1 Vs. 100

Ok, let me start this post by saying 1 vs. 100 on xbox live is absolutely awesome. It's totally free if you have a gold account and if you haven't tried it yet, I suggest you go do so, right now.

Oh, but make sure you play a live show first, there's two every weekend.

Here's how it works. It's a massively multiplayer quiz game that works just like a quiz show. One player is selected at random to be 'The One', a hundred others are selected to play in the mob and everyone else plays from the crowd.

Basically, the one plays against the mob. A question gets asked and everyone who gets it wrong gets eliminated. The more players The One can eliminate from the mob, the bigger the prize. After each question The One decides whether to take the winnings and run, or go on to another round. If The One gets a question wrong, he gets eliminated, wins nothing and the prize money gets split between the remaining members of the mob.

If you don't get into the mob or get to play as the one, you play from the crowd. You can only win a prize if you're one of the top three scorers (which is unlikely as I've seen around 20,000 people playing at once), but it keeps the game fun and 'trust the crowd' is one of The One's lifelines (If they don't know, they automatically choose the most popular answer from the crowd).

It's insanely fun.

The only thing I'm not sure of is how they pick The Mob and The One. During the week when there's not a live show, there's regular 1 vs. 100 'Extended Play' games which is just a straight quiz without real world prizes. It says that your performance on those shows plays a big part in whether you get selected or not.

Now, I can understand why they do this. A two hour live show would get frustrating really fast if the players chosen to be The One or play from the mob all turned out to be clueless tweens. The extended play games are essentially the audition.

However, as with every online game, you always get the hardcore players who treat the game like a second job. IE, I play a lot…at least an hour or so a day, get around 90% of the questions right and my lifetime score is around two million points. However, there are people with scores around the twenty or thirty million mark…meaning they must play almost every extended play session…about eight hours per day.

I can't really complain about this because I don't know whether they pick The One and The Mob from the top 1%, 10% or 25%...but I hope it's the top 25%

It's just one of the unavoidable downsides to online gaming, with such a large pool of players, there will always be the people who play like machines. For example, in 1 Vs. 100 to prevent a massive 5000 person tie every game, as well as getting the questions right, you also score points for how fast you answer and for maintaining a streak of right answers.

Every single game there is a handful of players who get every question right and have an average answer time of zero seconds.

They probably need to get out more.