Directing bonus answers in Discord tournaments

[LeoLaw]

I am happy that we got to play bonus questions for the Workshop mirror on Saturday, specially because of the strict policy of giving an answer within 5 seconds which sped up the tournament by a lot. But there were confusions about directing answers in bonuses that I've observed.

In real life tournaments, it is pretty easy to tell which answers are directed or not, usually one person on the team looks at the moderator and gives the answer with somewhat high volume. This dimension is obviously lost in Discord tournaments. In my Discord tournament experiences in the past, the solutions to this problem includes typing the answers in all cap, typing "^^" after someone else gave an answer, or just the moderator asking for an answer. The first two aforementioned solutions works pretty work in my experience, though I do think that standardizing what is acceptable as a directed answer in the chat would be very helpful to both the moderator and the players.

The bigger problem for me is when voice is used to give an answer. The quality of voice transmission is a function of the mic and the internet speed for the mod and the players. The voices of the different players on the same team also interfere with each other to decrease the voice quality sometime. In my experience, the mod often have to ask the players to give an answer again due to the two problems mentioned above. Sometimes in moments of indecision between two possible answers, the player first gave answer A, then when asked again which answer it was they gave answer B instead. I am not sure how to prevent these kinds of things from happening (or how bad of a problem it is).

Overall, the Discord experience is still a positive to me specially when there are no alternatives. But I think it can be refined via conversation on specific matters like this one.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

This is a good topic to start a conversation about. I've always been of the opinion that due to the persistence of technical issues in discord tournaments, typing being slower than speaking, etc., something more along the lines of 7 seconds per part should be given to players. While this may slow a tournament down a bit, I think it makes it more comparable to IRL quizbowl where there is some amount of time to actually remember an answer, whereas online quizbowl often feels to me like if you don't know the answer immediately you aren't going to get the bonus part in a strict 5 seconds due to the factors I mentioned.

To answer the actual question you posed, I think typing an answer in all caps works best to direct it if only text is being used. That being said, I don't think a mod needs to take the time to ask for a directed answer if 3 players on a team have all typed out the correct response to the easy part.

[A Lust-Fanned Dairy Tale]

When I was moderating WORKSHOP Online, both open and closed, I requested that players confer in voice if they were able and then type their answers (or if they were conferring in chat, to say "DIRECTED: [answer]" or write it in all-caps. Some of them did, some of them were voice-chatting in another call and said anything in the chat was directed, and others capitalized or used carats for their directed answers. It seemed to me to be ad-hoc overall, even though everyone caught on eventually, but I think this is a valuable discussion to be having.

[Mike Bentley]

I personally find the caret to be the best option when conferring via text. It saves you from having to type the answer again and avoids accidental giving of an answer for something that is naturally capitalized (like when someone types "PA" to mean "Pennsylvania").

With vocal conferring it's easiest to say something like "blah blah directed."

I'm also of the school that moderators in online tournament should generally just take a correct answer if they see it. And that they should not give people a lot of extra time to come up with a second answer if their initial one isn't correct.

[whatamidoinghere]

I've modded for a couple online tournaments in the past and for the most part I said either bolding, carat, or all caps worked. I feel like mods in general are able to figure out which answers are directed and which aren't, but this is just my two cents on what would work for directing answers. I think the a big thing with conferring online is that text-based conferring is inherently harder than voice-based conferring. Being strict on time and making sure directing bonus answers is standardized would help speed discord tournaments in my opinion.