2019 Super ACRONYM 2: General Discussion

[Cheynem]

I apologize if Erik is going to start this thread, but I'm about to do some work and don't have a lot of time, and wanted to get my thoughts down first:

This was a fun tournament, on the whole. There were a number of very good ideas and entertaining clues. Generally speaking, I thought the film, TV, and comics, the areas that I know the most about, were pretty solid. There were a few too many actor tossups, but on the whole fine.

Some general quibbles:

1. The bonus consistency was super inconsistent. I know this tournament was marketed as hard, but there were some bonuses that were like playing the hardest possible Chicago Open for academic tournaments. Sometimes hard parts were insane (I felt like we were asked for the names of not-famous actors a lot). Sometimes there were bonuses that didn't have clear easy parts (as opposed to bonuses in which the easy part was easy or at least something you could figure out)--this seemed to me to happen in music and TV the most frequently.

2. The sports was the weakest part of the tournament in my opinion. The modern sports, at least to me, felt like many hard-to-buzz on context clues followed by either a player figuring out what was happening or a giveaway (and then looking back, realizing what those context clues were). For example, the tossup on the "non pass interference call" was insanely difficult to buzz on early unless you remembered specific names of people involved or who had commented on the matter. I appreciated the nods to historical sports--there were some good ideas here, but again, I felt like you had to figure things out (stealing home, Babe Ruth's called shot) or the questions just got too easy too fast (Jerry West, which basically said in the first sentence it was a 1960s player who scored a lot who wasn't Wilt). The latter were particularly frustrating in a tournament that was otherwise hard. I might suggest playtesting the sports more extensively in the future.

3. Finally, the tournament really could have amped down on what I'll call the "whimsy factor." I appreciate the whimsy in an easier tournament like ACRONYM in which pretty famous things get asked about differently. But in an already hard tournament, having to constantly jump like two levels to think about what was happening got oppressive after a while (I realize I wrote a whole tournament in this vein once, but that was a side event). For example, was "the castle from Edward Scissorhands" a better idea than "Edward Scissorhands"? Did we need to toss up a second tier character from Napoleon Dynamite? Holy freaking crap, an entire tossup on the physical object that was Hattie McDaniel's Oscar, many stories of which are probably just fictional anyway? In isolation or maybe even as a whole, these tossup ideas aren't bad, but the cumulative effect of hearing so many of them, PLUS the few pretty straightforward questions, got kind of oppressive. Making some of these questions into more straightforward answerlines and/or bonuses would have been better.

[InvadErGII]

After a couple of days to reflect on how this turned out, I have some pretty mixed feelings on the set.

When working on this, we made a point to focus in on more whimsical/inventive ideas and answer lines - those have often been the highlights of previous ACRONYMs, so the idea was to try and make a lot of those. To that end, I feel like we succeeded - we came up with a lot of interesting things, and there's a lot in this set that I'm proud of.

Having said that, it was just too much. While a lot of the "interesting" ideas worked well, there were others that just didn't work, and the set was kind of all over the place. In too many instances, there were ideas that were shoehorned into the set for the sake of keeping things "interesting" without enough care for making sure questions were clear and decipherable, or that bonuses were of appropriate and consistent difficulty. I really dropped the ball on this, I should have known better, and I hope anyone who had a less-than-stellar experience playing this on Sunday will accept my apologies. I know I probably shouldn't feel quite so awful about it all, but here we are.

A few more sites are going to play this in a couple of weeks, and before then I intend to tone down/simplify much of the more "out there" content, and even out the difficulty of the bonuses. I feel like these sorts of changes will do a ton of good, and that we can get this set to a point where it maintains a good amount of interesting content in a way that doesn't come at the expense of overall quality.

[Cheynem]

Yeah, just to be clear, I enjoyed the tournament a lot and you shouldn't feel bad. I'm glad you're making some revisions and I expect in future versions of this tournament you'll improve--this is, after all, only the second time.

[ryanrosenberg]

2. The sports was the weakest part of the tournament in my opinion. The modern sports, at least to me, felt like many hard-to-buzz on context clues followed by either a player figuring out what was happening or a giveaway (and then looking back, realizing what those context clues were). For example, the tossup on the "non pass interference call" was insanely difficult to buzz on early unless you remembered specific names of people involved or who had commented on the matter. I appreciated the nods to historical sports--there were some good ideas here, but again, I felt like you had to figure things out (stealing home, Babe Ruth's called shot) or the questions just got too easy too fast (Jerry West, which basically said in the first sentence it was a 1960s player who scored a lot who wasn't Wilt). The latter were particularly frustrating in a tournament that was otherwise hard. I might suggest playtesting the sports more extensively in the future.

I agree with Mike, and would add that there was relatively little sports content you could get from, well, watching sports. Tossups like "James Harden's beard" and "the Madden curse" are perhaps fine in limited quantities (the "Yadier Molina for Mike Trout" bonus part was my favorite of the tournament) but get wearing pretty quickly. I enjoyed the tournament a lot overall, I'd just prefer more engagement with sports content.

[sonstige]

1. The bonus consistency was super inconsistent. I know this tournament was marketed as hard, but there were some bonuses that were like playing the hardest possible Chicago Open for academic tournaments. Sometimes hard parts were insane (I felt like we were asked for the names of not-famous actors a lot). Sometimes there were bonuses that didn't have clear easy parts (as opposed to bonuses in which the easy part was easy or at least something you could figure out)--this seemed to me to happen in music and TV the most frequently.

I can't speak for Erik or Danny individually on this, but I think collectively this was a challenge for us on both iterations of SAC. I definitely made an effort to establish what I felt at the time were reasonable E/M/H progressions on the bonuses for this level of difficulty --- yet given how much of SAC is uncharted territory canon-wise, it's possible this was mis-gauged a bit. But certainly the feedback here is valuable for shaping future iterations.

(PS: Thanks, Erik, for toning down some of my questions whose hard part in retrospect may have been too hard!)

And again, I can't speak for Erik or Danny ---- but I consciously chose to limit the 90s references in my contributions to this set based on the feedback from the first SAC.

Which prompts me to ask: how did the decades-wise distribution feel? Should there have been more / less references to certain decades?

For example, as a writer it's hard for me to imagine that someone born in the 80s or sooner wants to hear more than a few questions on 1950s TV in a set --- but if I'm completely wrong, then this can absolutely be adjusted moving forward.

[Cheynem]

Decades distribution seemed fine to me.

[InvadErGII]

I agree with Mike, and would add that there was relatively little sports content you could get from, well, watching sports. Tossups like "James Harden's beard" and "the Madden curse" are perhaps fine in limited quantities (the "Yadier Molina for Mike Trout" bonus part was my favorite of the tournament) but get wearing pretty quickly. I enjoyed the tournament a lot overall, I'd just prefer more engagement with sports content.

This definitely makes sense - as the author of the majority of this set's sports content, I've been thinking about the best way to change my approach to these. In general, I feel pretty strongly compelled to do more than just "this team" or "this player" sorts of questions, as they feel a bit boring (having written 6 regular ACRONYMs doesn't help with this, as I feel like I've just written everything there is to write in that space). That leads to stuff like "James Harden's beard" or other, more sports-adjacent ideas, which do work sometimes, but SA2 certainly had too many of them, and a good number of them didn't work at all.

So, what's the best way to find middle ground between those things? Is it just a matter of picking answer lines that are gettable and more "within sports" (I feel like the tossups on "Hank Aaron's 715th home run" and "Super Bowl XXXIV" both worked okay), or is it better to just stick with good/themed clues in similar answer lines? A mix of both? I feel like this has been my biggest struggle with PQB sets in the last year or two - it was a bit of an issue with ACRONYM 12 as well - and I'd love to do more to make this better.

[Cheynem]

I like the varied answerlines (the ones you list were good tossups, I think), but maybe think about how some of the answerlines play out. Both Harden's beard and Madden Curse seemed to be more "figure it out, or buzz on sports-adjacent clues" type tossups. Tossups like the "non-call on the pass interference" were challenging because there wasn't a specific name and the clues mostly relied on you being familiar with names/chatter after the incident (the lead-in was about people blaming Bill Vinovich, which I now understand--he was the head ref--but I would be really skeptical if anyone buzzed on that clue in isolation).

You could also consider doing just more team or athlete tossups with particular slants. A tossup on the "Rams/Saints" might have been better.

[InvadErGII]

For anyone who might be interested - I've been making a good number of changes to the set over the last couple of weeks based on the feedback here and elsewhere. The most up-to-date version of the set is here. There is also a change log, in case you're just curious about what's moved and/or different, here. A whole bunch of power marks were also moved, though those aren't listed individually.

I still have a handful of specific changes I want to make, but due to the timing I feel like it's worth sharing now. There are a few sites playing the set this weekend, including one that asked for a few extra days to print physical copies, so please let me know ASAP if you have any other suggestions/thoughts about the set or about the changes. Thanks so much to everyone who has taken the time to look things over already.