Guide to Packet Difficulty

[Theodore]

So I've made this guide to packet difficulty.

People have already given me constructive criticism on missing and mis-categorized sets, and I encourage the community to continue to do so.

Fred Morlan suggested that I further subdivide sets by year, which is something I would like to do. I would just require input from the community as to how to categorize them, as I haven't played many sets written pre-2011.

My other concern: LIST and (the modern) Prison Bowl are both categorized in the regular high school difficulty tier. However, LIST is clearly easier, but not enough for it to be IS-A level. To resolve this, should there be some sort of quantified scale? e.g. Each set could have a rating out of 5 or 10 stars, or 100. Of course, the tiers would still be there to give a general understanding of difficulty.

I'd be happy to move this to quizbowlpackets.com or some other Quizbowl website to make it more easily accessible, as long as I get a small mention or so.

Mods/admin--feel free to move the relevant posts from the "What packets should I study?" topic to here if you deem it necessary.

[AKKOLADE]

Since I'm making the rounds giving daps this morning, I really like this idea from Ted. I definitely think more information would be useful, but this is a great starting point. We should figure out a community way to get more data together for this; I can help out some with the high school sets, but obviously aPPB adjustments only go so far.

[Theodore]

Firstly, I think the first step is to integrate the guide to quizbowlpackets.com or move it to a website like HSQBRank where more people would more easily find and access it; information isn't terribly useful if people can't/don't find it.

We should figure out a community way to get more data together for this; I can help out some with the high school sets, but obviously aPPB adjustments only go so far.

I think using aPPBs would prove very helpful for this task.

As for "a community way to get more data": of course it shouldn't be just one person determining difficulties, as even experienced members of the community can make human misjudgements. However, I don't think having a purely public/democratic rating system in which everybody can vote is the right way to go either, as anybody can mess up rankings. Any suggestions as to finding a good middle ground?

[Adventure Temple Trail]

It might be nice, as a future update to quizbowlpackets.com, to add a column next to the list of sets with some estimate of the difficulty for each one; while this might have the unintended effect of discouraging some less-dedicated teams from even clicking on anything labeled Regular or Above, it would have the more-important intended effect of helping less-experienced teams find sets of the difficulty they're looking for if they aren't familiar with the past 10+ years of tournament announcements.