Memorandum submitted by Mark Raven
As a regular quiz player who now only enters
by the web for free, I want some stricter rules on the selection
process, as I know it is the producer who selects who goes live
on air, and it is not a random process.
You get many regular players who get on more
than others, and I know for a fact they pay to enter as well as
entering for free.
I think stricter rules and an independent adjudicator
should monitor just how random the process is, and free entry
players should have equal chance of winning.
Certain channels such as Quizcall, Pop The Q
and Cashcall have such user unfriendly free entry systems that
don't even tell you if you might get called back. Indeed Quizcall
may call you back many hours after you have entered a quiz, by
which point the show is off air or the game has changed. Other
channels give you no indication of whether you may be called back
or not. ITV Play should be commended for their free entry system
which is operated by Eckoh, and it sthe best example of how entering
via the web should operate. You get a message telling you if you
are successful or not, which takes away some of the doubt about
whether you will be successful.
Certain channels start games which are very
rarely if ever won. They are usually counting games, like count
the number of reds.
Here is an example of one currently on air.
"Freda ordered 60 white roses. Alexander
ordered sixty red roses, when the roses were delivered, there
were only 100 roses, 77 of them white, only twenty three of them
red. Erasing the delivery company from her phone Freda offered
Alexander some of her roses"
The problem with a quiz like this is they never
tell you how a puzzle was solved, and often reveal an answer which
must involve using roman numerals in the text and other unusual
methods of calculation that only the most skilled mathematician
is going to be able to solve.
These games are clearly revenue earners and
the average caller has no chance of solving them. Some of these
games actually run for weeks and weeks, being bought back so a
whole new audience can call in with repeated wrong answers. When
they do eventually reveal an answer, they should also be made
to reveal how it was solved.
15 November 2006
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