Confirmed Season 32 Changes

You know, I just realized something. By the time S32 begins, I won't be in much of a position to complain: the $32K they'll be winning will probably equal my $30K in 2014 dollars by the end of the season. It'll all even out!

By this logic, this also means Jeopardy! would increase the $200 clues to...$310 each.

Time for my say on the matter... TL;DR is at the end.

First off, I'm going to admit that I actually like the $1,000 Same Letter bonus. Is it a necessary change? Absolutely not. However, it does provide some new excitement to the category and will probably be the closest thing we get to a "bonus category" in a long time, if ever. Plus, it does add a bit more incentive to calling the SL, even though usually when it does go uncalled, it's because it's a Prize Puzzle. This change would have been even more welcome if the cardboard did not award money (I believe on at least SL's first two aired uses, the SL was called on cardboard), and I don't believe the SL has ever been called on the MDW before. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out on camera. This would be a nice little opportunity to revive the "High Rollers chimes" to use whenever someone calls the SL. Either way, I'll definitely be adapting this rule for my forum games come September. That being said, SL isn't always a very welcoming category, so hopefully we won't be seeing it more than once a week. This really doesn't help justify their refusal to do trivia bonuses anymore, though. At $3,000, they could easily replace the Prize Puzzle bonus if the questions are easy enough, which they usually were.

As for the $32,000, it strikes me as very random. I could get if they wanted to do this with $35K when S35 comes (which they might), but 32 is such a random number to have in this situation, plus it'll probably take up half the Bonus Wheel so we'll be seeing it ad nauseum once again. And they can't have this next season, so they'll either have to decrease it back to $30K (which will make them look cheap), or increase it again to $35K (please not $33K), which will make them squander more unnecessary thousands from the budget that they could use on freshening up the Wheel. I'm not asking for a $7,500 or normal-functioning $10,000 wedge (although I'm not opposed to moving $5,000 to R3, but that will only make R3 even more make-or-break than it already is; calling a right letter on it and winning the PP could be just as beneficial as winning the Express if not more), but the new basic Wheel is a joke. More on that in a bit.

Scott said it perfectly. They're fixing what ain't broke, and leaving what IS broke. I was REALLY hoping they would separate the Prize Puzzle and Express, but NOPE. How is staff so oblivious to the fact that Express winners usually double their winnings only because it's R3? To make matters worse, they use Express in rehearsal games which play out in the context of a normal round, so Express winners there do not get any kind of bonus, which is how we SHOULD be seeing this on camera. Now we still have to go through the annoyance of Express winners getting thousands more thrown into their pile when they've already won big anyway. -_- Both of these new changes and the lack of others just add to the nightmare that Wheel loves giving away more money in areas it's SHOULDN'T, yet NOT adding (or decreasing) money where they should. The Prize Puzzle trips are supposed to start at $5,000 worst-case-scenario, but we rarely see any under $6,000 anymore, and we're seeing more and more trips over $9,000 or $10,000 even without teams playing, regardless of destination. I can't stand when the Prize Wedge is a ~$6,000 trip to Italy while the Prize Puzzle is a ~$9,500 trip to Hawaii. The trip department is one of the places where they're trying not to be cheap. Next season, I'm going to try to keep track of all the PP values and do a little analysis on things like price vs. location, average price on singles vs. teams, trips under $6,000, etc. At least Wheel kind of remedies this by having the "cash" Prize wedges typically be $7,500 now instead of $5,000.

When it comes to the Wheel itself, you're doing it wrong. When fans said "we want bigger values on the Wheel", that didn't mean "raise the minimum value and keep everything else above it as-is". However, I have to say that the lack of permanent 4-digit values through this change especially is probably more a case of laziness than hesitance. Since changing the values was essentially a cosmetic change, all they did was rip up the 3's and 4's and added mores 5's through 9's, almost as if they did them arbitrarily and just looked at it afterwards and were like "Eh, I guess we'll go with that." It's very possible that this was rushed since S32 began taping a little over a month after S31 finished. I don't think anyone here was complaining that $300 was too low. If anything, $900 was too low when compared to $5,000, as has been the problem since 1996, but only got more frustrating as the seasons and layouts progressed. It's a good thing Double Play isn't still around, because it'd be pretty boring to see nearly every use of it end up only between $1,000-$1,800 as opposed to the $300-$3,000 non-TDV range of S13, or even the hypothetical $600-$1,800 of previous modern seasons. The only even remotely good thing to come out of this new Wheel is that house minimum solves won't be as common (but they're still going to happen, of course). By the time S40 comes, the Wheel will probably be only $700, $800, $900, and $2500+.

Then comes the vowels. Wheel is clearly becoming desperate to achieve "No More Vowels" status in each round because vowels are actually a very important piece of help. Yet this was the reason they cost a pretty hefty price back in the day. Just because the concept is such an icon of the show doesn't mean it should come so easily. Now we're going to get so many more rounds that start with one spin, and then two (or more) vowels right after. Is Wheel trying to speed up the game even more, I wonder? Regardless, Wheel needs to stop being stubborn about $250 vowels. It may be a "tradition", but if the main money maker of the show (the Wheel) upgrades, so does everything else. Even if they were $500, that would be the equivalent of having them as $250 in S14-15. The ideal vowel price with this new layout is $750, or maybe even $1,000, but definitely nothing more.

Bottom line, Wheel is doing a bad job so far this season of catering to its fans, while Jeopardy! has been doing the exact opposite lately (we'll see if that changes for the worse next season, but doubt it). Did anybody ask for the wedge minimum to go up? No; people asked for vowels to become more "earned" and for a better gap between top value and "regular" values, which could lead to good secondary Wild Card uses and more exciting Speed-Ups. Who wouldn't want to see a nice, round $2,000 or $2,500-per-consonant Speed-Up Round?

TL;DR: Wheel is spending their extra money in the wrong places. Trips are getting more expensive, unnecessary extra thousands thrown in to the Bonus Round and maingame, Round 3 still being the unbalanced "win both gimmicks and 98% likely win the game" round, still keeping vowels at $250 which is now half the minimum value, yet decreasing the variety in Wheel wedges because they childishly (and probably lazily) refuse to go into four-digit territory without some kind of gimmick.

Sorry, I just had to rant about these. The lack of variety in Wheel values (especially no $750 or $1,000+ when especially the former was screaming to be put somewhere with the new changes) was one thing which I'll grow used to over time, I guess, but keeping the Express with the monstrosity that is the Prize Puzzle was one of the biggest flaws of S31, just as bad, probably worse, than keeping vowels at $250 even with this layout. Wheel is going to have a lot to make up in S33.

Plus, they wouldn't be able to run the episodes out of taping order anymore if they did that.

At least not with an increase like that. If they were to make a progressive Jackpot system for the $100,000 envelope, I'd do it more like Lingo if you will. Add $500, maybe $1000 at most, for every day it's not won.

In the case of a Million Dollar Win, I'd still reset the prize back to $100,000 because technically, the Million Dollar prize is like landing on $100,000 only with a special wedge.

Someone I know went to a recent taping and confirmed the big changes we've already heard of, but had one other thing: the Mystery Wedge apparently got a redesign. Still worth $1,000 as far as I know, so the changes are largely cosmetic.

A $32,000 bonus round... puh-leeze. What else can be wrecked up? The font for the wedges? The font on the puzzleboard?

When I read this, I imagined the extreme situation that both look like a five-year-old wrote it, for some reason.

The Wheel font's basically been in the same general style for its entire existence and the changes require paying attention to notice at first glance (though I think it's the easiest to tell on the 7). The puzzle board font change in 1997 was more radical, but I swear I read somewhere that sans serif is easier to read than serif on screen. As far as fonts, I think most fans are only going to care that 1.) they don't look ridiculous or ugly and 2.) that they can read the damn thing. If Wheel of Fortune were to, say, change the wheel font to Helvetica, there will inevitably be people who will say, "I hate this new font; change it back to the custom version of Clarendon," but I would think that the purists would be the majority people saying that. Changing the wheel font to Comic Sans, on the other hand, would probably generate a lot more complaints, as 1.) it looks weird on a game being played by adults and 2.) the font is ill-liked in the first place.

Why was it even decreased to $3K in the first place?

Was the lettering outline always dark blue since they adopted that style of name tag? I could have sworn it was black.