Trivia would be more fun without cheaters

[USU_Aggie]

I get it. It's just an informal thing to hang out and answer some questions. But when I was on thy panorama this spring, I went to Harry Potter trivia. I love HP. So does my sister. There were a ton of teens and kids there who clearly do too. 
 

My group missed 3-4 questions and they were very hard. Unsurprisingly, about 5 claimed to have gotten every question right, including a group of adults who also claimed a perfect score on the name that pop diva trivia that was immediately before the HP trivia. 
 

So the trivia host (ironically a British person who knew literally nothing about HP or how to pronounce anything, but that didn't bother me) asks the 5 perfect score groups to nominate their most talented Potter nerd for a tie break. Each group sent up 1 person. The question was how many knuts are in a galleon. This is like asking how many pennies are in a $100 bill, except much harder because Wizarding money makes no sense. 
 

The answer for context is 493. I didn't know it but anybody who has read HP would know it was a lot. 
 

The 4 losing answers ranged from 5 to 100 and then one guess of 500. The group that claimed a perfect score on divas and HP said 5! I'd say it's the equivalent to being asked how many US presidents have there been and answering 833. If you know enough about HP to answer even 50% of the questions correctly, you know it isn't 5. 
 

The person who guessed 500 came from one of the clearly Potter-crazed groups. Perhaps they got a perfect score. But the other four clearly cheated. 

 

Anyway, this is my long rant on a very small issue. I wish carnival could grade the trivia answers instead of groups self-grading. 

Edited June 26, 2023 by USU_Aggie

[tonit964]

I agree but cheaters are at every trivia game on every ship and every cruise line.

I just play for fun and to see how many I can get right, I don't even think about trying to win anything because I know the cheaters are in the back googling away. 

[sanger727]

I really can't see why anyone would find it fun to win a game like this through cheating. 

[hard_eight]

Agreed, takes the fun out of it. Should be held in a wifi free area, and should swap for grading.

[hard_eight]

Just now, sanger727 said:

I really can't see why anyone would find it fun to win a game like this through cheating. 

Gotta get that ship on a stick!

[mizLORInj]

10 minutes ago, hard_eight said:

Agreed, takes the fun out of it. Should be held in a wifi free area, and should swap for grading.

Used to swap papers on Royal Caribbean. . . not anymore though. 

 

I agree it was more fun when you didn't have internet help!

[USU_Aggie]

6 minutes ago, hard_eight said:

Gotta get that ship on a stick!

 

I won a ship on a stick on a tiebreaker question my first cruise. The question was what were George Washington's teeth made of. I said ivory and slave teeth. The other person said wood. The host awarded it to the other person but I said that's a myth you best fact check that. Old dude mean mugged me every time he saw me that cruise for taking his ship on a stick away. Didn't help that I also beat him by 1 stroke in mini golf (he brought his own putter on board for it). 

[asalligo]

Agree completely, used to be my favorite activity and now it is always someone winning who is just cheating. 

[PrincessArlena'sDad]

This wasn't on a cruise, but recently someone cheated at a trivia game to win a potted plant.  We actually saw them write in the answers as they were going over the answers.

[starstruck05]

I love Triva on a cruise and 100% agree its ruined by cheaters. I actually won Harry Potter triva with 11 questions right because no one cheated! But the cruise before someone got all the questions right including the name of a teacher who is only mentioned once in the books and never in the movie. No way someone would have known that off the top of their head. I wish they would do like a phone lock box or something for triva like they do at some bars.

Edited June 26, 2023 by starstruck05

[havanadaydreaming]

there are two types of trivia bums, pure cheaters and folks who have heard all the questions and remembered the answers from previous cruise.  

 

i looooooooooooooooooooooooove the live tiebreakers.  its almost the most fun at sea thing for me.  put up or shut up time! 

 

 

 

(that said i had one of those live tiebreaks on our last cruise. it was pretty clear me and a retiree-im not all that far away myself- were the top two in sports trivia.  and we tied.  i wanted to lose and asked to defer to him since i had already had a ship stick from earlier in the week.  

 

nope.  high noon shootout.   The question was something akin to how many points did Kevin Garnett score in last game of 2xxx first round playoffs.  no earthly clue.  i assumed it was really high or really low...otherwise why would anyone know?  it was something like 22.  weird!  luckily he won) 

 

 

[havanadaydreaming]

trivia topics i could run the table on, perhaps: 

 

Baseball 

80s music

movies (i was a film minor, tv major) 

jimmy buffett (gone to his concerts for 37 years) 

 

 

Everything else is a long shot.  i have watched every Friends and Seinfeld and Cheers episode and i dont think i stand a chance against 4k shipmates who watch reruns! 

 

 

[ontheweb]

Here's a question that was asked on my last Carnival cruise that no one would have been able to cheat. The assistant cruise director running that particular game asked how old he was. (Actually one other participant and I were the closest to getting it right. We were only one year off.)

 

I told a different assistant cruise director who was on his first cruise about that question, and he said "that is not on the question sheet". 🤣

 

The assistant cruise director who asked that question was once on duty during a port disembarkation. And as I passed him, I said to my DW, I bet I can guess how old he is. That got a big 🤣 out of him.

[john91498]

"If you aren't cheating, you ain't trying..."

[dallasdan]

I don't play trivia for this reason.  Every time I walk by Trivia and will see several people on their phones looking up the answers.

[nwcruiselover]

I’m a huge trivia fan and I love to play, but the cheaters take some of the fun out of it.  Nowadays on many ships, they’re playing for medallions (bling on a string), rather than ships on sticks.  I don’t mind people who have heard the answers before on other trivia sessions and actually remember the answers, but those who google or fill in the answers as they’re read should be banned.

[Purvis1231]

In the past, I have noticed cheaters but I just got off the Glory and played a half dozen trivia games, thankfully I did notice any cheaters. Oddly enough this was the first cruise where I did not win a single game. It seems those who won just outplayed me. I did tie twice but didn't raise my hand fast enough in the tie-breaker. 

[staceyglow]

My pet peeve is when people show up late for trivia, ask the host to repeat the 5 questions they missed, and the host obliges them.

[tallyho8]

I love trivia if though I am very poor at it because I have a loss of short term memory. If they ask a question about something that I learned in school 60 years ago I can give a correct answer but if they ask about something more recent like an episode of Friends or the name of a song or singer from the 80s on up then I have no clue.

 

One of my last cruises, not on Carnival, where you won a drink, it was a general knowledge trivia and every question was about geography, history or social studies. This was the last day of trivia and I had not even been close the previous 6 days and one party of 6 people had won every day so far while I was playing alone. The answers were easy to me and I wound up winning. My phone was sitting on the table because I had been playing a game of Free Cell on it earlier and I did not have internet on that cruise.

 

One of the "ladies" who had been winning every night rushed over to my table, grabbed my phone and looked at it to see my recent views and exclaimed out loud that I was cheating because there was no way I could have beat her. Of course, only Free Cell was on my phone and she could tell I had no internet but I was so shocked at her conduct that I just sat there quietly in shock for a moment. It was lucky that she was a woman because if it had been a man I probably would have been kicked off the ship for knocking him out. All I could do was to walk past her table when leaving, with all her friends there, and tell her how arrogant she was to think that anyone who could beat her had to be cheating. I was a straight A student in High School and could probably beat her in any high school subject but Home Economics. She was so flustered that she spilled her drink on the lady next to her as I walked out the door.

[Viajera7]

3 hours ago, starstruck05 said:

I love Triva on a cruise and 100% agree its ruined by cheaters. I actually won Harry Potter triva with 11 questions right because no one cheated! But the cruise before someone got all the questions right including the name of a teacher who is only mentioned once in the books and never in the movie. No way someone would have known that off the top of their head. I wish they would do like a phone lock box or something for triva like they do at some bars.

I would agree with you until my May cruise. My cousin and I joined a young woman who happened to have a photographic memory. I thought that photographic memory was a myth until we met her. 

[CruiseHealing]

My 14 ships on a stick are now in a box. DW doesn’t want to display my Trivia trophies. It does go with our decor. 

[sfaaa]

The universal rule on cheating is It is not cheating if you aren't caught. 

[Honolulu Blue]

15 hours ago, USU_Aggie said:

I wish carnival could grade the trivia answers instead of groups self-grading. 

I was a part of at least one trivia session where we traded the answer sheets; I'm not sure if it was on Carnival or not.  I've had two winning trivia sessions (not on Carnival) where the host spot checked my answer sheet after I (correctly) claimed that I had the most correct answers.

 

15 hours ago, sanger727 said:

I really can't see why anyone would find it fun to win a game like this through cheating. 

For some people, I guess the fun is either in possession of a ship on a stick (SOAS) or pulling a fast one on everyone else.  I shrug my shoulders; I try not to be too harsh of a judge.

 

14 hours ago, havanadaydreaming said:

i looooooooooooooooooooooooove the live tiebreakers.  its almost the most fun at sea thing for me.  put up or shut up time! 

 

I had one of these tiebreakers some years ago, and this one WAS on Carnival.  Music trivia - first person to ID the tune played won.  I could literally name it in three notes - and did.  And won!  😃

 

14 hours ago, havanadaydreaming said:

trivia topics i could run the table on, perhaps: 

 

80s music

 

We should totally do a one-on-one trivia session on some Carnival cruise sometime - that would be a lot of fun!  I like to think I know 80s music pretty well and have the trophies and other bling to prove it.  Random photo of one of my awards:

[sparks1093]

When we cruise with our two youngest we typically score higher then if it is just DW and I. Highest we've gotten was 19 of 20. Collective knowledge is greater than individual knowledge so I can see a group scoring higher. That said if one of the boys pulls out their phone during trivia I tell them to put it away. They always say "I'm just checking my messages" and I always say, "that's not what it looks like to everyone else".

[ontheweb]

On one of our Carnival cruises, there was team trivia, the men against the women. There were 4 matches, and the men won every one of them. Only the captain got a ship on a stick, I was the captain on the first match. My teammates tried to elect me again, but were told there had to be a new captain each time. One time I got the answer, but the person running the game would only accept it from the captain, and I had to actually spell the answer for him to be able to say it.

 

As I wrote in the first paragraph, we won every match, but the assistant cruise director (who said that had never happened before) wanted the last match to mean something, so he did not want us up 3-0. And he cheated. We had the question name an NFL team with a horsey name. I forgot whether we said Colts or Broncos, but he would not accept the answer and passed the question on to the women who said whichever one we did not and were given credit for the answer. I still vividly remember this even though it happened back in 2013!

 

And on the plane back, there was a woman and her son sitting directly in front of us who had been on the same cruise. The youngster at one point turned around, looked at me and said "You're the trivia guy." 😊