Winter Closed 2022 - General Set Discussion

[Kino Noir]

This thread is for general discussions of Winter Closed 2022. Discussions about specific questions belong in the other thread.

[tpmorrison]

Thanks so much to everyone who played Winter Closed!

There was some editorial shuffling during the production timeline, but Tejas Raje and I ended up as co-head editors, and the subject editors were:

Literature: Tim Morrison
History: Hari Parameswaran (US + Euro) and Tejas Raje (World + Other)
Science: Itamar Naveh-Benjamin (Biology), Jonathan Settle (Chem + Physics + most of Other Science), and Tim Morrison (Math)
Painting/Sculpture: Hari Parameswaran
Classical Music/Opera: Ethan Strombeck
Other Fine Arts: William Golden
Religion: Jon Suh (Judaism + Christianity) and Hasna Karim (all else)
Mythology: Annabelle Yang
Philosophy: Justine French
Social Science: Tim Morrison (Econ) and Hasna Karim (all else)
Geography + CE + Other Academic: Tejas Raje

In addition, the following writers contributed to the set: Jacob Egol, Ganon Evans, Natan Holtzman, Aseem Keyal, Rahul Keyal, Amogh Kulkarni, Chauncey Lo, Steven Liu, Douglas Meeker, and Kai Smith.

I’d particularly like to thank Rahul Keyal, who edited a great deal in the set’s early phases and continued to provide tons of useful insight across the set afterwards. He also wrote on the order of 100 questions, including dozens of awesome literature questions. I’d also like to thank Jon Settle for stepping up to write and edit most of the science on a fairly condensed schedule and for providing loads of great proofreading in the late stages.

Speaking of which, Ryan Rosenberg volunteered to proofread the set and gave tons of great suggestions that helped make the set a lot more polished for the playtest mirror.

Thanks as well to Aidan Leahy, who did a fantastic job as Logistics Coordinator (and playtest mirror TD) for this set.

Last but not least, thanks to Ophir Lifshitz for setting up his packets and statistics software for this set and for his all-around helpfulness in the final weeks of set production.

Feel free to post any comments about the set. The feedback so far has been quite helpful.

[Tejas]

I'd like to follow on from Tim and thank everyone who worked on the set. This set took longer than expected to come to fruition, but once we were able to get a great group of editors and writers together everything came together.

I want to give special thanks to Tim, who joined as head editor when set production was not going great and immediately managed to turn things around and get all of us collaborating to finish it up. Without his work there is no way we'd have this set completed and with high quality questions.

I want to thank all of the writers and editors who stuck with the project from the very beginning, especially Hari who wrote a huge amount of great questions in various categories.

I would also like to thank all of the writers and editors who joined the project later and did amazing work. Special thanks to Jonathen who not only wrote and edited much of the science, but also made tons of helpful suggestions as we finished up the set, and to Justine who gave a ton of feedback on questions.

Also thanks to Aidan for all of the logistics work and making sure the set gets played by as many people as possible. Thanks to Ophir for his software, which greatly helped us improve the set after the playtesting mirror.

Thanks to everyone for playing the set, please give any feedback on the set as a whole or on my questions/categories specifically.

[VSCOelasticity]

I'd like to echo Tim's and Tejas's praise for everyone who contributed to this set, whether that was by writing/editing, handling logistics, proofreading, or assisting with some other task. A quiz bowl set is a huge team effort, and it's great when it all comes together!

I'd like to shout out Amogh, Hari, Aseem, Steven, and Tim (and Ganon) for their contributions to the categories I edited. Thank you for taking the time to write questions. I appreciated every bit of help in making the Winter Closed science come together! In particular, I want to highlight Hari, for writing some crucial physics questions to help me meet deadlines when he had already written a large chunk of the history and visual arts, Aseem, for helping me finish chemistry, which I really need assistance with since it is not my strongest category, and Steven, for well executed questions with cool clues and helpful feedback during internal playtesting.

Hope everyone has enjoyed the set! As Tejas said, more feedback is welcome :)

[Gene Harrogate]

I read for this set at the Canadian mirror and I have a pretty high opinion of it. Medium parts were decently challenging (as you would expect for 3 dots) but it seemed like the editors kept the hard parts reined in across the board. The questions generally didn't feel stingy with powers. I wouldn't mind if this set became the rough standard for three dot difficulty in the future.

This tournament touched on a remarkably high amount of especially interesting topics. The clues for the literature questions felt like they were selected by people who genuinely enjoy reading books, which is a really nice vibe for a set. I'm not usually very interested in science but there were several questions that held my attention and made me want to learn more about the subject. Mythology, philosophy, and religion were also consistently engaging.

The social science in this set felt like it had the common SS problem where there were very few powers and most of the buzzes were from people figuring out the answerline at some point. I'd also be curious to see the distribution; my gut feeling is that hard psychology/neuroscience topics, as well as economics and linguistics, got top billing, to the detriment of other fields like political science and sociology.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

Whoever incorporated the large amount of US and non-US American Indian history/literature into this set did a great job of it. I'll likely have more comments later but wanted to say that first and foremost.

[Ehtna]

This set was fine. I think our team had about as much fun as we could for an online tournament.

I think my biggest issue with these questions was that they ended up feeling a bit too...interesting. It felt like we had a lot of instances playing where the questions were cluing things very obliquely or had weirdly difficult answer lines to figure out. It seemed like a decent number of categories and answerlines were written for the sake of being unique, with playability concerns coming second. Stuff like the tossups on chromatograph peaks, "religious" experiences, Polynesian navigation, "strategies" in game theory, etc. got really old after a while, especially when it was clear that a lot of these questions could be converted into a more conventional answerline and would have played much better. I understand the joy behind writing commonlinks in tossups (I tend to fall victim to it too), and maybe it was the online playing that was getting to us after a long day, but our team's takeaway at the end of the day was that this set was trying too hard to be cute. There's a specific question that we took a lot of issue with, but I'll reserve my posting for the specific question discussion thread.

But overall, thank you to the writers and editors (and staffers today) for making this tournament happen. I appreciate y'all's work!