I doubt I'm the only one who is surprised that the HQ Trivia [Free] phenomenon is still going this strong, but with that popularity accusations of cheaters and insiders winning is reaching new heights. In the world of the App Store, it seems like the harder a fad hits, the faster it is to fade. HQ Trivia has seemed oddly immune to that, likely in part to their ever-increasing prize pools. Last night, they played a game with a $50,000 prize pool, ending with six winners who took home $8,333.33 a piece. Needless to say, it's a pretty unbelievable thing to think that can even happen. Imagine just opening up an app because you got a push alert, answering some questions right, and taking home over eight grand!
Unfortunately, once you throw any sort of prize of value into the mix, people suddenly get very motivated to find whatever advantage they can to win the prizes. There's no shortage of HQ Trivia bots out there, and the easiest one to use was HQuack which we've posted about before. It's currently offline, and it really wouldn't surprise me if they got hit with a cease and desist. Github is loaded with bots, although they're all quite a bit more difficult to get working than HQuack was.
The thing with these bots is that the way they work is by using some low-level of AI to read questions from the game then blast them into Google, Wikipedia, and other data sources to try to figure out what the answer is. HQuack claimed to be 85% accurate, and even that seems a little optimist...