Quiz Shows

The fun world of Twitch quiz shows (Part 3)!

This week, we’re looking at The Hive by Royal Flush / Persephone’s Chair

It’s the third part in this series of reviewing online quiz shows. So far, we’ve looked at two of the British Twitch trio that made the New Media Five in the UKGameshows 2021 Poll of the Year (Topper1gaming and Ash The Bash). It seems only fair that we now turn to the third person who goes by Persephone’s Chair, Royal Flush or simply Ben on stream. We’re going to look at one of his newest offerings, where the focus is on a single player who will need the help of the audience to win The Hive.

Royal Flush’s The Hive

Can you understand the Hive mind?

The Hive is an original creation which focuses on a single person’s quest to build up the prize pot with their knowledge and the audience’s before trying to win as much of the prize pot as they can in the final. I’ll be writing about the episode from Ben’s recent Season Finale — a special as it was played for real hard cash! This particular game lasts around 40–60 mins — anyone who has a microphone can put their name in the random draw to be the centre player in control of the Hive. Everyone else is able to participate within the Hive and will play a pivotal role in the main game.

Its Otley — you are the one, please enter the arena! (No wait, that’s a different show)

The game has four main phases before the final. In each phase, the person in control will be shown four questions. These questions are written so that you have to evaluate all of the answers that are shown rather than it being a straight question and answer. Example questions could be:

“Which of these events was earliest?”

“Which of these capital cities is the furthest distance from Paris?”

“Which of these composers completed the most symphonies?” (It’s not Tchaikovsky)

The Hive controller will select three of these questions. The first question in the phase will have two possible answers, the second will have three and the third will have fourth. The unpicked question will reappear in the final.

The timer is on for the Hive to lock in their answers.

With a question selected, the audience/the Hive will be shown the options and have 15 seconds to lock in their answers. The player in control can then choose to either answer the question themselves, trust the Hive or mistrust the Hive. If they answer the question correctly, they add points (or Pennies in Ben’s channel) to their potential prize pot — 20 for the first question with the value rising by 10 per question successfully navigated. Alternatively, if they don’t know the answer themselves, they can bank these points by predicting whether the most picked response by the Hive will be correct (trust the Hive) or incorrect (mistrust the Hive). In these instances, we’ll see what the correct answer is before the Hive results are revealed.

The contestant has chosen to Trust the Hive — they hope that the majority of audience players have gone for B.

I really like the visual reveal — the camera pans back to the hexagonal grid and we’ll see the profile picture of each audience player fill it up with either green for right answers or red for incorrect ones. For every question an audience member gets right, they’ll earn a Penny for everybody else who got it wrong plus one — so the harder the question is, the more they stand to earn. While the focus of the game is on the main player, the audience gets an update on their performance at the end of each phase with a slick leaderboard displayed.

And luckily the majority has gone for B! Its Otley has added more Pennies to their bank.

There is a lot of strategy for the player in control to consider. In any phase, they can only answer a maximum of two questions and the Trust/Mistrust options are available only once each so they can’t succeed solely on their own merits — they must have a good sense of how hard a question will be for the audience. Should they trust the Hive on a question they are confident they will know or should they just answer themselves? They also need to factor in the order they want to play questions. If they see one on a topic they like, do they save it for the third question in the phase when there will be more possible options and choose to take on the question themselves? Do they save that spot for an obscure category where the audience is likely to make a mistake? And which question do you choose not to select at all — the contestant will not answer this question in the final, only the audience.

There are a lot of quiz shows that have a limited number of questions during the show and are padded by discussion around them. The most recent one that comes to mind is One and Six Zeros where there might be as few as seven questions in an hour long episode. In my opinion, the pace of that show is too slow — there are a lot of questions where it’s possible to know the answer immediately and even if the contestants do know it, there’s a lot of unneeded back and forward to reach that point. (It also can easily lose tension if the players have started badly and the prize they are playing for becomes trivial.) The Hive handles this much better — 17 questions across the show and most of them are going to prompt an interesting conversation with the need to mentally order all the options. I’ll also give praise at this point to the music for The Hive — the tension stings during answer reveals are really good.

Channel 4’s One and Six Zeros feels slower than the Hive and doesn’t feel as exciting or tense to watch.

Onto the final — for free, the main player gets 10 Pennies to take home for every question they answered or Trusted/Mistrusted the Hive correctly. Every question from now on will have five possible options. The audience are still playing for Pennies each question but at least for this first one, our main player can take a breather.

What’s important is the % of the Hive that gets this question right. For each subsequent question, the contestant now has to predict the % of correct answers relative to all the previous questions. So for Q2, they just have to determine if this % is higher or lower than Q1. By the time we reach the last question of five, there’s now five possible ranges the correct % may fall in.

Its Otley correctly predicted this question would be answered better by the Hive than the previous question. They’ve added another 66 Pennies to the total they’ll take home.

The further into the final, the more points on offer — the contestant wins 10% of their bank for the first higher or lower decision rising up to 50% of their bank for the last question. The player gets some assistance by being told the correct answer before they reach a decision — if they would have answered completely wrong, it can sway their prediction.

The final question of the game for 325 Pennies. Have a guess what the answer is and the prediction range the player should go for — answers at the end of the article.

Decisions earlier in the game will make their impact felt here. If you chose to skip all of the potentially difficult questions in the previous phases, then the % of correct answers on each question could all be close together and make the predicting harder. So it can be advantageous to have saved a couple of easier looking questions for the final — although this could result in fewer correct answers earlier in the game and a smaller potential prize pot. If you had ten contestants play out the game with the exact same set of questions, I imagine the results would look very different each time and that makes every game unique.

The show takes inspiration from a couple of different titles —the conversational style of questions is similar to the National Lottery show Secret Fortune, recently re-created by Ash the Bash. There are elements of It’s Not What You Know — a short-lived Chris Tarrant gameshow where you guessed if celebrities knew the answer to multiple choice questions and more often than not, came down to a bit of luck. That game had a lot of issues — it was slow and most of the show was usually rendered irrelevant as your bank was reset to zero every time you made an incorrect decision. The Hive takes the idea of working out what others would know and implements it far better. Right up to the last question, there is a lot to play for. The main game is engaging and the audience can still battle among themselves for Pennies.

Ben normally streams at 8pm UK time on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays over on his Twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/royal_flush. The new season of games (most of them original creations), starts on Saturday 23rd April (that’s tomorrow if you are reading this on release). It’ll be kicking off the qualifiers for the Face/Off tournament — a treat if you enjoy the quick back and forward chess clock quizzing seen on Beat The Chasers. I will be among those trying to make my way into the main tournament bracket. His Discord has stream information as well as discussion around the games played and a lively voice chat during streams to hop into.

I will likely continue this series to cover more TV and online quiz shows in future articles — stay tuned.

Answers to the posed questions: Richard II & C