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Sudden Death - Answer:Distractor Ratios?

Submitted by DubawntLake on December 11, 2024
I've really been digging the Sudden Death format**, but I've noticed that user results skew a bit low. I'm wondering if my ratio or answers to distractors might be a bit too low (I've naively been sticking with 1:1). Is there a standard ratio or one that other people have found to be a sweet spot for balancing difficulty w engagement?

Interested to hear other people's thoughts!

-M

**Shameless plug: https://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/1633744/canadian-lakes-and-rivers-sudden-death

8 Comments
Dimby
+2
Level 83
Dec 11, 2024
I think it entirely depends on how hard your information is. The rivers and lakes one you posted is pretty hard. I'm Canadian and got about 10 deep before I didn't feel very confident at all and tripped a distractor. Of course, the experience of the quiz taker changes with the number of wrong answers. Do you want a decent chance for users to get a bunch of lucky answers based on vague hunches? Or should users get the number they know and maybe just 1 or 2 more? You could even make a VERY hard quiz with 20 correct answers and 4 incorrect answers, and the experience would be like Russian roulette! Anyway, that's how I think of it. I think about the user experience. :)
DubawntLake
+3
Level 61
Dec 11, 2024
Russian Roulette. Now that would be a quiz!

Thanks for trying the quiz. I try to think about user experience but principles of UX be damned, I end up overvaluing my own. I also tried to represent the breadth of the country and avoid whales (explaining the exclusion of the Saguenay).

Cheers from Sask.

Xtrordinary
+2
Level 75
Dec 11, 2024
Very early when sudden death came and there only like 5 featured sudden death quizzes I calculated the average amount of answers in a sudden death quiz was ~60% of all the tiles although that statistic is probably outdated now.
DubawntLake
+1
Level 61
Dec 11, 2024
It'd be interesting to see some good stats on this, particularly benchmarked against engagement.
McKenzieFam
+2
Level 68
Dec 11, 2024
I tend to try to use about a 1:3 ratio of distractors to answers
DubawntLake
+1
Level 61
Dec 11, 2024
That definitely seems more forgiving. Was that a ratio you came to through instinct, experience, or theory?
McKenzieFam
+1
Level 68
Dec 11, 2024
I experimented a bit in the quiz preview before I posted my first one, with a ratio of about 1:2, and since then, I have played and created more and decided that 1:3 or somewhere around that value provides just the best level of easy to hard, as evidenced by the stats on this quiz I also just released

(more shameless self-promotion there lol)

DubawntLake
+1
Level 61
Dec 11, 2024
New one's great. Very nice progression of difficulty.
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