Something I have been pleased by this year is a return to a more "normal" contestant pool - no more casting, back to interviewing the audience and finding fun people to be on the show. With this, I sense that overall gameplay has improved as you have more people on the show who know the show well. One indicator of this is bidding on the showcases. I had a sense that bidding on showcases has improved as more true fans are on the show. To test my theory, I looked at the first 20 shows for season 52 versus season 51, with a few alterations:
I looked at the absolute value of differences...overbids are included by their difference.
Week 4 of last year was Dream Car week, so I used week 5 of 2022 instead.
You can see the results in the file below (hopefully). Overall the mean difference is quite lower (4400 vs 7650) and you can see the overall variability is much lower for this year, save for 1 rogue 17k difference in week 1.
Is this evidence of overall better contestant quality? Perhaps..
Could it also be due to the many LFAT's in the audience over the first few weeks? That's possible too.
