I am not very happy about this tournament. I've talked about this some in the private discussion forum and on the Discord, but after hearing more from people involved in it, I think this needs to be said publicly. Here's a list of the editors for this tournament:
1992 in spaceflight wrote:Editing Breakdown:
Myself (Jacob O’Rourke): American history, American literature
Isaac Thiessen: History, Auditory Fine Arts, Other Fine Arts
Jakob Myers: History, Geography
Rein Otsason: Science
Joe Su: Assisting Rein with Science, assisting Isaac with Auditory Fine Arts
Harris Bunker: Social Science, Philosophy, Current Events
Derek So: Literature, Visual Fine Arts
From everything I have seen and heard, and from the evidence of the set, the only ones of these people who actually understand the concept of a deadline are Jakob, Joe, and Derek. Their categories were fully written several days in advance, giving them time to proofread and playtest them, and resulting in those categories being mostly very well executed. The rest of the set was... not. At the MSU site, we only had five packets at the start of the day. Thankfully, a) it was a round-robin so the order of rounds didn't matter, and b) Briana, the TD, is very good at her job. If either of those things (in particular the first) were false, the tournament could have been significantly delayed. Seriously, it is absurd that
at lunch multiple packets had still not been received -- including the packet written by at least one team (ours) who was playing on that day. If Briana had used a prelim-bracket system with no playoff byes, under the understandable assumption that all the packets would be available to her and she could freely choose the order in which they were used, we might not have been able to finish prelims before 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
Furthermore, the fact that certain people didn't get their shit done on time led to the quality of the set being markedly lower for those of us who played it on the first weekend. According to the editors, at least one sub-category of science was "basically guerilla", which led to a number of issues with sparse answerlines, bizarre bonus difficulties, etc. These problems were also present in numerous other categories to varying degrees, and the bonus variability in particular was markedly unfun. The questions for the finals packet were literally being written
as the finals were being played. The "other academic" distribution skewed very heavily (as in, far more than advertised) towards geo (which I enjoyed personally, but was probably not fun to people who don't like geo), because Jakob actually wrote stuff, and whoever was in charge of the CE didn't.
I understand that a number of the people editing this tournament are new to editing college tournaments, and I am very grateful that new people stepped up and made a tournament happen. I hope that they learn from their mistakes and build on their successes, and that they go on to edit many more tournaments. However, it seems to me that most of the issues with this tournament were not due to inexperience or lack of knowledge (with the lit being the exception -- Derek apparently met his deadlines and incorporated feedback, and if it wasn't perfect then oh well, everyone has a first time), but rather due to people not meeting deadlines that they committed to. It does not require extensive quizbowl experience to know that if a tournament is being played at 9AM on Saturday, all the questions should, at a minimum, be written by 8:30AM on Saturday. I know this isn't a super comparable situation, but I didn't even
announce Math Monstrosity until the set was entirely written, because I was conscious of the fact that, as a new writer, I didn't want to be the guy who couldn't finish his tournament on time and disappoint a bunch of other people. Math Monstrosity certainly had its flaws, but being rushed was not one of them.
This is not even to mention the fact that Isaac Thiessen, who was apparently supposed to do a chunk of history and all the non-visual art, edited one (!) religion question, and per people on the Discord, was not working on this tournament on Friday because he was playing Reach for the Top instead. There are two things wrong with this:
1) Agreeing to sign up for a tournament and then not doing it is a really shitty thing to do. Especially since he didn't let the other editors know, apparently -- they just had to progressively assign themselves his questions as he failed to do them.
2) This is especially shitty because he was doing other quizbowl-related things instead.
This in particular deserves special derision, I think. If I'm the editor of a tournament, I'm probably not going to want to work with Isaac, since the evidence shows that he won't do anything, won't tell me this, and will then go play shitty Canadian chipbowl while we all frantically finish the tournament.
1992 in spaceflight wrote:We’ll all be helping any other categories not specifically listed here, such as trash.
And religion, and myth. Like, who thought it was a good idea to take 3/3 of the distribution and just decide it would be "collaborative"? That's only going to work if everyone finishes the stuff specifically assigned to them first, which is understandable, since people want to get their responsibilities done first, and even then having 3/3 get written in a hurry after everything else would be stressful at best, and negatively impact the set in a big way at worst (hint: the second -- there were a couple bonuses in this category which would have been easy at Fall, and other issues to boot). This was... a pretty big oversight (although maybe it's reasonable to have assumed this would work and I'm just a cynic, but I don't think so).
In summary: I am not happy that, as a result of playing this tournament this weekend, I'm going to have played a significantly worse version of the set than other people. I'm aggrieved that our club paid full price for what was essentially a preliminary playtest mirror. I feel sorry for Jakob, who -- despite having his categories done well in advance! -- had to spend the day at MSU apologizing to everyone for the set's numerous problems. I don't know what I want or expect to happen going forward, but I think this needed to be said.