[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'251233\' date=\'Nov 19 2010, 06:22 AM\']Call it anticlimactic, call it counterintuitive, call it whatever cool adjective you want, but it violates a cardinal rule of game structure, at least as far as what American audiences have come to expect. Shows certainly have gotten on the air with a few of those cardinal rules broken in the past. Some have even been successful, though not many and never for very long.[/quote]I'm not saying that I like or dislike it, I'm just reporting that's what it is for those who don't know. The most telling bit is that no one managed to keep even 10% of their original stake through the gauntlet of guessing.
I would say that the whole "losing" angle fits into Fox's programming nicely: Greed had lots of losers and few winners, plus the whole Terminator angle, which guaranteed a loser at that point, and The Chamber had the "lose half your money" rule when it could have just as easily been "You didn't make it to seven minutes so you don't earn anything more," but they went with halfsies anyway. (Notwithstanding all the OTHER reasons to loathe The Chamber, but they had this too.)
[quote name=\'Neumms\' post=\'251286\' date=\'Nov 20 2010, 09:58 AM\']One canny element of this formula, then, is that players are forced into staking money on "guess" questions. They avoid Greed's pitfall that to get to the top of their ladder, they had to keep finding kooks.[/quote]Perhaps a sign that those in charge finally realized that people weren't going to risk their wad on a blind stab, and allowed teams that reached the sixth level to keep a portion of their money. That didn't negate the entire second half of the game relying on Those Questions of Theirs, but it was something.
