The exact format of the tournament will be decided by a poll. For context, this was MARCATo’s format:
(Additionally, if a team negs, then the other team gets the tossup if either player’s answer is correct. This way of handling negs was voted on via poll during the initial MARCATo mirror, and we intend to follow suit.)ThisIsMyUsername wrote: ↑Wed May 27, 2020 12:54 am The basic format of the tournament is as follows: Rounds are spread over multiple days, one round per day. On each game day, each two-person team is paired with an opposing team. Each player is sent a link to the 20 tossups for that round. Each tossup is constructed as it would be in Imaginary Landscape: one minute of (usually) six clips, arranged in pyramidal order. The playing mechanics are much as they are on Qblitz and Buzzword: the question is "read" to each player alone, they buzz, type in an answer, and the computer records where they buzzed and what answer they gave. The earliest buzz from each team counts as that team's buzz on the question. If both teams give the correct answer, only the earlier correct buzz earns points. Tossups are worth 10, and negs are worth -5. The higher-scoring team in each head-to-head is the wins that game.
Noah Prince from Qblitz has pointed out to me and my cowriters that Qblitz has the capacity to handle certain kinds of tournament formats that would not be possible in real life. For example, the second mirror of MARCATo used the first round to seed the teams into brackets by simulating a full round robin with all teams. Tournaments could, through this mechanism, play round robins within brackets in a single round. This, however, de-emphasizes (or, perhaps, renders inert) the ability to strategize while playing against a particular team with particular known strengths, which one could do effectively by utilizing buzzing data available to you through Qblitz.
Option B is more interesting. If option B wins, we will write twelve 20-tossup packets and run one tournament off of the first 6 packets, with each round being played on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule for two weeks. We will run another tournament at least a month afterwards on the second 6 packets that we write on the same format: during that month, we plan to adjust question difficulty by rewriting questions and answerlines. We will, again, mirror either of these tournaments that we run again if interest remains.
If neither option A nor B seem satisfying to the field, we will run additional polls. People who strongly prefer a format other than A or B can include a description of their preferred format in the poll at the end of this post under the “Other…” option.
The above information is no longer up-to-date. See the latest post in this thread for information about how to register and vote on the final format of the tournament.
The entry fee per player (per tournament/mirror) will be $15, with a portion being donated to COVID relief charities. The distribution entirely consists of popular music genres. The average difficulty of the tournament is also intended to be somewhat easier than that of MARCATo - the range of expected difficulty will be college nats to open level questions. The tentative distribution is as follows (questions will primarily be within one genre and era, but license will be given to include cross-genre clues where need be):
2 pop music from 1950-1989
2 pop music from 1990-2020
1 soul, blues, pre-1960 rock
1 country, folk
2 jazz / Great American Songbook
1 electronic music / electronica / house music
3.5 rap, hip-hop, and R&B
1.5 rock from 1960-1979
1.5 rock from 1980-1999
1.5 rock from 2000-2020
3 extra or misc. tossups - these can span across genres and eras
(A special note here that the rock distribution will include metal music, and the extra/misc. distribution will include multimedia questions.)