 cents each :lol:
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by alietr »

I guess it was fun while it lasted ...

A Wave of AI Robots is Threatening to Ruin HQ-Trivia
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ChexMix
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by ChexMix »

alietr wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 2:32 pm I guess it was fun while it lasted ...

A Wave of AI Robots is Threatening to Ruin HQ-Trivia
This is something that I have suspected for a little time now. Last week one of the knockoff HQ games, The Q, ran a "survival mode" where the plan was to continue until only 1 person remained who got the whole pot. This is a game that has maybe 1% of the player base HQ has. This particular game had about 10k people in.

After around 12 questions, a few hundred players remained. What followed was a string of about 6 or 7 questions in which literally everyone except maybe 2 or 3 players answered correctly. Some of them were basic trivia facts that any player worth their weight would know, but others were extremely obscure that it boggled my mind how it could be a near unanimous consensus.

The end result was that the makers had to end up suspending the game after 25 questions and split the prize amongst the remaining players because they only prepared 25 questions. If software out there for the public exists with an "82 percent" success rate, I have to believe that people with advanced programming knowledge can write software for their personal use that is even better.
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by squarekara »

alietr wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 2:32 pm I guess it was fun while it lasted ...

A Wave of AI Robots is Threatening to Ruin HQ-Trivia
Well, that's super lousy. After reading through this article, I put up a "kill the cheat bots" message in the HQ chat today. That should take care of the problem! :lol:
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threearruda
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by threearruda »

I don't know about you, but I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

That said, I've transitioned over to Cash Show as well in the past two weeks and won a whopping $2 earlier this afternoon. I appreciate how the questions ask for material worth knowing, instead of which candy bar has the most total fat per 100 grams or which of the following is the proper pseudocereal. :roll:
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seaborgium
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by seaborgium »

threearruda wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:29 pm I don't know about you, but I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

That said, I've transitioned over to Cash Show as well in the past two weeks and won a whopping $2 earlier this afternoon. I appreciate how the questions ask for material worth knowing, instead of which candy bar has the most total fat per 100 grams or which of the following is the proper pseudocereal. :roll:
See, I would think that being able to figure out that "pseudocereal" refers to existing plants and not fictional brands, or that peanuts have a higher fat content than milk chocolate, would be indicative of some good critical thinking skills, but whatever, I've only won HQ seven times. :roll:
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threearruda
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by threearruda »

seaborgium wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:38 pm
threearruda wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:29 pm I don't know about you, but I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

That said, I've transitioned over to Cash Show as well in the past two weeks and won a whopping $2 earlier this afternoon. I appreciate how the questions ask for material worth knowing, instead of which candy bar has the most total fat per 100 grams or which of the following is the proper pseudocereal. :roll:
See, I would think that being able to figure out that "pseudocereal" refers to existing plants and not fictional brands, or that peanuts have a higher fat content than milk chocolate, would be indicative of some good critical thinking skills, but whatever, I've only won HQ seven times. :roll:
Fair points. I have no clue why the peanuts and chocolate didn't click until now.

Back to the hole I go. :oops:
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seaborgium
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by seaborgium »

threearruda wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 5:09 pm
seaborgium wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:38 pm
threearruda wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 4:29 pm I don't know about you, but I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

That said, I've transitioned over to Cash Show as well in the past two weeks and won a whopping $2 earlier this afternoon. I appreciate how the questions ask for material worth knowing, instead of which candy bar has the most total fat per 100 grams or which of the following is the proper pseudocereal. :roll:
See, I would think that being able to figure out that "pseudocereal" refers to existing plants and not fictional brands, or that peanuts have a higher fat content than milk chocolate, would be indicative of some good critical thinking skills, but whatever, I've only won HQ seven times. :roll:
Fair points. I have no clue why the peanuts and chocolate didn't click until now.

Back to the hole I go. :oops:
My apologies for getting snarky with you. I just think there's more than "material worth knowing" to good trivia questions, and I happened to think (by virtue of being successful in logically attacking them) that the pseudocereal and fatty candy bar questions, like good FJ clues, rewarded more than simple recall. The Q has more bad questions, like how many miles are in a 5K, with the choices being 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3. It was the second question of the game, and the choices made it bad; at that level I think they should have rewarded the mere knowledge that kilometers are shorter than miles rather than make the player quibble over multiples of 528 feet. The worst The Q question I've encountered asked for a toaster's patent number. I think HQ does all right with its questions.
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threearruda
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by threearruda »

seaborgium wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 6:54 pm
My apologies for getting snarky with you. I just think there's more than "material worth knowing" to good trivia questions, and I happened to think (by virtue of being successful in logically attacking them) that the pseudocereal and fatty candy bar questions, like good FJ clues, rewarded more than simple recall. The Q has more bad questions, like how many miles are in a 5K, with the choices being 3.1, 3.2, or 3.3. It was the second question of the game, and the choices made it bad; at that level I think they should have rewarded the mere knowledge that kilometers are shorter than miles rather than make the player quibble over multiples of 528 feet. The worst The Q question I've encountered asked for a toaster's patent number. I think HQ does all right with its questions.
No worries; it's my fault for even complaining in the first place! :D

Quiz Bowl in high school the past two/three years helped me get back into trivia and coming from that, I forget sometimes that there's more to this whole shebang than immediate recall. I've missed my share of FJs by simply not piecing things together or being unable to dismiss obvious wrong answers. I've gotten tricked by those silly questions regarding Octopi plurals or whatever those were. Still have plenty of time to improve, though!

I've never played the Q, but yeesh, that's... not good. HQ does good by starting with a couple obvious, easy questions - those choices for the 5k at Q2 is slightly ridiculous.
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by seaborgium »

Cash Show (which I've noticed is, in fact, written as two words) asked a pretty bad question today, (possibly) paraphrased here: "What is the second hottest city on Earth?" with the choices being El Azizia, Death Valley, and Lut. Besides the fact that only one of those choices is actually a city (well, a town at best), this ranking was based on the single highest air temperature recorded in each place rather than average temperatures (which would be a better indicator of "hottest place" than a single extreme); moreover, the El Azizia record cited as making it the hottest (and therefore making Death Valley the correct answer) was disqualified over five years ago for various irregularities in the recording of the record 136-degree temperature. (I correctly decided they were probably going for Death Valley, and made it through all of the questions, winning 34 cents.)
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mikebdoss
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by mikebdoss »

Earlier this week, Cash Show had the following question:

Why hasn't mankind explored the sun?
- It's too hot
- It's too far
- It's too cold

First of all, we have "explored the sun" - telescopes do it, and there have been numerous solar probes, and there's a probe that'll be launched this year that will get closer than any others before it. More obviously here, the sun is both too hot and too far to explore directly or personally - both answers are correct. They were looking for "It's too hot".
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by CasketRomance »

alietr wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 2:32 pm I guess it was fun while it lasted ...

A Wave of AI Robots is Threatening to Ruin HQ-Trivia
russians invading a trivia game like they did with poker on pokerstars?
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Re: HQ Trivia

Post by twelvefootboy »

CasketRomance wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:20 am
alietr wrote: Fri Feb 09, 2018 2:32 pm I guess it was fun while it lasted ...

A Wave of AI Robots is Threatening to Ruin HQ-Trivia
russians invading a trivia game like they did with poker on pokerstars?
Funny how the experience is predicated on a fair-ish game with some chump change at stake. I see 3 demographics:
1) The trivia buffs here that (I conjecture) are mostly doing it for bragging rights and dopamine. These peeps can certainly do the math. You need to win $3.00/game average to make minimum wage. The cash at stake adds a little fun, but they will play anyway, until it just gets too unfulfilling.

2) The semi-clueless who start out thinking they might get 12 wheelhouse questions anytime and might actually win 20 bucks. As long as it is a social experience, it will survive their endless losses at question 5, but the clock is ticking. It's not got Game of Thrones longevity.

3) Is $7.00/hour worthwhile for the cheaters? They apparently get their adrenaline from the element of the grift. There just doesn't seem to be enough money at stake to support a syndicated effort. Might as well send phishes for Nigerian Prince bank transfers.

I think the game is headed into a death spiral along with fidget spinners, whether they can win the arms race with the cheaters or not. It was fun as a social event, and maybe the millennials will sustain it.
Usually this is where I delete a long post but I'm letting this ramble go. Hope I didn't offend anyone in category 1. My hats off to you if you've beat minimum wage or even won 12 cents. :D
Disclaimer - repeated exposure to author's musings may cause befuddlement.
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