The Quizbowl Resource Center

The editors and writers of CALISTO will run a Discord online mirror on May 16. This is a closed, general mirror: only teams of players in high school or below, all from the same school, are eligible. Any teams, regardless of region, that have not already played the set are welcome to register.

We will have a Competitive and a Standard division. The Competitive division will be open to all teams; Standard will be open only to teams ranked outside the top 100 on the most recent Groger Ranks, or, subject to my discretion, teams ranked in the top 100 which are at substantially weaker strength than a full team. I retain the right to ask Standard teams to play in Competitive.

The fee to play will be $45. Payment must be through Venmo or PayPal. (You should cover any applicable fees if paying by PayPal.)

The tournament will start at 8 AM Pacific to accomodate staff in the correct time zone.

We will have initial field caps of 12 UPDATED: 16 teams for each division; we may increase or redistribute field caps based on interest.

Policy on cheating: don't do it! We will kick you out of the tournament, and then publicly shame and ridicule you.

I will direct the tournament. To register, please email me at ajgray at ucsd dot edu from your team's contact email with how many teams you want to send and their divisions (you can give rosters now or later). Please also give the Discord username of a contact and indicate how you will pay - include a Venmo handle if using Venmo. Teams are not registered until I confirm. You can see registered teams on this spreadsheet. (read-only, register by emailing me)

We also welcome outside staffers, and will pay $20 to full-day moderators and $10 to scorekeepers UPDATED: all full-day staff. Email me to sign up to staff.

Do we have a rough idea yet of how many packets will be played? Will it be TU-only, or TU+bonus? If TU+bonus, how much time will be given on bonuses?

Will answers be given via voice or text?

Woody wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 3:10 pm Do we have a rough idea yet of how many packets will be played? Will it be TU-only, or TU+bonus? If TU+bonus, how much time will be given on bonuses?

Will answers be given via voice or text?

We plan to have 10ish rounds of tossups and bonuses. It's a month out and we're still considering policy on technical details, but the current plan is for 5/5/5 timing and to recommend (but not require) answering and conferring over Discord voice chat.

Arras Agility wrote: ↑Thu Apr 16, 2020 4:00 am

Woody wrote: ↑Wed Apr 15, 2020 3:10 pm Do we have a rough idea yet of how many packets will be played? Will it be TU-only, or TU+bonus? If TU+bonus, how much time will be given on bonuses?

Will answers be given via voice or text?

We plan to have 10ish rounds of tossups and bonuses. It's a month out and we're still considering policy on technical details, but the current plan is for 5/5/5 timing and to recommend (but not require) answering and conferring over Discord voice chat.

For what it's worth, when we've been doing practices w/TU+Bonus, enforcing a 5 second rule on bonuses would lead to a significantly lower than usual conversion rate. w/varying degrees of latency/lag, 5 seconds seems to be significantly different via Discord than it would be in-person.

Additionally, 5 seconds from buzz on a TU would work w/audio answer responses, but may be a little tricky to enforce for text responses, especially given that the moderator may be experiencing their own latency/lag issues and the answer could have been sent prior to the expiration of the 5 seconds.

I'm not vehemently opposed to 5/5/5, and obviously it affects both teams (relatively) equally during a match, but just trying to bring up what I expect to be some of the pain points (not having done an online tournament like this before) before they happen.

Also, I assume coaches will be allowed to spectate matches but will need to have their microphones muted?

Field update: the field caps for both divisions have been expanded to 16 teams each. Keep those registrations coming!

Woody wrote: ↑Fri Apr 17, 2020 10:59 am Also, I assume coaches will be allowed to spectate matches but will need to have their microphones muted?

Yes.

Registered teams and staff have been sent a logistics email. Also, I still welcome more staff; all staff will be paid $20 for a full day.

This happened! Thanks to all the staff and players who contributed to the smooth running of one of the largest Discord tournaments ever.

Stats are available on the database. In Competitive, Georgetown Day A defeated "Akbar and the Boys" 510 - 260 to win the division, while Detroit Country Day B won Standard over Choate Pembroke by a score of 375 - 330.

CALISTO is now clear, and can be discussed anywhere; if you'd like feedback to go directly to the writing and editing team, feel free to post in the private discussion group, message the discussion Discord, or get in private contact with any of us.

I'd also like to note here for posterity some of the novel ideas that were implemented in running this tournament, especially as the community is still experimenting with the best format for online tournaments.

Rather than the conventional model of having a separate text channel or text-voice channel pair for each combination of round and room, I elected to have one text channel and one voice channel per room. Each team was assigned roles according to the schedule (e.g. A1, B2, etc.) and permissions for accessing each room were given to and removed from those roles as the tournament progressed. That is, after each round each moderator would remove permissions to access their room from the two teams that just played and would add to each team permissions to view their next room. We had a Discord bot written by Karan to automate this - staff only had to input one command to move each team.

Pros of this approach included that it was just generally cleaner, that it was simpler than the conventional model for teams, who at any time only had access to one room (all rooms teams didn't have access to were invisible to them), that moderators didn't have to move as much, that it more intuitively matches how rooms are used in physical tournaments, that it involved much less manual setup (repetitive and prone to error) of permissions before the tournament, and that it was easier to adapt to a different schedule, if the need was there. There are a few drawbacks - the largest of these is that humans doing things are never going to be 100% reliable, and occasionally mods mistyped commands, which caused (easily fixable but existent) permissions errors. This could possibly be fixed in the future by delegating more to the bot, i.e. storing the schedule in the bot so that moderators would only have to signal for the ends of rounds. Also, there were a few situations where teams were not removed from channels when their permissions were removed, but I believe there are also technological situations to that. Overall, if I were running another large online tournament with a similarly Discord-comfortable set of staffers, I would use this system again.

This tournament was a lot of fun! I think the only hiccup was that some staff weren't familiar with how to manually disconnect someone from a voice channel, so there were a few times we had to wait around until someone whose roles had been revoked actually left. (sidenote: I think it's possible to give a bot permissions to disconnect people from a text/voice channel, so that might be a future improvement that Karan could make to his already excellent bot)

EDIT: I also have to say, this tournament had some legitimately excellent computer science questions, and the rest of quiz bowl should take note of how they were written.