General Discussion

[gyre and gimble]

Hey, thanks to everyone for playing/staffing ACF Fall this year! Also many thanks to my co-editors, Tanay Kothari, Ankit Aggarwal, Adam Silverman, Stephen Eltinge, Lloyd Sy, John Lawrence, and Andrew Hart for their hard work and excellent output; I thought I'd be very happy with the editing team I chose and I wasn't wrong.

I'll apologize in advance for the repeats in the set; there were more than the number I'd be comfortable with (and of course the ideal number of zero).

Discuss away!

[njsbling]

I greatly enjoyed playing this tournament; great job to the editors and packet writers. Overall people at the Berkeley mirror enjoyed the set (although one of our newer members mentioned to me that "the questions felt a lot harder than the ones from the [novice] tournament"). I felt like there was a large amount of film (trash and non-trash) compared to other tournaments (at least in the packets that we had). It seemed like the trash distribution was swayed heavily towards film (as opposed to sports or music).

[vinteuil]

I felt like the music in this tournament was often not really sensitive to the fact that composers often do the same things (e.g. Paganini Variations).

Also, titles in literature questions were often dropped very early.

[Cody]

I felt like the music in this tournament was often not really sensitive to the fact that composers often do the same things (e.g. Paganini Variations).

Bonus lead-ins don't have to be unique (though that one was). I don't recall any problems in that vein.

[Corry]

It seemed like the trash distribution was swayed heavily towards film (as opposed to sports or music).

I don't know about film or music, but I can attest to the lack of sports questions: out of the 8 games that Amherst played at the Northeast site, I only heard a single sports question (from Northmont's packet). Not that I personally feel distressed about this lack of sports. :P

Overall, I enjoyed the set. As for my own observations, it seems like the bonus difficulty this year was slightly easier than last year's ACF Fall. At least, that was the conclusion I reached from looking at nationwide stats for the tournament.

[t-bar]

To provide some numbers: from a quick scan of the answer spreadsheet, I see 3/3 film out of 17/17 "other arts." Over all 17 packets, the distribution of the 1/1 trash/CE was as follows:

Current events: 3/8 (32%)
Movies: 4/2 (18%; 26% of the trash)
Television: 4/1 (15%; 22%)
Music: 2/2 (12%; 17%)
Sports: 2/2 (12%; 17%)
Video games: 0/1 (3%; 4%)
Miscellaneous: 2/1 (9%; 13%) (counting "death of John Lennon" as miscellaneous since it had no substantial music clues)

Obviously, nobody heard all of the packets, so the questions that any individual team heard may have been more dramatically skewed than this, but this doesn't look like an unreasonable spread to me.

[pajaro bobo]

The only blatantly trash film tossups I remember hearing on the packets I played were on Wes Anderson, Napoleon Dynamite, and sharks. I assumed Woody Allen, France, and Vertigo were included in the arts category, though I could be mistaken (especially with Woody Allen).

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Why did these packets each have 3-4 tiebreaker tossups and 3-4 tiebreaker bonuses? It seems like the effort of making those questions happen could have been better spent making packets of 21/21 more pristine - tiebreakers after the first one are almost never read in mACF events and every site was likely to have a full packet or two that it wasn't using, so it seems like those extra tiebreakers just stretched the editors thinner for no reason.

[vengefulsweatermensch]

The only blatantly trash film tossups I remember hearing on the packets I played were on Wes Anderson, Napoleon Dynamite, and sharks. I assumed Woody Allen, France, and Vertigo were included in the arts category, though I could be mistaken (especially with Woody Allen).

Woody Allen was in the arts category.

[Tanay]

Also, titles in literature questions were often dropped very early.

I did end up dropping some titles earlier than you might find them at regular-difficulty tournaments, as I was writing for an audience that I anticipated would have many more teams that are new to quizbowl. Looking at the statistics now, I can conclude that this definitely was the case. That being said, I'm sure that over the course of writing or editing 85/85 literature, there may have been situations where I made poor decisions in this regard. I'm happy to own up to those if you have specific examples of questions where a title was dropped excessively early.

[Mnemosyne]

Also, titles in literature questions were often dropped very early.

I did end up dropping some titles earlier than you might find them at regular-difficulty tournaments, as I was writing for an audience that I anticipated would have many more teams that are new to quizbowl. Looking at the statistics now, I can conclude that this definitely was the case. That being said, I'm sure that over the course of writing or editing 85/85 literature, there may have been situations where I made poor decisions in this regard. I'm happy to own up to those if you have specific examples of questions where a title was dropped excessively early.

I got Gordimer on Get a Life and Pamuk on Museum of Innocence on what seemed like the first line of both. I don't know what counts as "too early," but I noticed the title drop on both of those.

[Tanay]

Also, titles in literature questions were often dropped very early.

I did end up dropping some titles earlier than you might find them at regular-difficulty tournaments, as I was writing for an audience that I anticipated would have many more teams that are new to quizbowl. Looking at the statistics now, I can conclude that this definitely was the case. That being said, I'm sure that over the course of writing or editing 85/85 literature, there may have been situations where I made poor decisions in this regard. I'm happy to own up to those if you have specific examples of questions where a title was dropped excessively early.

I got Gordimer on Get a Life and Pamuk on Museum of Innocence on what seemed like the first line of both. I don't know what counts as "too early," but I noticed the title drop on both of those.

Museum of Innocence appeared about halfway through the second line of the tossup, while Get a Life was at the beginning of the third line.

[Mike Bentley]

Also, titles in literature questions were often dropped very early.

I did end up dropping some titles earlier than you might find them at regular-difficulty tournaments, as I was writing for an audience that I anticipated would have many more teams that are new to quizbowl. Looking at the statistics now, I can conclude that this definitely was the case. That being said, I'm sure that over the course of writing or editing 85/85 literature, there may have been situations where I made poor decisions in this regard. I'm happy to own up to those if you have specific examples of questions where a title was dropped excessively early.

I actually had the impression that this tournament was not dropping titles early enough for the target audience. I'd have to look through the set to find specific examples, though.

I also had a vague sense that tossups on individuals spent a bit too much time talking about their work outside of the core canon for a tournament aimed at newer players. The answer lines in general were easy, but there were more than a few tossups that did a poor job distinguishing between the median ACF Fall team by compressing the clues about the overwhelmingly most famous work of a person to 1-2 sentences near the giveaway.

I thought this tournament did a particularly poor job of giving complete answer lines. Examples that come to mind include the "grammar" tossups which didn't give any instructions on what to do on early buzzes of "language", the heat capacity tossups that didn't mention what to do about buzzes of "specific heat", answers likes like _Huckleberry Finn_ that don't instruct what to do on "Huck Finn" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" answers, etc.

[Irreligion in Bangladesh]

I thought this tournament did a particularly poor job of giving complete answer lines. Examples that come to mind include the "grammar" tossups which didn't give any instructions on what to do on early buzzes of "language", the heat capacity tossups that didn't mention what to do about buzzes of "specific heat", answers likes like _Huckleberry Finn_ that don't instruct what to do on "Huck Finn" or "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" answers, etc.

Agreed; one specific, unjudged protest I recall along this line was a question of whether the title of The Coronation of Napoleon can be embellished/expanded, such as The Coronation of Emperor Napoleon. The answer line gave no "accept" or "do not accept" instructions.

[tiwonge]

Is this set clear? I had somebody ask me for a copy of it, and it's apparently not on the archive, so I didn't know if there were any plans to be using it for some future tournament.

[gyre and gimble]

The set is clear. I haven't gotten around to cleaning it up for posting yet, sorry.