I guess I'll start?

[dwd500]

Before I say anything else - THANK YOU for writing. This really is a thankless job, and, since working on WHAQ, I know full well - the only time you hear any feedback, it's always negative. I don't mean to add to that, I honestly don't. There's a lot of good going on in here, and while some cosmetic things tend to distract from that, there's one main core issue I have.

I read at the Hallsville site, where my B team played. My A and C team were at the Orchard Farm mirror. I've talked to a couple of other coaches at both sites, and to my players. The general consensus is this: This set was just not fun.

Standard negbait/waiting for late in the question to drop the pronoun you're seeking/all the usual stuff everyone complains about every set/ issues aside, this set has a lot of "edge of the canon" tossups that seem to be good prep for PACE (Fugard, Robert Walpole, etc.), combined with some of the "sideways thinking" tossups that are great prep for HSNCT (Senators from Kentucky, etc.) It was really ambitious when it came to difficulty, and it seemed to wear that ambition on its sleeve. For teams like us, it does help. But we're rare - even in a state that sends a lot of teams to Nationals.

Meanwhile, some of the answerlines could have stood to have had something promptable - I'm guessing there's some for Pterosaur (lots of rooms were negged with "pterodon"), but I'm a choir teacher. There were a few other questions that, judging by the negs I had to give out, had an answerline that may have been a little too persnickety.

When a round has odd and sometimes strict answerlines on multiple tossups, and, thus, more and more stuff goes dead, it makes for a long day.

It wasn't consistent, though. You also dropped Musket Wars in power for Maori and Acton Bell well in power in the TU for Bronte. That stuff makes for uneven play. The championship game at Hallsville had 3 tossups go dead (DNA Polymerase (with a neg on "polymerase"), Magnetic Flux, Turandot), only to have it decided on the 5-word buzzer race on "Night."

Then come the bonuses. A coach at Hallsville put it best - 1 easy part, 1 college hard part, and the middle can fluctuate from anywhere in-between. The bonus where Averroes is the middle part comes to mind. I'm amazed anybody has hit 20+ PPB on this. At Hallsville, with 3 teams that went to HSNCT last year, no one cracked 16.5 PPB on the day.

There's so much ambition going on behind the scenes, and I get that. I really do. But In the land of most teams - where they don't study college sets, all of that reaching makes for a lot of missed stuff, it makes the day seem like a slog, and it makes the day no fun.

Case in point: the Orchard Farm mirror was the Gateway Athletic Conference meet. My C team of Freshmen (they were a bye team as schools are allowed one team that counts, but only having 9 teams sucks) were demoralized, even though they went 3-5 against other conference squads' best teams. The packets just beat them up.

So, I guess my main point is: I really appreciate your trying to bring really important stuff into the HS canon. There's some successes - and lots of places that fit in the "important, but hard" category. But please be aware that, at the end of the day, it's a game, and games should be fun. I think some scaling back of bonuses (especially the computer science) and another look at some TU answerlines would help along that way.

Other issues:

You may want to just sit down and read this set out loud. There's a lot of places where words/phrases were doubled. They never tend to pop out until you read it aloud - we had that issue on WHAQ.

Most frustratingly, there's several instances where the word "this" was mistyped as "the" or missing entirely. That's an important word. Multiple times I had to restart reading just so I could stress what the question was looking for.

As a music teacher - The ricercar came before the fugue. The fugue is based off the ricercar, so saying the ricercar is written in a fugue form isn't totally accurate. There are rules to fugue (especially concerning "episodic" moments when there's no thematic material going on) that ricercar doesn't have. There are ricercars that, in hindsight, do follow the rules that would eventually govern fugue, but not all of them did - and it was in trying to fix those issues that we got the fugue in the first place. Even then, that clue doesn't point straight to fugue. I can buzz after the first sentence and answer with "counterpoint," or "imitation," and not be wrong.

Also, on the Mendelssohn tossup - Rachmaninoff also has a third symphony in A minor. You need to eliminate him early in the question.

[jonpin]

Thank you for the feedback. We've playtested a few of the packets in our practices, but didn't get a chance to go through the whole set. We'll continue doing so, and hopefully catch most of the typos and pronoun issues. And we'll do what we can about overly hard answer lines. I did notice as stats were coming in on Saturday that the set seemed to be playing difficult, with 80-85% tossup conversion rates and bonus averages under 15. I agree that when multiple tossups are going dead, it reduces the fun.

I don't want this post to seem like it's brushing you off, but I'm going to leave the specific critiques to my players, as they were the writers/editors.

[Dirty Water]

Hello Mr. Dennis,

Thank you so much for your comments. We just had our second mirror this past weekend, and we did a bit of patching up, largely with the help of what you pointed out here.

You’re right in that we did choose to include more “edge of the canon” answerlines, and we tried our best to make sure that they were important and still accessible. With this set being used in spring tournaments, we thought that it wouldn’t necessarily be bad to include some of these harder questions. In hindsight, we should have noted this in the set announcement (instead of just as “regular-difficulty”), and regardless, many of these questions weren’t executed as well as they should have been.

The bonus difficulty also reflected this ambition, although we didn’t anticipate the conversion numbers to be so low. I certainly hope that to call most of these hard parts college-level is an exaggeration, although I do recognize that many of these answers aren’t commonly seen at the high-school level. While writing this set, there was an implicit philosophy that we should be writing questions on what is “important”, not what had been done before. As you note, this didn’t account for all of the teams who wouldn’t be participating at Nationals, and would mostly be seeing questions within a narrow(er) canon of answerlines.

Finally, the grammar/copyediting was inexcusable, and we ran through the set again to correct many of these errors. We apologize for any difficulties these caused readers. We also changed some of the answerlines to increase the breadth of acceptability.


Commenting on specific questions:

There’s nothing really promptable for pterosaur - they’re not dinosaurs, but rather flying archosaurs (a group which also encompasses dinosaurs). I'm guessing "Pterodon" is an incorrect pronunciation of Pteranodon, a genus of pterosaur. This would be wrong in the way that “Veloraptor” doesn’t exist, and wouldn’t be acceptable or promptable, for dinosaur.

I talked to our music writer about the tossup on fugue, and we rewrote the beginning to account for both the ambiguity and the timeline accuracy.


Again, thank you for all the help. It’s great that we get such thorough feedback, and I can say with certainty that subsequent tournaments using this set should now see a better product.

[irackow]

Thank you guys for the set, my team and I had a great time playing it at TJIAT over the weekend. The one question I remember for now that may have had issues was the Chloroplast tossup which mentioned Margullis' endosymbiotic theory in the first line. I believe with that point her work also applied to mitochondria, but I'm not sure what the actual wording of it was so I could be wrong. With regards to stretching the cannon, I think you guys did a really good job of introducing answer lines that are not totally outside the high school cannon/difficulty, but are still not common tossups (I really appreciated the Danse Macabre question). I would definitely play another installment next year if one was written!

[Dirty Water]

We're glad to hear you enjoyed the set.

Lynn Margulis proposed the commonly accepted evolutionary history of this organelle. In sexual reproduction, the DNA for this organelle is transmitted only by the maternal parent. In addition to high concentrations of starch, the internal structure of this organelle includes several granum, which are stacks of pigment-rich (*) thylakoids. Endosymbiont theory suggests that the mitochondria and this organelle originated as bacteria. There are higher concentrations of this organelle in leaves because of its role in photosynthesis. For ten points, name this green organelle most frequently found in plants.

We namedropped Margulis in the first line, but didn't explicitly mention endosymbiotic theory until after the powermark. Her theory isn't nearly as publicized or dramatized as, say, Watson and Crick, so especially at the high school level, we determined this wasn't inappropriate.

More importantly, this wording totally leaves the possibility for mitochondria, and any plastid. This will be revised for future use. Thanks for pointing it out.

[The Polebarn Hotel]

I think my main complaint would be the variance in bonus difficulty. The hard parts were really, really hard most of the time. Not only that, but the middle parts had no set difficulty; more often than not, they were either really easy or really hard. It reached the point where it was frustrating when the other team would get a bonus with a normal difficulty curve (where a good team might 30 it). That's just sad.

Some more specific points:

• In the Achilles tossup, you mentioned in the first line that he was "dipped" in ambrosia. This truly is a more obscure clue that should have been much less difficult to fraud. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but the clue about ambrosia and fire shouldn't be written to sound exactly like the much more well-known clue (that he was dipped in the River Styx). Fraudable tossups should be avoided, as should negbait (on to the next one).
• I noticed the above discussion about endosymbiont theory in the chloroplast tossup. It was still negged in my room with mitochondria, on that clue. It's just negbait.
• I remember the Tennessee Williams tossup being super hard but I didn't (legibly) write down any of the clues I heard. I wrote down one thing that I can read, but I either spelled it entirely wrong or it's never been included in a Williams tossup before.

Okay, this is kind of pointless without having the tossups in front of me. This is just my two cents, I guess.