Just in time we're bringing the latest and greatest on all things Crowdpurr for the month of June 2020. We're going to discuss the new features Edit Player Rankings and QR Codes!
June has continued the trend of high-volume virtual event engagement with both new event creators and participants continuing to increase. Because of this, Crowdpurr spent most of June going to work on under-the-hood enhancements, bug fixes to handle the traffic load, and continued development on forthcoming major features.
We do have a few smaller, highly requested new features to talk about. So let's dig in!
Hosts Can Edit Player Rankings
After many, many user requests, we have added the ability for hosts to edit player scores in the Rankings Leaderboard! Make a mistake on a question's correct answer? Want to award bonus points for something done outside of Crowdpurr but reflect it within Crowdpurr? Just want to bump a certain player up or down? Now you can!
Simply go to the yellow Crowd Rankings tab and click on the green Pencil icon to the right of each player's ranking. You can now edit the Points or Percentage Correct of any individual player. Or of any individual player within an Advanced Team ranking. Just set a new score, click the Checkmark, and watch it update across the entire app including the Presentation View and all player Participant Views!
Can I Edit Advanced Team or Multi-Game Ranking?
At this time, you can only edit Individual Player and Basic Team scores. You cannot edit Advanced Team, Survivor Mode, or Multi-Game Rankings directly. However, you can update Individual Player scores within an Advanced Team ranking or Multi-Game Ranking. Those updates will then roll up and update the overall calculation for the Advanced Team or Multi-Game Ranking.
QR Codes on the Presentation View
We've added QR codes in the lower-left corner of the Presentation View. You can use QR codes to quickly allow your audience, both live and virtual, the ability to simply scan the code using their mobile device's camera to quickly open a web browser to join your interactive experience. No experience code typing required! For virtual events your participants can simply scan your live-streamed or desktop-shared Presentation View. For live events, your participants can scan your overhead-projected Presentation View.
QR codes also work with Custom URLs and custom Experience Codes and update in real-time when changed. QR codes are optional and can easily be disabled in the Presentation View's lower-right configuration menu. Try them out on your next event!
Under The Hood Improvements
The recent high traffic load we've experienced shined a light on some bottlenecks and issues in the app that we addressed throughout the month of June.
Rankings Leaderboard Efficiency Improvements
Did you ever see the issue where the Presentation View showed rankings that didn't match your player Participant Views? Yeah, we saw that too.
We overhauled the entire technology for how real-time rankings are calculated and delivered to better handle many thousands of players all at the same time. We previously used separate approaches and processes for the Presentation View, Experience Dashboard, and Participant View rankings. Those have now been unified into a "single source of truth" so rankings will always match. Additionally, we cut the processing time down by a factor of 10x thus releasing crucial processing cycles to our application servers to better perform at scale.
Highly Improved Team Scoring Algorithm
Our Advanced Team Mode scoring algorithm previously used a mean average calculation to generate team rank. Otherwise known as a "simple average", this simply divided the team's total points by their total team members to calculate an Average Points Per Player rank for each team.
Several players pointed out the issue of witnessing their team's high score plummet when certain team members only answered a few questions due to leaving the game early, or by joining the game late, or dropping out due to connection issues. We even heard some teams that used this as a way to sabotage other teams!
Not anymore! We updated Advanced Team scoring to a new weighted average algorithm that now correctly regulates how much each player's score influences the overall team performance by taking into consideration how many questions they answered!
This is a much more robust algorithm and makes it much harder to negatively influence a teams rank on the leaderboard, either intentionally or not.
Fixed Trivia Cheating Issue
It was brought to our attention by one extremely savvy Crowdpurr user that players could actually cheat on trivia games by using a scripting hack on the player's Participant View that revealed the correct answer to the current question while the question was still open for answering... yikes!
This was extremely rare we found, but was indeed possible because we were sending correct answers a bit too early to player devices for display when the host triggers Show Correct Answers (C).
Our team quickly corrected the issue and we no longer deliver any correct answers for display until they are actually triggered from the Experience Dashboard by the host after the window of time to answer is closed.
New Games in our Trivia Database Every Monday
Our trivia content team continues to release amazing new 100% original from-scratch trivia games every single Monday... totally FREE!
Fresh off the press is a series of trivia games to celebrate the American holiday Independence Day. Each of the games focuses on different American values during these trying times like equality and inclusivity, while still honoring America's amazing history.
To get our weekly new trivia game announcements right in your feed, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn!
Upcoming New Features
Last month we announced several new features. We're still prepping these including an all new Question Image Library, Experience Scheduling, and Automatic Experience Warping.
We're continuing work on these and will be releasing them when they are production-ready.
