I have been progressing quite a lot over the weekend on the trivia quiz. The last things to do is to check if all the announcements are correct and program multiple payouts in case we have a tie.

This is how it will work: We have a catalog of over 7500 questions, some hard, some easy. Anybody can be quiz master and start a new quiz. The person will pick how many questions there will be and how much it will cost for users to answer. The the quiz master will get a random question. If he likes it, he can broadcast the question. I chose the [O] Offtopic channel for all quiz communication. Users can then send in answers and will be debited the costs. The quiz master can see the answers but not who sent them.

After the quiz master waited some time for answers, he can check which answers are in and then also see the correct answer for the first time. He can then decide to award one user the correct answer or to skip the question because nobody had a good enough answer. It’s in the judgement of the quiz master if he takes the funniest, best or whatever else answer to win. Of course it’s important to be fair, otherwise next time the same quiz master runs a quiz, people will be hesitant to participate!

A skipped question will also count in the number of questions for the quiz. When the initially chosen number of questions is asked, the quiz ends and the money that people paid to answer will be given to the winner(s). There will be a website where people can follow all old sessions and see who did a good job at asking and answering!

Achievements: Psiber contacted me today with an idea to implement achievements. We talked it through in quite some detail and found a good way to implement this. Essentially, all our handmade functions can be extended via achievements, for example the “buy xp” functions. There can be an achievement how often you buy XP and how much you buy over time. There will be different achievement points given to users progressively with milestones in each achievement they receive. Maybe the achievement points will be displayed as a name prefix, we still have to find out if things become too crowded on the screen. Psiber agreed to help me first with the general functionality, and then we can, over time and quite easily add achievements to many things in the system. There will be a website where you will be able to see all available achievements and for each user who has how many overall points and what type of achievements.