The warning applies to my post too, for everyone reading. Again, stop reading if you're not interested in such posts. Some of this is meant to be humorous/sarcastic just in case you're the type of reader that doesn't pick up on sarcasm too well.Ike wrote:While I enjoy more quizbowl and enjoy playing some of them, I think it's worth taking a step back and just talking about their creation as a whole. I understand that the stakes are kind of low here, but I think the general principle is also applicable to normal quizbowl, so bear with me please. Warning: this post reeks of circle-jerk, music mafia like mentality, and intellectual masturbation. In particular it reeks of James Bond and JRPGs, so deal with it or stop reading.
First, I'm going to presume that your playing of LIMITLESS INDALECIO prompted you to write this post. Good! The packet had a casualty. Glad to hear it. Back to reality. I would like to remind you that your statement is true in general, however LIMITLESS INDALECIO was a gauge to see exactly what you guys know. I don't want to leave out tons of interesting clues and whatnot simply because "I don't think you know anything about game X." So we took an hour of our time to figure out exactly what it is you guys know about JRPGs. Jason's packet actually covered a bit more of canonical topics whereas mine went deep into areas not explored by you and your editing crew at ACFNATIONALS. I think this is a perfectly valid approach to seeing what the field's (at least the top half of the field's) limits are. To that end, I gave you very few easy parts on the bonuses. Given that LIMITLESS INDALECIO was pretty much designed to be read to the "top 1% of 1%" of JRPG question players, I wanted to see how far their knowledge stretched and for the most part, even though bonuses were converted at a rather middling 12.5 ppb (my goal for a room of 8 was 15-16 ppb and we had 5 players), people seemed to just not be able to pull a few ppb worth of things. Several answers were very close to what I wanted and people just couldn't remember the names of some things. Great! So at least I know that people know of these things, even though they couldn't convert them. What does that mean? It means that I can probably clue at least some stuff from those games at CULEX (say, in common links) and have them converted at a relatively high rate! I'm not leaving out interesting clues from JRPGs because they are "not Pokemon" or whatever the fuck. People know other things. They do! I have proof!Ike wrote: Good vanity packets are hard to do well: you have to make it challenging to the audience, and you have to make it accessible. I think the majority of vanity packets I have played has had errors in one or both of these categories.
Ike wrote:Let's talk first about making it accessible. I think vanity packets are much more interesting if the giveaways are accessible. For my James Bond packet of 15 tossups or so, here were my answers:
Motorcycles, New York City, hotels or motels, (sniper) rifle, Japan, Valentin Zukovsky, License to Kill, Wint and Kidd, Rosa Klebb’s shoe,. James Bond being tortured in Casino Royale, policemen or sheriff, Elliot Carver, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and the fight scene in New Delhi or the fight scene in India
Huzzah, a good writing style that I've always meant to emulate at CULEX, but this time with truly canonical content and not random clues from obscure AKSYS games, Mana Khemia XXVI: Legend of the Tootsie Pop, or various other games featuring anime characters with green or purple hair and overly emphasized breasts who sing to damage their opponents.Ike wrote:If you'll notice, around 60% of the answers are on easy things with real giveaways. If you have only seen the Bond movies once, you can probably get 90% of these answers by the end. That was done on purpose, and people writing vanity packets should be doing it more and make it feel less circle-jerky.
Ike wrote:For ACFNATIONALS, a JRPG tournament, I knew that Rob Carson, Tejas Raje, and Dylan Minarik were probably the better players of the field, - I didn't think they have encyclopedic knowledge of JRPGs - no one does*
I amped up the difficulty of this packet in rather significant ways and after I changed the ruling on something I should have prompted him on, Jason went 5/5/1 on the packet and 6/2/0/1 or something on the easier twelve-question set, even getting the hardest question based on the name of an item he picked up their after a random fight. In a world that is huge. So yeah um no, YOUR ARE WRONG. I wrote LIMITLESS INDALECIO with the data I got from ACFNATIONALS in mind! I wanted to test peoples' limits. Whose limits was I testing? Precisely those players you mentioned! It turns out that hard questions are hard. Again, the packet was pretty much announced as a data-collecting exercise and it served its purpose incredibly effectively. When combined with CULEXsurvey and the right choice of second writer, this information will give me everything I need to turn CULEX into one of the best side events you will ever play. Why is it that you think you can write a set of questions under certain assumptions but I cannot experiment after I have even more data than you? My packet was announced late in the game but I knew a lot of players from ACFNATIONALS were going to HSNCT. So I had an opportunity to test their skills. I did! It worked, dude. You don't believe me? Wait until you listen to CULEX. You will be in heaven, or the farplane, or wherever.
i like how you managed to not mention me in the list of people you thought you would be the best at the tournament even though i accomplished this feat by the age of 9Ike wrote: each one of them may probably only have beaten 20-30 RPGs that are longer than 40 hours
no fuck you lol the tossups on characters actually played well, almost all of them getting extremely solid buzzes. In actuality, of the seven tossups that went dead, three of them were the things on SEGA games. To be fair, I was a bit of a dick with a couple of these. I guess I'll take a moment to apologize for writing tossup 0 and then mislabeling it as tossup 1, but I mean fuck tossup 0.Ike wrote:So I wrote the tournament from there. If you’re assuming that people can name a single character from Shin Megami Tensei II, or Ar tonelico III: The Girl's Song that Pulls the Trigger of World's Demise, fuck you!
As will CULEX, dude. There won't be any tossups on the inside-jokey Charles Barkley JRPG in my tournament, Mr. Accessibility McAccessibilitypants.Ike wrote:One thing that shocked me about ACFNATIONALS was that 35(!) people showed up for it. I think that’s partly because it was well advertised, but also because the tournament was designed to be accessible.
JRPGs are such a damn niche category that it's hard to know exactly what that is without, say, testing their limits! Oh wait, that's exactly what LIMITLESS INDALECIO was designed to do! Also, CULEXsurvey will give me an idea of what people know as well. Pretty nifty! Making overreaching assumptions on "what people know" makes you think weird things, such as your favorite strategy RPG series is more accessible than it is. Again, your favorite quizbowlers like to play games from that series, but that alone does not imply that they are more canonical than another game. For instance, at the main site, a question you probably 30ed (you know which one) was 30ed at the main site. This was taken solely from two extremely expensive strategy RPGs in said series. Meanwhile, I write a tossup basically testing to see whether or not anyone has played a game from another series, which was prominent in North America WAY before games from your favorite series were ever known in North America, and no one can convert it. (One of these games even appears on several "greatest RPGs of all-time lists!") Nintendo bias there, anyone? In fact, I think your favorite series' accessibility is directly proportional to how strong a character's tipper was in a certain fighting game not to be named. Before his appearance in that game, the series I tossed up twice was far more prominent in North America than yours. Okay, people don't play SEGA RPGs. I mean, judging by your content at ACFNATIONALS, I thought some of you did. So yeah. I tossed up a couple of them, one of which was accessible and the other which was, admittedly, difficult due to poor sales numbers near the end of the life of a poorly selling console. Okay. But I included 23 tossups in a packet that was advertised to be hard, so I fail to see the problem.Ike wrote: Now let's talk about making vanity packets challenging. I think it would be wise for more vanity packet authors to consider the knowledge base of their audience.
Mine included locales, people, events, films, languages, and all sorts of haberdashery. I chose to ask it in a different way because ***my intended audience was smaller than your intended audience, and that prompted me to write the questions differently!*** For CULEX, my intended audience will be extended! Oh and by the way, several people I wouldn't really expect to PM me to acquire this packet have done so and are interested in the content, so yeah let's make all JRPG question content only Pokemon-based.Ike wrote:For example, my Bond packet clued from the movies, games and books.
Fair point, and everyone should listen to this sound advice. For the record, my writing philosophy for CULEX won't be very different than this and never was going to be. There is room for challenging INDALECIO-type questions (the easier ones) but there certainly won't be an overwhelming amount of them.Ike wrote: I also wanted to find upper middle clues that were distinguishing, in my mind, reaching deeper and deeper into the Bond films isn’t really testing more knowledge. I think a lot of the packets that I have played don't adhere to this, and it's stupid.
Trust me, Jason was really sad when he powered four out of five questions. He was practically crying. Even with the question difficulties, eight questions were powered out of 23 with only five competitors. I hope you'll give me your data soon so I can see if you powered what I think you powered so we can add to the total of things that were powered by the top few people (aka the intended audience). I think you powered question 23, at the very least. At least you better have, I wrote it with you in mind. :)Ike wrote:One more thing about vanity packets and what people know. They are designed to bring a smile to people’s faces.
A good point! Listen to this, everyone.Ike wrote:Some of my favorite buzzes of all time include Mike Cheyne’s first clue buzz on Wint and Kidd, or Benji Nguyen’s first clue buzz on Friedrich Nietzsche in JRPGs; if you know about Final Fantasy X, the tossup on Shoopuffs was designed to bring a smile on your face (and it did!) Point is: the reason why vanity packets exist is that you can get what Billy Busse has called a “satisfying buzz” out of them. Writing your tossups in such a way so that there are no satisfying buzzpoints is one of the hallmarks of shitty (vanity) writing. So for example, a shitty tossup on say the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies might leadin with "The first commercial for this film shows X." Seriously, no one fucking cares unless it's otherwise memorable!
On the other hand, you can't remember these things unless you have actually played the games. I cannot reiterate enough that 19 of the 35 questions I asked on Saturday night were powered. Obviously something was pretty memorable about those! I clued great memorable things from games - unfortunately for those of you who haven't played those games just yet, you're missing out on lots of memorable things! Maybe you should play some of those games you haven't played yet? At some point? Instead of, you know, just playing Pokemon and Final Fantasy? I would be happy to recommend some games to you. I've played a lot more of them than you have, more than likely.