[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'247607\' date=\'Sep 15 2010, 08:39 AM\'][quote name=\'Loogaroo\' post=\'247598\' date=\'Sep 15 2010, 03:32 AM\'][quote name=\'chad1m\' post=\'247591\' date=\'Sep 14 2010, 09:10 PM\']Nope, still don't. It should be hard to see a $250,000 question.[/quote]
Not so hard that it never happens.[/quote]
That's you're opinion of what might be the result of the season after watching two episodes. As a debate point, that's pretty weak.
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They've changed the format to either a small degree ($25,000?) or large degree (OMGWTFCLOCK) almost every year now. We've had the show for 11 years; that's long enough to have a decent feel for what changes do to the show. Even this year's changes.
That said, whether we see many BIG winners has much less to do with changes in format, and much more to do with question difficulty. Consider The Price is Right. They overhauled their budget by making prices more challenging and by making non-bimodal guesses much harder. Here, it doesn't matter whether $25,000 is at the start of the stack or near the end; either way, they're going to have some questions. Some are easy, and some are hard. And if enough of them are hard, more people will bail earlier.
Personal thought: Yes, winning a lot of money should be hard on this show. But for a show called "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", for a show that the host simply calls "Millionaire", I would like to see a question 15 14 about once a season. It's perfectly reasonable that some or all of these people don't pull the trigger. But I don't want it to happen by someone being handed a gift stack, either. Yes, I know this is an incredibly hard thing to balance without having a lot of people go deep in their stacks, but I really believe that it's better television overall if they can manage that balance.