Is ancient a bit cramped?
It is a bit difficult to delineate between what counts as "ancient" vs "late antiquity" for some questions but in a few sets I've worked on, even having roughly 0.67/0.67 ancient feels quite cramped:
- there's a general expectation for a certain amount of Greco-Roman content in the set which seems to be what people know the best, and you need to cover a range within it rather than just the classical periods every time
- to not give Egypt/Ancient Near East content ridiculously short shrift relative to importance/how much there is to ask about, you really have to set aside a fair bit more space than like 1 question a tournament (I'd argue 2/2 isn't too much)
- ancient world content (interestingly recent sets seem to have gone quite heavy on Americas)
- archaeology-focused questions, which sometimes have a tendency to play like geography in disguise if made too extracanonical for the difficulty as it is very easy to make them too hard
Early medieval
In my experience when sets have 1/1 of each of European, World, US, and Ancient/Other History it often leads to skipping over late antiquity/early medieval periods (especially 600-1000, but also c.300-600 to some extent) unless a lot of care is taken, especially since people tend to gravitate towards writing classics for ancient, world often skews very 19th-20th century, and there's so much late medieval and Renaissance/early modern-onwards European content that comes up that it is easy to miss early medieval altogether.
I'm not trying to say early medieval needs to come up disproportionately more than it does now, rather that it's important that people don't hear (almost) zero questions on it when playing a tournament, and that it should probably therefore be blocked out in the distro. I'm aware that for a lot of this there are fewer contemporary written sources but maybe this just demands a slightly different approach to writing rather than merely a neglect of the category. The two COOTs I've worked on have had a "pre-1100" and "pre-1000" category which groups in early medieval with ancient but it seems arguable either way that space for early medieval could equally be grouped in with High/Late Middle Ages and might be more thematically consistent there.
So, some questions I'd like input on:
- How good a job do you think the standard 0.5/0.5+ ancient history per 20/20 packet does at covering a range of content (i.e. "the canon", plus a good number of things that need to come up more)? Would it feel terribly egregious if this were increased a bit?
- Do we need to explicitly make room for slightly more early medieval, and if so does it make more sense for this to be at the expense of ancient, or at the expense of later medieval? This fundamentally involves a very small number of questions in a set, but seems worth keeping track of to avoid certain periods coming up zero times.
- I've seen a few sets (like some NASATs) have very wide-ranging "medieval" categories such as a subcategory of European History that goes from 476-1492, which intuitively feels like a bit much to fit into 1/1 to me (but is possibly okay for sets with significantly more than 13 packets); is there much argument to be made for taking such a broad approach to one temporal category?