The Game Show Forum
The Game Show Forum => The Big Board => Topic started by: TheInquisitiveOne on September 24, 2004, 01:55:15 AM
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Hello everyone!
Many game shows have flaws...some obvious, some that takes a while to notice. When the corrections are made, few of them are met with resounding success.
That is the focus of this topic. Which game shows do you believe had a flawed format which, when corrected, was met with success?
If you are confused with the question (and justifiably so), allow me to lend an example. Many of us have raised the issue of the NBC version of $ale of the Century's Shopping Round where the cash jackpot was a stand-alone prize. (The problem may have not been with the prize itself, but with where it was placed.) Once the cash jackpot was reached, all but one decided to take the money and run (that one, as we all know, was Babara Phillips.) That was the flaw: no one was willing to put his or her money on the table in order to add prizes that, at times, totaled less than the jackpot. (Thanks to Chuck Donegan for raising this issue in an earlier thread.)
The correction: the Syndie version of the Shopping Round was formatted where the cash jackpot could only be won as part of "The Lot."
So with that, I leave the rest to all of you. Thanks in advance for the responses!
The Inquisitive One
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Dare I say, "Twenty-One." :)
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In the early days of Pyramid, whenever there was a tie(sometimes a 21-21 tie), sudden death would be played & the team that created the tie gets to pick a letter that the words began with & proceed from there. As always, high score wins. Problem is, if the round ended in another tie, another round was played & this could go on untill an eventual winner was chosen. Later on, the sudden death round was modified to eliminate subsequent ties by going by fastest time if both teams got 7/7. Also, the regular scores were erased to avoid any confusion that might be caused.
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[quote name=\'Jimmy Owen\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 02:06 AM\'] Dare I say, "Twenty-One." :) [/quote]
Good one!
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In general, many of the 50s panel shows needed some sort of tweking of the panel; few had a good regular panel out of the box.
A bit more recently, Match Game 7x didn't really get going until it dropped the _____ Stew type of questions for the ones that we know and love.
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[quote name=\'TheInquisitiveOne\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 12:55 AM\'] Once the cash jackpot was reached, all but one decided to take the money and run (that one, as we all know, was Babara Phillips.)
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Barbara had $484 in her bank as of her next-to-last win, $26 away from the cash jackpot on her last day IIRC. SHe managed to get enough maingame cash to win the lot on the last question of the maingame(in the days where the final FG was followed by three more questions).
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The only one which comes to mind, which I've mentioned before (and always seem to pull out at moments like this!), is the scoring for HS86 when it first came out. Each round was worth $500, but if the same player won the first two rounds, they were up by $1000. Most shows saw only three rounds, so the third player was screwed.
This was corrected in later seasons (Zach??) when they made round 3's value $1000.
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[quote name=\'aaron sica\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 06:52 AM\'] The only one which comes to mind, which I've mentioned before (and always seem to pull out at moments like this!), is the scoring for HS86 when it first came out. Each round was worth $500, but if the same player won the first two rounds, they were up by $1000. Most shows saw only three rounds, so the third player was screwed.
This was corrected in later seasons (Zach??) when they made round 3's value $1000. [/quote]
The "third and subsequent games worth $1000" rule began on the next to last week of season one.
The same rule befell Marshall SYndie HS with each game worth $250. If one player won the first three games, usually the other player would be out of the race for the econobox.
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One tweak I really liked was the free letters in Lingo's bonus round. This helped avoid those long stretches in the first season when the contestants stared helplessly at the board as the seconds ticked away. And it probably helped Lingo survive into a third season.
I also liked the six-in-twenty on Donny's Pyramid vs. the classic seven-in-thirty. Tightened up the pacing. Too bad Donny's version wasn't a huge success, but that probably had a lot more to do with the industry's current hostility toward game shows than with the new format.
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[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 07:49 AM\'] I also liked the six-in-twenty on Donny's Pyramid [/quote]
So did I. I also liked the fact that if in one's first trip to the Winner's Circle if the $10000 was not won, the amount you played for the second time out was still $10000. Unfortunately, because of there being no returning champions, there was no chance to play again with another win for an additional $15000. But we beat this issue to death for two years to no avail so I shall now go back to listening to sleep-talking Les Brown, Jr. on the Music Of Your Life.
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I couldn't stand the six-in-twenty rule. Not simply because it was a change, but because it meant that virtually every segment of gameplay ended on a negative "time's up", rather than a positive "you got through them all". It's a small thing, but I think it went a long way to sour many people's subconscious enjoyment of the show while their conscious minds were busy picking apart the myriad other undesirable elements of this revival.
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That's a good point. I wonder if "five-in-twenty" would have lead to more finished categories--but not so many that it lead to time-eating tiebreakers.
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My favorite example of a game that improved while it was on the air is Scrabble. The final format, the one most people remember, was excellent, but they struggled mightily in the early days to get there.
As for the modern Pyramid, much as I dislike the knee-jerk reaction that changes to a classic format are automatically bad, I'm a seven-in-thirty man myself. I also think they wasted enough time in other parts of the show that they could have gotten those 120 seconds back somewhere.
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[quote name=\'CaseyAbell\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 05:49 AM\'] Too bad Donny's version wasn't a huge success, but that probably had a lot more to do with the industry's current hostility toward game shows than with the new format. [/quote]
I blame the multilation they did to the Winner's Circle, me.
Unforutnately, we'll never know.
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I didn't mind unfinished rounds in the front game on Donny's Pyramid. They added to the urgency and the challenge, and made the front game seem like less of a routine time-passer before the Winner's Circle. The players definitely had to move right along with the tighter deadline.
While Pyramid didn't knock the socks off Nielsen Media Research, Variety commented (http://\"http://www.livejournal.com/users/heytherelamp/\") (page down in the blog) that the numbers indicated a "renewable" show. I really think there's genuine hostility in the industry right now towards the genre. Michael Davies' Studio 7 flop probably didn't help the atmosphere.
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How about TPiR? One could argue that in the half-hour days of the show, if all three contestants won their games, a player could be shut out of the showcase just because their prize was lower in value than the other two players'. Not really all that fair. Sure, the SCSD is almost entirely chance-based, but it at least gives everyone a fair shot.
--Sam
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[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 10:39 AM\'] I'm a seven-in-thirty man myself. [/quote]
Thing is, more often than not for much of the 80s run [I can't pinpoint the exact day when this started] 7 out of 7s were happening so frequently they were almost dull.
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[quote name=\'Don Howard\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 12:46 PM\'][quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 10:39 AM\'] I'm a seven-in-thirty man myself. [/quote]
Thing is, more often than not for much of the 80s run [I can't pinpoint the exact day when this started] 7 out of 7s were happening so frequently they were almost dull.[/quote]
True to a degree, but it was enjoyable (to me) to watch a team that got the rhythm down and could zip through those like pros. (My friend Dave and I have it down well for playing the home version.)
There are a couple of ways to improve this without going to the 6-in-20 format:
1. Allow a team to get as many words as they can in 30 seconds. (I believe this was suggested by someone else here back when Donny's version premiered.) There's a practical limit to how many they could get, so the writers would only have to come up with, say, 10 or 15 words per category.
2. Keep the categories to a fixed number of words, but play the whole front game in a manner similar to the 80's tiebreaker rounds, with the team that completes its 3 categories faster winning the game. Obviously there would still have to be a limit (30 seconds would still work just fine for 7 words) for completing a category, with perhaps a penalty of 5 seconds for each unguessed word. (That is, if a team got 7 words in 21 seconds, that would be their time; but if a team only got 5 words in 30 seconds, their time would be 40 seconds.) This method of play would, I think, add more tension to the game because of the competition against the clock. In addition, it would prevent ties and thus save valuable time.
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Not railing on your suggestions, Mike, but I find it fascinating how people in general decry changes from the norm unless they're the ones suggesting the changes.
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[quote name=\'Don Howard\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 01:46 PM\'] [quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 10:39 AM\'] I'm a seven-in-thirty man myself. [/quote]
Thing is, more often than not for much of the 80s run [I can't pinpoint the exact day when this started] 7 out of 7s were happening so frequently they were almost dull. [/quote]
That's actually a good point. For a while, I was also a proponent of what Mike suggested two posts up, that there be an unlimited number of subjects and you keep going 'til time runs out. Still, I understand the advantage of having "successful" rounds.
So eight-in-thirty then.
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I agree with SamJ93 about TPIR.
I was only 8 months old when TPIR went to an hour, so my first strong memory of the 30-min format was Kennedy's run. The pressure to win a pricing game stuck out like a sore thumb, esp the car games.
Depending on how the segments were loaded, the showcase contestants could be decided after two PGs (esp. if Clock Game was in the 3rd spot).
Going to the full-hour (and using the SCSDs) eliminated those scenarios on the daytime show. You could blow your chance at the Golden Road's Viper and still redeem yourself by winning a Bonneville in the showcase.
76GMC Rick
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[quote name=\'SplitSecond\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 07:59 AM\']I couldn't stand the six-in-twenty rule. Not simply because it was a change, but because it meant that virtually every segment of gameplay ended on a negative "time's up", rather than a positive "you got through them all".[/quote]
That's interesting; I'm thinking exactly the opposite.
Over the course of the *entire game*, the 80s version usually saw one player *lose* by failing to get all seven once or twice. Osmond's version was *won* by someone getting more words than someone else.
Common last category scenarios:
Clark: Team needs all seven to tie. Team gets six. Team loses; ends game on a sour note.
Osmond: Team needs two to win. They get them. Boring, but does end the game on a high note.
The biggest reason I like six in twenty? One cuckoo---er, burble---caused by a celeb doesn't often cost a team the game. Perfection is a mighty lofty goal.
Now, if they'd only gotten some celebs who could actually play the game...
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[quote name=\'SplitSecond\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 01:42 PM\']Not railing on your suggestions, Mike, but I find it fascinating how people in general decry changes from the norm unless they're the ones suggesting the changes.[/quote]
An excellent point, and one that came to mind as I was making my suggestions. If it were up to me, I'd leave the format unchanged from the 80's. Knowing that producers tend to want to change formats when they revive them, if only to put their own stamp on the show, it's just fun to come up with our own ideas for the changes. If someone had implemented either of my suggestions on Pyramid, I probably would have hated it (since neither would have been my idea at the time).
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WML when they added Fate's law.
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Not that there was anything wrong with their first format, but in the beginning, Tattletales had 'quickie questions' every third, fifth, or sixth question. It wasn't until the summer of 1974 that they switched to their 'all-quickie questions' format; and they stuck with it right up to the end of the 1974-78 run and all through their 1982-84 run.
Cordially,
Tammy Warner--the 'Sandy Duncan of the Big Board!'
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Granted it was much too late to improve the show's ratings enough to get a second season, but TJW90 did change the maingame to include categories on the wheels. That was considered an improvement to some.
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[quote name=\'Winkfan\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 05:23 PM\'] Not that there was anything wrong with their first format, but in the beginning, Tattletales had 'quickie questions' every third, fifth, or sixth question. It wasn't until the summer of 1974 that they switched to their 'all-quickie questions' format; and they stuck with it right up to the end of the 1974-78 run and all through their 1982-84 run. [/quote]
An excellent example, Tammy, one I wish I had thought of, and one I'd probably put above even my choice of Scrabble. I never cared for the He Said, She Said style of questions, but I thought the all-quickie format was brilliant in its simplicity.
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May we include Wheel Of Fortune switching to an all-cash (or mostly all-cash; at least the shopping was dumped) format?
Plus, I thought the bonus round used on Hollywood Squares for the final two years of the Bergeron run was the best.
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[quote name=\'Don Howard\' date=\'Sep 24 2004, 08:23 PM\'] May we include Wheel Of Fortune switching to an all-cash (or mostly all-cash; at least the shopping was dumped) format?
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I think the addition of the Bonus Round on WOF was a good thing, during the Woolery years, there was no "payoff" as it were, time just ran out. One of the selling points originally was that people could buy glitzy prizes. ("Look at this studio.....") Imagine where we would be today if they had stuck with the "Shopper's Bazaar" title.
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How About FF going back to the "first team to 300 points wins" format? It's a lot better than the "whoever has the most points after we triple them" format. I hated to see family A win the first three rounds, only to miss one answer in the one strike only round, causing family B to steal it and win.
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Nobody's mentioned the biggest Pyramid flaw to be fixed: The WC was originally supposed to have ten categories, not six; Bob Stewart concluded that nobody would be able to get 10 categories in 60 seconds and so covered up the bottom row.
As for the 6-in-20 versus 7-in-30, I think something easier like 7-in-30 is better. I'm not a producer, but I think if you have celebrities playing, you don't want to insult them by making them look like terrible players. At the same time, you don't want to make it too easy to win the big money. 7-in-30 made it easier for celebrities to look good (as well as helping out new civilian players by letting them ease into the game). Not only that, but too many times on the Osmond Pyramid we saw teams getting only 2 or 3 answers because there was a difficult word in the middle on which the team spent too much time. Not only that, but there were far too many games that ended after only five categories were played.
But Osmond's 6-in-20 has a bigger flaw, I think: the producers effectively switched the difficulty level between the two parts of the game. Their front game was hard, but it seemed far too easy to win the money in the WC, which seems a very bad thing to me.
(Some here denigrate the front game of the Clark Pyramid by saying it's too easy, but I think the front game is underrated, and is almost as good as the WC minus the tension. The Clark-era front game wasn't easy; it was deceptively simple. Of course, Bob Stewart was helped by having a small group of celebs who seemed to enjoy playing Pyramid precisely because it's challenging, not in spite of the challenge.)
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Just to throw this out there: for Pyramid, "as many as you can get in 20/30 seconds" would require more careful selection of categories. You definitely wouldn't want a bunch of items that could all be mimed quickly, for example.
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Just to (once again) answer my own question...
One flaw correction was carried out between two different versions of the same show: Password Plus and Super Password.
The flaw, if you can call it one, was in the bonus round. In Alphabetics, an illegal clue just meant that $1,000 was going to be taken from the jackpot for each infraction. However, in Super Password, an illegal clue meant a forfeiture of the cash jackpot entirely, which meant that one mistake makes the difference between what could be $30,000 and $900; this allowed for some tighter gameplay and more proficient clue-giving.
The Inquisitive One
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While we're speaking of "Password Plus," one improvement they made about six months into their run was to have the team that guessed the password keep the option for the next password (if that team didn't guess the puzzle's answer correctly).
Brendan
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[quote name=\'pyrfan\' date=\'Sep 25 2004, 01:02 AM\'] While we're speaking of "Password Plus," one improvement they made about six months into their run was to have the team that guessed the password keep the option for the next password (if that team didn't guess the puzzle's answer correctly).
[/quote]
I also liked the disallowing of opposites. Those players really would have to be on their toes to come up with a clue for "out" if "in" was a no-no.
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The biggest improvement for Pyramid came in the New York era and stayed through the Davidson version, when they gave the players the choice of giving or receiving in their third turn.
On the 6-in-20 vs 7-in-30, I have two reasons for preferring 7-in-30: As Fedya pointed out, it was too often very costly to get stuck on a difficult one when you had only 20 seconds. The other is that, even without that happening, 7-in-30 rewards you for giving "good" clues, while 6-in-20 rewards you for giving brief ones.
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The thread about changes to Wheel of Fortune reminded me of its bonus round, which desperately needed to move beyond the RSTLNE trap, and did. Putting up those letters and then letting more be called gave the bonus round some actual strategy, and was more rewarding for very good players.
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Would you consider The Joker's Wild getting rid of the Joker's Jackpot and therefore eliminating the "do you want to risk the money you've won so far" element fixing something that was broken?
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Would you consider The Joker's Wild getting rid of the Joker's Jackpot and therefore eliminating the "do you want to risk the money you've won so far" element fixing something that was broken?
I would. I never liked that rule...I think if a contestant won a game, the money they won should be safe. Maybe the rule could have been changed to having any contestant who won five games get the Joker's Jackpot as a bonus. It could still increase the amount that any contestant won, but they wouldn't be risking their winnings.
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Barbara had $484 in her bank as of her next-to-last win, $26 away from the cash jackpot on her last day IIRC. SHe managed to get enough maingame cash to win the lot on the last question of the maingame(in the days where the final FG was followed by three more questions).
And therein lies another successfully corrected flaw...the "final 3 questions" format was basically irrelevant about 95% of the time, which is why the producers dumped it and added the Speed Round to end the game in early 1984.
Chuck Donegan (The Illustrious "Chuckie Baby")
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Would you consider The Joker's Wild getting rid of the Joker's Jackpot and therefore eliminating the "do you want to risk the money you've won so far" element fixing something that was broken?
I would. I never liked that rule...I think if a contestant won a game, the money they won should be safe. Maybe the rule could have been changed to having any contestant who won five games get the Joker's Jackpot as a bonus. It could still increase the amount that any contestant won, but they wouldn't be risking their winnings.
I always thought giving it as the fifve-day prize would make more sense without risk, also. The issue then lies in "how would the jackpot grow?" and I thought, if I had any say at B&E I would have suggested putting the loser's score (since they didn't receive it anyway) into the jackpot after each game, but I never like making these kinds of proposals because I think there's probably an obvious flaw that I'm not noticing.
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I always thought giving it as the fifve-day prize would make more sense without risk, also. The issue then lies in "how would the jackpot grow?" and I thought, if I had any say at B&E I would have suggested putting the loser's score (since they didn't receive it anyway) into the jackpot after each game, but I never like making these kinds of proposals because I think there's probably an obvious flaw that I'm not noticing.
Interesting idea. The only flaw I could see in that is that the loser's score is usually low and the jackpot wouldn't grow as fast, but it would depend on how long you went between Joker's Jackpot winners as to how big it actually got. The first big winner took quite a while and the jackpot was high, but after that they occurred much more frequently. Back then, the rule was for three straight games. I think if you're going to offer it without risk, it should definately be five.