Geoword

[thedoge]

Starting next week, the QBReader website will have a new functionality called Geoword. Similar to Beterword, Geoword is an online, single-person event in which a player may test their skills on a packet of original tossups. A free-to-play sample is available on the website linked here.

New packets will be available to play every other week on Saturday and close the following Saturday, with each biweekly game called an "opus." Each opus will be divided into three divisions based on difficulty: High School, Division II, and Division I. These roughly correspond to high school regs-plus difficulty, ICT Division II difficulty, and ICT Division I difficulty. Note that questions in an opus may be upconverted or downconverted from other packets in the same opus. For the sample, you are free to play any and all of the three divisions' packets; however, in the future, you will only be able to choose one of the three divisions to play per opus. You will be allowed to switch divisions in between opuses, though.

Packets will consist of 22 tossups each with the following distribution. This distribution will remain the same across all divisions:

4 History:
1 American History
1 European History
1 World History
1 Ancient/Other History

4 Science:
1 Biology
1 Chemistry
1 Physics
1 Other Science

4 Literature:
1 American Literature
1 British/Commonwealth Literature
1 European Literature
1 World Literature

3 Fine Arts:
1 Visual Fine Arts
1 Auditory Fine Arts
1 Other Fine Arts

4 RMPSS:
1 Religion
1 Mythology
1 Philosophy
1 Social Science

3 Other:
2 Geography/Current Events/Other Academic
1 Pop Culture

Opus 1 will be released on June 24, 2023. We hope you enjoy the sample and future weeks of Geoword!

[Adventure Temple Trail]

What is the writing/editing team for this event?

[Serpentine284]

I will be the "head" editor for these questions. Writers at the moment include Aum Mundhe (Ridgewood), Richard Niu (Cornell), Forrest Weintraub (Columbia), Andrew Zeng (Stanford), and Nathan Zhang (Cornell); however, we may add more writers if necessary.

[Serpentine284]

A couple of quick announcements. First, I forgot to mention this in the original post, but games beyond the sample will cost $2 per opus for now; however, we may change this price in the weeks to come. Second, I am proud to announce that Jason Hong (Brown) has joined our entourage of writers!

[Mike Bentley]

Cool to see this start up. After having played the D1 sample, I do wonder if you all want to tone down the difficulty a little bit. For a format where you're asking people to individually answer all questions, it's going to feel harder than playing as a team. And even as written, it looks like the top players aren't converting a pretty significant number of questions.

Also, the sample round doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Works on other browsers though.

[ryanrosenberg]

Cool to see this start up. After having played the D1 sample, I do wonder if you all want to tone down the difficulty a little bit. For a format where you're asking people to individually answer all questions, it's going to feel harder than playing as a team. And even as written, it looks like the top players aren't converting a pretty significant number of questions.

Also, the sample round doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Works on other browsers though.

I'd be strongly opposed to toning down the difficulty, there are a lot of other outlets to answer questions less difficult than college nationals.

[Mike Bentley]

Cool to see this start up. After having played the D1 sample, I do wonder if you all want to tone down the difficulty a little bit. For a format where you're asking people to individually answer all questions, it's going to feel harder than playing as a team. And even as written, it looks like the top players aren't converting a pretty significant number of questions.

Also, the sample round doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Works on other browsers though.

I'd be strongly opposed to toning down the difficulty, there are a lot of other outlets to answer questions less difficult than college nationals.

I agree it's nice to have something harder than Buzzword but comparing the answer lines to some of this year's ACF Nationals this seems tougher on average. For a solo competition, if you're shooting for a certain difficulty it's probably better to come in a little below it rather than above. But in any event, I do plan on playing even if it does stay this hard.

[thedoge]

Also, the sample round doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Works on other browsers though.

Tested it on Firefox on a Mac and it worked for me—do you know what specifically didn’t work? (Was the audio not playing, or was something else not working, etc.)

[cemeterysummoning]

Also, the sample round doesn't seem to work on Firefox. Works on other browsers though.

Tested it on Firefox on a Mac and it worked for me—do you know what specifically didn’t work? (Was the audio not playing, or was something else not working, etc.)

It didn't work for me (Firefox on Linux); when it asks to confirm the level (e.g. "high school,") the button that should take you to the game page doesn't lead anywhere, and it leads you back to the level selection page.

However, it seems that once I start the game on another browser (I used Chromium) and then go back to Firefox, it lets me continue the game.

[thedoge]

I've fixed the bug causing the division selection not to work on Firefox. If anyone is curious (this may be of help for future web developers), this is effectively what I did: https://stackoverflow.com/a/70780452

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Strongly agree with Ryan. For D1, I think tougher answers in particular are a wise choice given the format. Beterword-style formats excessively reward conservative play, since you get at least 10 for waiting until the end, but nothing if you get it wrong anywhere; this is different from normal quizbowl, where you also get nothing if an opponent beats you to the buzz because you waited. With a number of harder answerlines, an average player's EV for waiting the whole tossup out is a good bit less than 10, and I think that's important to have in a stronger field.

[DavidB256]

Beterword-style formats excessively reward conservative play, since you get at least 10 for waiting until the end

Would be interesting to see a Beterword-style format that omits giveaways or has a wider range of point values than 10-20 in order to change this, and maybe reward specialists more.

[Serpentine284]

Opus 1’s release will be delayed until Monday, June 26. Apologies for the inconvenience.

[Serpentine284]

The first opus of Geoword will be released for play tomorrow, with play ending next Monday, July 3. We'll also be moving the price up to $2.50 due to taxes and fees. Thank you for your understanding!

[thedoge]

Opus 1 is officially out! Let me know if you have any issues, especially with payment (I won’t be able to get to anything until the evening).

[thedoge]

Venmo is now a payment option, if people prefer that.

[Serpentine284]

Opus 2 of Geoword is officially available to play! In addition, Opus 1 has now been closed. We have amended our closure policy as well; after an opus has closed, it will still be available to play, but your performance will not count on the leaderboard or player stats page.

[Kouign Amann]

Really enjoying this, especially the difficulty as mentioned above. Small criticism of the audio itself: I would love a little more attention to even pacing and careful enunciation, and perhaps it would benefit the readers to take some time in advance of recording to look over the packet for words that might trip them up.

[RexSueciae]

Enunciation is good. I would also note that I keep messing up when I'm prompted -- it would be really nice if the prompt would take the new answer and append it somehow to the old -- because I keep answering how I reflexively answer in quizbowl which isn't quite how Geoword works. But that's just me. I'm having fun thus far.

[Serpentine284]

Geoword Opus 3 is out now!

[Serpentine284]

A couple of quick announcements:

- Due to outside circumstances, we will be delaying the release of Opus 4 to next Saturday. We apologize for this inconvenience and hope that Opus 4's quality will be better for it.

- Due to lower interest, we will be removing the HS division for future opuses. To accommodate for the players originally participating in the HS division, the Division II difficulty will be lowered, roughly corresponding to a "high school nats-plus" difficulty. We hope that those who had been playing either the HS or DII division continue to play and find the questions interesting and rewarding.

[Serpentine284]

Opus 4 is out now! Reminder that there are only two divisions for this opus.

[Kouign Amann]

On Opus 4, I scored 20 points and was given a celerity of 1.000 for all correct buzzes before the end of the question. Didn't happen in any of the first three opera, nor—from a quick look at the non-round numbers on the leaderboard—did it happen to anyone else. Anyone have any idea what's up?

[thedoge]

That's very odd. What browser & operating system were you using? Maybe it's something with that.

[Kouign Amann]

Safari 14.1 on MacOS 11.3.1, it looks like.

[thedoge]

Unfortunately, I was unable to figure out what the cause of this bug was. However, I have used a new, more precise method of calculating celerity going forward that should hopefully prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future? (Also will cause everyone's celerity to be slightly better because it is more precise.)

[Serpentine284]

Opus 5 is now available to play!

[Serpentine284]

With Opus 6 coming out on Saturday, here are a few announcements about the future of Geoword:

- Opus 6 will be the last edition of standard Geoword in what we are calling the "first folio" (analogous to a season of Buzzword, for example). With the school year starting, Geoword will no longer be running standard, 22-question opera every two weeks. While a second folio is not confirmed yet, we hope to be able to bring you more standard Geoword next summer!

- Full statistics for the first folio will be released soon after the conclusion of Opus 6, including category statistics throughout the summer. The statistics will be available in the Geoword section of QBReader.

- While standard Geoword opera will not continue into the school year, we will be having an "off-season" of sorts, filled with non-standard themed events. Due to its nature, these events will not be run on the typical biweekly schedule that Geoword has traditionally been run on; however, we do hope to have at least one event per month ready for people to play. The first off-season event will be a packet entirely on the early 2010s sitcom Community, and will open on September 30 (sorry Chicago players, I already read the packet to you all). A rough schedule of the rest of these events will be posted soon.

We hope you liked this summer of Geoword, and good luck for the rest of the year!

[Serpentine284]

Opus 6 is now out! In addition, the new forums thread for the Geoword off-season is up and available here.

[thedoge]

Category stats leaderboards now exist for each opus! To access these, go to the stats page for an opus and click on the category stats link.