Your two favorite/two least favorite Family Feud formats?

[TimK2003]

I like the 300-point Dawson version.

My least favorite was the Bullseye/Bankroll especially on the John O'hurley version after the Bullseye and the prerecorded intro the game felt rushed

I never understood why the show started at the top of the show with Joey Fatone saying,...

"This is Joey Fatone...It's time to play the Feud." (Whoop-de-doo, so Joey is the announcer...
 yay?)

It's not like you're going to see him anytime during the show as a sidekick, host or co-host.  it was just a weird opening to the show.

[chargeradiocom]

I never understood why the show started at the top of the show with Joey Fatone saying,...

"This is Joey Fatone...It's time to play the Feud." (Whoop-de-doo, so Joey is the announcer...
 yay?)

It's not like you're going to see him anytime during the show as a sidekick, host or co-host.  it was just a weird opening to the show.

Why? Pop culture cache. Joey was still relatively fresh-ish from his run with N*SYNC, and it gave them an announcer that was known to younger audiences.

FWIW, I don’t disagree with you. I noticed it too, and looking back it gives off a bit of a “How do you do, fellow kids?” vibe. But I get why they wanted a name droppable announcer, even if we never saw him.

[PYLdude]

Favorite: the original 300 point format

Least fave 1: the original 1999 format

Least fave 2: the move to 400 points (sloooooooooog)

[Jeremy Nelson]

Combs S-S-D-T to 300 was my favorite. Dawson to 400 was the worst.

I rank Anderson S-S-S-T low, but the idea of only getting one strike in the triple round makes the play/pass such a strategic decision, and I love it for that.

I like the concept of Bullseye as a way to make the bonus round worth a different amount every day, but I also think that Bert's Family Feud did that well enough.

I would argue that it kinda made the final round anticlimactic and not great TV. A player who got 5 top answers in the first half is giving their partner a (relatively) easy clean up for $100,000. Conversely, a second player who produces an epic comeback may only be awarded $10,000.

[SuperSweeper]

I don't hate the Dawson 400 format as much as most, but it's still not my favorite.

I'm with Jeremy - the Combs to 300 is definitely up there, as is the original to 200.

[Nick]

If somebody's done the math on this to verify, please share, but the single, single, double, triple to 300 format truly works only if it is mathematically possible to win in a sweep of the first three rounds.  Otherwise, as in the case in the current version (now, anyway), the total points up for grabs never amounts to 300 over the first three rounds, and thus the first round has no bearing on the outcome of the game, meaning it's useless.  If it's useless to the game, why is it there?

The answer, as far as the current powers are concerned, is to play the question with the most innuendos for laughs, YouTube moments and nothing else.  If only Family Feud was still a family show...

[Robert Hutchinson]

You can't quite say it's useless, because A) in addition to adding the points to your score, you're keeping them from your opponents, and B) sometimes there are low-scoring rounds. So even if the score is 94-91 after two rounds, for instance, you want to win the Double round because what if the other team wins the Triple with 192 points?

Edit: that's not to say it's a great scoring system! Just that it never completely devalues any round.

[Jeremy Nelson]

If somebody's done the math on this to verify, please share, but the single, single, double, triple to 300 format truly works only if it is mathematically possible to win in a sweep of the first three rounds.  Otherwise, as in the case in the current version (now, anyway), the total points up for grabs never amounts to 300 over the first three rounds, and thus the first round has no bearing on the outcome of the game, meaning it's useless.  If it's useless to the game, why is it there?

"Truly works" is subjective, but you might enjoy this other thread where we discussed bad/vestigial scoring formats.

https://www.gameshowforum.org/index.php/topic,35839.0.html

[johnnya2k3]

The 400-point format was why Dawson Feud was getting its butt kicked in the ratings by Wheel of Fortune; the one-strike triple round (and Louie Anderson telling the other family to huddle immediately/right now/ASAP) was such a turn-off.

Thankfully, single-single-double-triple (and Sudden Death if no family reaches 300 points) is classic Feud, and that ain't changing anytime soon...though since the franchise is turning 50 this summer, they should finally make it $10/point if no 200 points in Fast Money.

[tyshaun1]

The 400-point format was why Dawson Feud was getting its butt kicked in the ratings by Wheel of Fortune

The change to 400 happened in December 1984, which means Feud was up against Scrabble, not Wheel.

[johnnya2k3]

The 400-point format was why Dawson Feud was getting its butt kicked in the ratings by Wheel of Fortune

The change to 400 happened in December 1984, which means Feud was up against Scrabble, not Wheel.

I’m talking about the nighttime Feud; they also adopted the 400-point format as their attempt to siphon viewers away from nighttime Wheel.

[BrandonFG]

How do you know for a fact that that was their attempt to siphon viewers away? You have a tendency to make correlations that are more coincidence than anything, and I really wish you’d stop. You want to be this expert on everything and all I ever see from you is misinformation.

If I’m wrong then I’ll have crow for lunch but I’ve never seen that as the reason they went to 400. I don’t think I’ve seen any reason for that matter.

[PYLdude]

How do you know for a fact that that was their attempt to siphon viewers away? You have a tendency to make correlations that are more coincidence than anything, and I really wish you’d stop. You want to be this expert on everything and all I ever see from you is misinformation.

If I’m wrong then I’ll have crow for lunch but I’ve never seen that as the reason they went to 400. I don’t think I’ve seen any reason for that matter.

Probably because there really wasn’t a legit reason for one.

The only one I can think of is more gameplay leading into Fast Money (and with the way they did it I would argue that it was taking more of a cue from Password Plus than from Wheel, and that’s totally ex rectum from me), but even then the pace slowed so much that I get too easily bored watching episodes from that era.

[TLEberle]

Probably because there really wasn’t a legit reason for one.

I know I put forward the idea that it was to prod Richard to get the lead out but that was disproven. For a show that was on the air eight or nine years they certainly didn't make any changes other than All-Star shows (did the ABC version ever have a Tournament of Champions or other playoff?)

The show didn't have categories of surveys or "all of the survey answers will begin with the letter A" so I think the only big change would have been the lollipop trees and pushing the goal another 100 points.

Wheel of Fortune was going to eat Feud's lunch to the point where it was a wounded duck, alongside the plodding and ancient looking Joker's Wild and Tic Tac Dough. (Name That Tune seemed to have good ratings but they also were going to get squeezed.) It's the turnover of the business--$100,000 Pyramid, New Hollywood Squares, you name it. Somebody is going to be on the outside of the clubhouse looking in, so it's no surprise that Feud was given walking papers.

[PYLdude]

I don’t know for sure how good Name That Tune really had to have been doing, at least in my area; it had three different time slots in the year it was on the air. It started in the morning, got moved to the afternoon once Jeopardy got picked up by WABC and paired alongside it, then got shuttled off to the post-Nightline slot around midseason. I know KNBC had it pre-news for awhile but I’m not sure what happened after that.

I wonder how much of the Barry power couple’s rating was affected by the dropping of the show by CBS. Granted, in my market it was on in the hour between the end of whatever the network was airing as a morning show at the time and Pyramid, but it had to have drawn pretty well for them to keep it there. (Granted also, that probably wasn’t an indication that it was great shakes anywhere else, either, but after that the shows just seemed to shuffle around quite a bit during their last two years).