Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/08/a-trivia-expert-offers-tips-fo.html
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I like trivia games and cash prizes, but I’m wary of installing an app that offers the latter when its parent company says that “monetisation is not currently the company’s focus.” A company can’t just hand out thousands of dollars twice a day without worrying about money, and the nature of Silicon Valley moguls is such that their quietly installing a tiny and “harmless” cryptocurrency miner* that runs in the background of hundreds of thousands of app instances for 30 minutes a day is not a (to be clear entirely theoretical) possibility I can entirely dismiss.
[* I’m not opposed at all to a site or app using some of my device’s CPU time to fund themselves, but they have to tell me it’s happening]
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Well said.
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yeah, this sounds like a scam
i’ve been playing since christmas… it’s fun, and he’s right, the questions are quite challenging. i think i’ve only made it to question 6 once, and a lot of the time the right answer is the non-intuitive one. i was worried about them having my phone number, but then decided that jeez, like THAT’S hard to find. it’s already out there on a jillion lists anyway, judging by the amount of spam calls i get.
I am quite good at trivia. Unfortunately they know android users are smarter and thus haven’t made the app available to us yet 
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I’ve been playing HQ off and on for a couple of months now. It’s pretty fun, but not without some gripes.
The questions, especially at the higher tiers can be confusingly worded and as @Franko says, the answers are often completely unintuitive. I have to instinctively answer the non-obvious question at higher tiers because the obvious one is pretty much always wrong. I’ve never been able to advance past question 10 and I consider myself a big trivia buff.
The “extra lives” system is punishing and stupid. The only way you can get extra lives is by referrals, and for a popular game like HQ, it’s pretty much impossible to find referrals. This of course causes the chat room to be nothing but people spamming you to enter their referral codes. I really wish that there were other ways to get extra lives (talk about an easy way to monetize – give extra lives for watching ads, taking surveys, etc – it’s not that hard!)
Speaking of the chat room, the chat room is about the most worthless feature possible. It’s nothing but people trying to get you to enter your referral codes, Trump memes, bitching about questions, and providing fake answers. First thing I do when I launch HQ is swipe that shit off.
I don’t understand why there’s only live games. Why can’t they run zero stakes games during off hours that are just for fun? You could easily monetize these by playing ads before/after the game, and could encourage players by awarding winners extra lives for the live games. 1 vs 100 on the Xbox 360 (which I absolutely adored) would do this – they hosted several games every week with a live host and unique questions that awarded real prizes, but off hours anybody could play for fun. I don’t know why HQ can’t do this.
Finally, the host talks too damn much! Every game it seems to get worse and worse. Last time I played, he yammered on for nearly 10 minutes before actually going into the first question. The longer the talking goes on, the more I feel like my time is being wasted.
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i agree the “extra lives” system is pretty stupid, or at the very least it could work or be implemented much better. i think a telling point in that article is that the professional quiz clue writer has ONLY won several times because he had an extra life.
i also fully agree that the chat is useless, and my theory is that it is partly responsible for the hanging and lags during the live streams. once i learned i could turn it off i immediately did, and haven’t gone back. [EDIT: also, now that they have made the app available for Android this past week, i suspect the lag is going to get even WORSE, ugh]
having no-stakes non-live games is an interesting idea. perhaps they are working towards that for 2.0?
the hosts can be super grating, but i’m used to them now. some i like more than others. Scotty Guyliner i can take or leave – he talks the most, but at least he’s quick-witted and comes up with some good patter. i get the idea that they are talking so much to fill in lag on their end while they wait for votes to be tabulated or whatever.
anyway, it’s fun – even though i totally fail every time.
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I still have a faint hope something like 1 Vs. 100 will return to XBox one day.
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OK, we’re done here.
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