2024 ACF Regionals at Purdue (01/27/2024)

[mapreader4]

I am pleased to announce that the Midwest site of 2024 ACF Regionals will be held at Purdue University on Saturday, January 27, 2024.

The tournament will take place at Hampton Hall (550 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907). The opening meeting will begin at 8:45am and gameplay will begin at 9am. I, Nathan Reed, will be the tournament director. Please direct any questions about this site to me at [email protected].

Eligibility
In general, teams where players are all attending the same school and all taking at least one class for credit during the 2023–2024 school year are eligible to play 2024 ACF Regionals. ACF’s full eligibility rules are available here. Questions about eligibility should be directed to [email protected].

Rules
This tournament will follow ACF’s official gameplay rules. Rules specifically pertaining to online tournaments have been rendered in blue.

Registration
Fill out the central 2024 ACF Regionals registration form with all relevant information. The form is here. The field for each site can be found here.

If possible, teams should register for the site that is geographically closest to them and/or is in the region they would normally attend. The field cap is 20, after which teams will be placed on a waitlist or potentially assigned to another site. Please register by January 22, 2023.
Fees

• Base fee: $150
• New to quizbowl discount: −$100
• Shorthanded discount (1–2 players): −$75
• Travel discount: −$10 per 200 miles traveled one-way
• Buzzers: −$10 per functional buzzer system
• Staffers: −$25 per staffer with a functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance by filling out this form.

The new to quizbowl discount is intended for schools that have not sent a team to any mainstream collegiate academic tournament (not counting exclusively novice tournaments) since September 2022, and which have no players who competed in non-novice collegiate tournaments during that same period.

Packet Submission
Any team with at least two people on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or high school student) prior to September 1, 2022, is required to submit a half-packet. Please email [email protected] if you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet. A team that is not required to submit a packet may submit an optional packet by the no-penalty deadline for a $50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular collegiate academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

Here is the submission schedule:

• October 25, 2023: -$75
• November 10, 2022: −$50
• November 25, 2022: −$25
• December 13, 2022: no penalty
• December 27, 2023: +$25
• January 3, 2023: +$50

After January 3, 2024, teams will be required to pay an additional $10 per day their packet is late. Teams that have not submitted a packet by January 13, 2024 will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

If your team is going to submit a half-packet, whether required or not, email [email protected] to request a distribution. All finished packets must be sent to that email before 11:59 Pacific time on the day listed to receive the discount or penalty. Please format the half-packet in .doc or .docx before sending it. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team number (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

[mapreader4]

Congratulations to Chicago A, who won with a 12-1 record after a gripping final; and Chicago D, who won UG with an 8-3 record!

Full stats for the tournament can be found here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/8658/

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I'm disappointed that this site did not use MODAQ when many other sites did so. I was also disappointed that this was true of Penn Bowl when Purdue hosted that in the fall. In the future, it'd be good if set logistics directors who want advanced stats get more direct with hosts that MODAQ or similar is an expected component of hosting; otherwise they'll be missing such stats from sites that don't keep them.

That said, I commend the staff at this tournament for reacting swiftly, yet keeping calm, when TJSheets broke mid-morning and unbroke early afternoon. The pivot to printing and distributing paper scoresheets basically didn't interrupt the flow of the tournament. It's not an easy situation to handle when the thing you're relying on stops working while teams are engaged in high-pressure matches, and Nathan et al. handled it about as well as one could hope for.

[Halinaxus]

I'm disappointed that this site did not use MODAQ when many other sites did so. I was also disappointed that this was true of Penn Bowl when Purdue hosted that in the fall. In the future, it'd be good if set logistics directors who want advanced stats get more direct with hosts that MODAQ or similar is an expected component of hosting; otherwise they'll be missing such stats from sites that don't keep them.

I understand you're frustrated with the lack of advanced stats. It was my decision to not use MODAQ for Penn Bowl and I strongly encouraged Nathan not to use it this weekend, so I want to explain my reasoning.

For Penn Bowl, I emailed the editors multiple times starting over a month prior to the tournament asking about logistics and statkeeping, including a direct request for information on MODAQ (of which I had very little knowledge at the time) and whether we would be required to use it. I did not receive a reply until the night before the tournament, at which point it was far too late for me and our staffers to learn how to use MODAQ properly.

I wasn't the TD for Regionals so I don't know exactly what ACF's position on MODAQ is, but from what I understand Nathan was told it was optional. With this in mind, I advised him not to use MODAQ for the following reasons:

1. First and foremost, PUQB has never run a tournament using MODAQ before and most of our staffers have never used it. In my experience, new and complicated quiz bowl technology tends to break down frequently (indeed, I overheard that some sites who used MODAQ also encountered problems), and it seemed like a bad idea to try out MODAQ at a high-stakes tournament that we already expected would go pretty late even if things did go right.

2. I'm not aware of a way to view in-progress scoresheets in MODAQ like you can in TJ Sheets. More generally, there doesn't seem to be a central "status report" page like TJ Sheets has. So far in my (relatively young) TD career, I've come to highly value that status page because it tells me at a glance which rooms are fast/slow, allows me to instantly determine if protests are likely to matter, provides live scores that are handy for rapid rebracketing, etc.

3. Because of the lack of (2), my understanding is that exporting stats from MODAQ (and perhaps even importing rosters?) requires running scripts. In my experience with TJ Sheets, scripts are usually the least reliable part of the apparatus; they tend to break for unexpected reasons, only work in incognito mode, etc. I try not to run scripts during the tournament, only before and after when I have more time to troubleshoot them.

Essentially, using MODAQ just seemed like it would lead to delays at a tournament that really couldn't afford delays a la Winter at Northwestern. Even though we ran pretty smoothly on Saturday (I think we lost half an hour max from the TJ Sheets issues), finals still went until 8:30 (yikes!!!). As a data science major myself I regret that we couldn't keep advanced stats, but from a logistics perspective I think it was the correct decision. Prioritizing logistics and sticking with familiar procedures is what allowed us to react so well to the TJ Sheets bug, after all.

Also, massive shoutout to Ganon Evans and Ryan Rosenberg for fixing the TJ Sheets issue and getting us back on track, and to the ACF protest resolvers for putting in serious work during the finals sequence!

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Thought I'd chime in with some clarifications about MODAQ.

I wasn't the TD for Regionals so I don't know exactly what ACF's position on MODAQ is, but from what I understand Nathan was told it was optional. With this in mind, I advised him not to use MODAQ for the following reasons:

1. First and foremost, PUQB has never run a tournament using MODAQ before and most of our staffers have never used it. In my experience, new and complicated quiz bowl technology tends to break down frequently (indeed, I overheard that some sites who used MODAQ also encountered problems), and it seemed like a bad idea to try out MODAQ at a high-stakes tournament that we already expected would go pretty late even if things did go right.

MODAQ was optional, but something that ACF has strongly encouraged this year because of its utility (reducing staff size, easy creation of advanced stats, etc.) I sent out a MODAQ guide to hosts two weeks before ACF Regionals. It seems a few sites had roster issues or an error message here or there, but they were worked out in the morning and to my knowledge didn't result in significant delays. As a result, we're adding a section to the MODAQ guide on importing rosters to avoid such problems in the future.

3. Because of the lack of (2), my understanding is that exporting stats from MODAQ (and perhaps even importing rosters?) requires running scripts. In my experience with TJ Sheets, scripts are usually the least reliable part of the apparatus; they tend to break for unexpected reasons, only work in incognito mode, etc. I try not to run scripts during the tournament, only before and after when I have more time to troubleshoot them.

Not really: MODAQ will spit out a qbj file once a game is over that is then sent to the tournament director who can then transfer the the score to Yellowfruit for stats on hsquizbowl while the buzzpoints are held onto for advanced stats. Sometimes there's an error here or there but again, the ACF team worked to resolve these issues if they arose Saturday.

I mention these not as a finger waging (in fact, I was very impressed with Purdue's resilience in getting through the issue with TJSheets) but more as a reminder that ACF's role during and leading up to our tournaments is to help as much as possible and that we're just an email away if you need anything. MODAQ is only going to become a bigger and bigger standard in the future and ACF wants to get as many people on board.