I'm looking to make this set available for any weekend in October that doesn't have something scheduled in your region.
Matt Weiner wrote:So, I'm willing to provide a just a regular old tournament to fill one of those dates--consider it the successor to last year's Titanomachy, or to the fall-scheduled Terrapin from 2005 and earlier that Titanomachy originally replaced. Is this more interesting to more people than a novice tournament?
Matt Weiner wrote:So, I'm willing to provide a just a regular old tournament to fill one of those dates--consider it the successor to last year's Titanomachy, or to the fall-scheduled Terrapin from 2005 and earlier that Titanomachy originally replaced. Is this more interesting to more people than a novice tournament?
Parson Smirk wrote:Also, no team in the Carolinas, Georgia, or Virginia are hosting an EFT mirror, so unless I'm missing something, the plethora of novice tournaments everyone's complaining about doesn't seem to hold true for the newish teams in that region.
The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:Wake forest is hosting a mirror. I'm going to recommend to all sites that they hand out D2 and UG awards; this is probably the only logistically feasible way to give EFT a "novice" feel, without actually splitting the divisions (which any site is more than welcome to do as well).
No Rules Westbrook wrote: They'll just be confused as to why all their sucky questions weren't used, and shrug it off, and go play intramural broomball.
Moreover, I think the notion of a novice submission tourney is pointless - novices can't write. The tournament will end up sucking or being written entirely by the editor, and novices will learn nothing from their writing experience because they're not yet at a point where they can learn anything. They'll just be confused as to why all their sucky questions weren't used, and shrug it off, and go play intramural broomball.
I'm pretty sure I disagree with this mentality. I think making novices write is something very worthwhile, not because their novice level writing will be great, but because they get used to writing, researching, and learning from that. Even though the tournament will end up probably being significantly rewritten by the editor, it's still a very positive thing that the novices wrote anything in the first place, and while plenty of them will either be confused or won't care when their questions are changed a lot, some of them will want know what went wrong out of a desire to improve, and if we can help get those players to a higher level with this situation, that's a great gain for the community.
cvdwightw wrote:That said, I could see a reasonable "novice circuit" develop that allows new players to get experience on easier questions. EFT in September/October, ACF Fall in November, NAQT D2 Sectionals in February, MCMNT in March. If we make the Summer Novice Tournament an annual event, that's five, and I think there's a reasonable argument to be made to add a sixth - the question being whether it makes more sense to put it in fall or spring. If it's packet-submission, I'd do it in spring. Like Ryan said, we can't expect novices to start writing halfway decent questions immediately. But the thing is, after a few tournaments under their belt, they'll start to get some intuitive idea of what makes a good question, and they'll at least try to emulate those tournaments. This not only makes the editor's job easier, but it also makes the feedback that much more meaningful.
I think that both Illinois and Minnesota Opens are striving for a difficulty between Regionals and Nationals level (like Cardinal Classic or Sun 'n' Fun have recently achieved), which I guess I would classify as "above regular" and therefore "hard." I don't think anyone's claiming that these events are going to rival summer Opens or ACF Nationals, but it seems perfectly reasonable to call fall semester events that exceed Regionals difficulty "hard."
No Rules Westbrook wrote:Well, there's plenty of tough language and ad hominem attack in that post, but none of it goes anywhere towards showing that you're right and I'm wrong. I'm well aware that your ideological program is to zealously proselytize the game to the third word, by any means necessary. It doesn't mean that I agree with all of the methods to achieve that goal.
My premise is that people have taken sets like Titanomachy and Penn Bowl to be "normal difficulty" or "regular difficulty" because a certain group (including yourself) keeps saying that's regular difficulty - not because there's some obvious pre-existing eternal definition of what that phrase means, which there obviously is not.
theMoMA wrote:I think it's important to add that that what we define as "regular difficulty" is actually based on what players know and what players want. It's not some kind of nefarious and nebulous invention of Matt Weiner's.
everyday847 wrote:I mean, that sounds like a reasonable definition way to construct a definition, except I'd want to see, like, actual percentages for that, then.
Matt Weiner wrote:everyday847 wrote:I mean, that sounds like a reasonable definition way to construct a definition, except I'd want to see, like, actual percentages for that, then.
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No Rules Westbrook wrote:[Regular difficulty is] a pernicious phrase because I think it's misleading - its meaning shifts according to the desires of whoever is using it...Andrew Hart puts forth a more empirical-type definition of the phrase, saying that it means difficulty where an acceptable percentage of people can get tossups at the end. Well, this suffers from the same type of misleading relativism that I'm talking about...I prefer some sort of fuzzy definition of difficulty that doesn't look at empirical stats (the Teitler approach, as I always call it), but uses the judgment of more experienced players on what's come up before and what is hard to know and what is easy to know and so on - I think that this approach is way more accurate in the long run.
theMoMA wrote:But those tournaments are clearly in a different category from ACF Fall/EFT, and also clearly in a different category than Nationals/ICT/CO. I don't think anyone is trying to claim that all "regular difficulty" tournaments are the same, just that they're the questions that are between stuff explicitly written for novices and the stuff explicitly written to decide national championships, and are therefore the questions that regular tournaments are run on.
theMoMA wrote:What I've been trying to advance this whole time is that it's up to the editors of a particular tournament to figure out what "regular difficulty" means to them. I don't think there's anything pernicious about using "regular difficulty" as an convenient term for things that are "harder than novice, but easier than nationals," as I do, and as Weiner does.
My real question is: When you say that a more accurate term for "regular difficulty" is "beginner difficulty," are you arguing that stuff that is between novice and nationals level is for beginners?
Matt Weiner wrote:Well, far be it from us to fall into the "trash trap" of aggressively proclaiming what is and is not fun and being suspicious of the motives of those who disagree. Some people like hard questions even if they aren't very good on them. I'm just saying that we need to go from experience about what the best way to keep questions rigorously real and competitive for good teams, without turning off everyone else, is. People can make mountaintop pronouncements about what you "should" know and about how something coming up before makes it easier, but in the real world we have to look at what has actually happened in the past and practice some solid induction to figure out what to do in the future, rather than relying on a priori masturbation.
The notion that Penn Bowl or Regionals are "beginners' difficulty" is just befuddling to me. Not necessarily because I don't think new players can answer and have the elusive "fun" on those questions--after all, the whole idea of keeping them at the difficulty they were in 2008 was largely so that could happen. Rather, I disagree with the implication that the questions provide no challenge or no legitimate competition for non-beginners.
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