Hello, I've been looking for a good place to put this and I'm not sure about my selection. If I chose wrong, I apologize.
With PAX Prime around the corner I have to ask if Bioware will hold a Trivia Panel again and if so, can I give some feedback from the one last year?
I'm not what one would consider a hardcore Bioware fan, I've only played the Dragon Age and Mass Effect Franchises, so there's quite a bit I don't know. That said, I still decided to go to the Trivia Panel and try my luck at winning one of the Flemeth Statues. I failed, needless to say. However, it wasn't the lose that left a bad taste in my mouth, it was the way I lost that did.
The Team had a page, front and back, with questions and the only rules established at the beginning were you had to wait until the question was finished before raising your hand and you could only win once. Sounds reasonable, right? Well the problem started when those questions were left mostly unused in favor of harder ones the Team was pulling from their heads.
As one would expect with harder questions, there were no hands raised once the question was put out. These weren't short silences either, minutes went by. This is where you, Bioware, did wrong in my eyes. When no one could answer the question you guys endorsed cheating. You encouraged fans to pull out their cellphones, tablets and whatever else to find the answer. I was sitting in the front row and watched the guy next to me sit there, on his phone for minutes before raising his hand and winning one of the last Normandy Models.
I went to the panel to try my luck and see if my knowledge was enough to win something. I was under the impression that this was going to be a fair playing field. Instead, the odds were stacked in favor of only those who had smartphones. As you might have guessed by now, it was impossible for me to win anything when the only thing I had was a flip phone. I know it wasn't just me left in that situation either.
How could you guys honestly think it was okay to let people cheat? I watched you guys tell fans to get their phones out and root for them as they raced over the search engines. It was like you turned a spelling contest into a 'who can find the word in the dictionary' contest.
I could go on about the bad mood you put me in, but instead I'm going to write how you should have conducted that panel in the hopes of making future ones better.
What should have been done:
- Set a time limit. If no one can answer the question within a minute or two, ask another.
- Do not allow the use of electronic devices. The people present are supposed to be your fans, let them show it by using only their knowledge.
- Maybe set an attempt count. Allow only a certain number of tries to answer a question before moving on (could go along with time limit).
- Use the premade questions more. Most of the panel were these hard ones from games either no one seemed to have played or played recently. Mix up the difficulty levels a bit.
- Mix up the franchises a bit more as well, both in questions and prizes.
That's all I could think of, but for the record not all the winners used their phones. The first Flemeth statue was won by a fan a row or two behind me who knew the answer right off the top of her head.
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