2025 ACF Regionals - General Discussion

[yeah viv talk nah]

This is the general discussion thread for 2025 ACF Regionals. Please use this thread to leave thoughts on categories or the set as a whole.

Jeremy, the rest of the editing team, and I will have more to say soon, but for now we'd like to thank all of the people involved in the set production:

Editors: Erik Christensen, Henry Goff, Taylor Harvey, Amogh Kulkarni, Tim Morrison, Noah Sheidlower, Munir Siddiqui, Abigail Tan, and Maxwell Ye

Advisors: JinAh Kim, Eric Mukherjee, Ophir Lifshitz, Rahul Keyal, Kevin Jiang

Writers: Abhinav Rachakonda, JinAh Kim, Ophir Lifshitz

Proofreaders: Ophir Lifshitz, Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, JinAh Kim

Playtesters: Sameer Apte, Henry Atkins, Jordan Brownstein, Jamie Burchett, Jason Golfinos, Aseem Keyal, Evan Knox, John Lawrence, Young Fenimore Lee, Mitch McCullar, Tracy Mirkin, Dan Ni, Kane Nguyen, Grant Peet, Karthik Prasad, Hayden Prather, Tejas Raje, Subhamitra Banerjee Roychoudhury, Shahar Schwartz, Vaishali Sivamani, Ashish Subramanian, Kevin Thomas, Pranav Veluri, Forrest Weintraub, Geoffrey Wu, Walter Zhang

We'd also like to thank:

• Ophir Lifshitz, for developing many scripts and other software to help the production, and generally helping out immensely in nearly all aspects of production. Ophir also saved us from a significant delay at the UK site on the day of.
• ACF's site coordinator Kevin Jiang, the tournament directors, and staffers, all of whom contributed to a relatively smooth experience across all sites on the day of.
• Jordan Brownstein, for developing (1) the Discord playtesting bot we used significantly throughout production; and (2) the character counting script we used for editing.
• The creators of QAMS, for allowing us to develop new features for it during production.
• The writers from teams who submitted packets.

We will be posting the packets soon, once we fix some minor errata.
Advanced stats from nearly all the sites are also almost ready to be published.

A few ACF-wide firsts* for this set that we'd like to highlight for community feedback:

• Jordan's script allowed us to use character count limits (average and maximum per both individual question and category) instead of line limits (e.g. "7 lines for tossups, no more than 2 lines per bonus part"). We hit the average limits almost exactly, with a few outliers being a bit short/long. Did the prose "feel" longer/shorter and/or "flow" better/worse than in previous years?
• We explicitly tagged each editor/freelancer question with their initials in the final packets, and each submitted question with the team name. This saved us from a few significant errors in question order very late in the process.

*As far as the editing team is aware.

[modernhemalurgist]

In addition to all of the people Ani listed above, I would like to thank Ani for not only the immense amount of work he put into all the traditional duties of a head editor and for helping me countless times in the same regard, but also developing a great amount of the set production infrastructure we used on this set. Ani highlighted Jordan's and Ophir's contributions here, which I know have helped several writing teams recently, but many of the advancements we used (including tracking scripts and greatly improved playtesting functionality) were the result of Ani's continual iteration to make the writing process as smooth as possible, responding to every concern with not only fixes, but real quality-of-life improvements.

[Restitutor27]

I edited the Other History for this set. I will be able to provide some more detailed commentary on conversion when I receive the advanced stats for all the sites. Though I already have a few years of quizbowl editing experience, this was my first time editing for an ACF tournament, and I would be very grateful for as much specific feedback on the questions as possible.

Writing/editing approaches and set philosophy
Writing philosophy is something that varies a lot between different editors, and I'd like to explain how I approached the category and the reasoning behind some of the decisions I made in the process.

A large amount of space in the Other History category is devoted to ancient history, which is interesting to deal with in large part due to the variety of different types of sources available. These include written accounts by historians from the ancient world, epigraphy, numismatics, and other material culture such as pottery, statues, and items found in burials. I have tried to incorporate a good mixture of these types of sources into the questions. I have also tried to highlight the importance of the different types of sources by making it clear what evidence is being used whenever doing so is possible within a question; some examples of cases I thought were interesting include the prevalence of the Aeginetan weight standard for coinage in the Cyclades during the late Archaic period, and the significance of the deities attested in the Persepolis Fortification Archive for understanding Elamite acculturation in the home regions under the rule of the Achaemenids.

"Pure archaeology" has had an interesting place in quizbowl lately, having been increased significantly in comparison to how much it was coming up before the last 3-4 years or so. I think this is a good thing, as it was underasked before; in addition, many questions on ancient Africa or the ancient Americas necessarily must draw heavily on material culture for sources. I have not entirely understood some other sets' desire to have an archaeological slant in almost all ancient questions, and don't think doing that is necessary in order to "over-correct" for its not having come up much before. I have intentionally incorporated a fair amount of archaeology into the set, and despite the subdistro laid out below I don't think this strictly has to be categorised separately to other ancient history, and I think it is good to have questions that mix different types of sources.

It's also worth my commenting on how "canonical" the content in my category was (to whatever extent a "canon" can be said to exist). I think once we get to Regionals-difficulty and above, it is important not to be just asking about the same things over and over again (which I think lots of sets lately have done a good job at). I have had this in mind while editing and am happy with the content, yet I don't think anything was egregiously beyond the pale, as most things in the set have been asked about before in some capacity. The least "canonical" questions were probably the Cimmerians bonus set, and the Babylon tossup that had a lot of clues from around the Kassite period; I thought this was fine, as quizbowl has been long overdue in terms of ANE canon expansion. This was balanced off with a good number of questions on things that come up more often, such as Shang dynasty, Hadrian's Wall, Mediterranean Sea, and Roman politicians named Cato. I also made an effort to include some late antiquity (which is often missed) in the set (in the Diocletian tossup and Serena/Stilicho bonus), as well as questions that emphasised the importance of women leaders (e.g. in the Pergamon/Apollonis bonus and the Vietnamese rebels against Chinese rule tossup).

I have not been too stringent about "category purity", since when dealing with the ancient world in particular, many sources are interdisciplinary and it's perfectly possible for people to encounter Claudian's panegyrics from a literary rather than strictly historical point of view, or to get points on archaeology questions from knowledge of art history, or to know about Polynesian settlements through geography. The set has also ended up having a fair amount of what we could call "ancient religious history", which I think is also fine due to the clear importance of religious practice and attitudes in the history of both ancient and modern times. I will additionally note that I kept the Mediterranean Sea tossup and the Theodor Herzl tossup in Other History on the basis of being historiographical and cross-regional, even if they could easily have been placed under European or World instead. I think it is fine for quizbowl to benefit from a relatively relaxed attitude towards distro-stencilling.

Lastly, I don't have much to say in particular about writing style, beyond general comments about how I think first lines should be "edifying" and give some indication of why the clue is important, where possible; this usually amounts to saying e.g. "this ruler's policy of X led to..." rather than just "this ruler had a policy of X" full-stop.

Sub-distribution
My sub-distribution of the category was roughly modelled on (my interpretation of) last year's Regs, which I thought generally worked well, and I didn't see much reason to change it drastically. This resulted in the 16/16 being broken down as:

3/3 Ancient Near East (of which 1/1 Egypt)
4/4 Greco-Roman (split roughly equally)
1/1 Ancient Americas
3/4 Other Archaeology (in addition to the other categories; of which 1/1 European, 2/3 World)
2/1 Ancient World History (in regions not mentioned above)
3/3 Australian/Canadian/NZ Commonwealth, Historiography, and Cross-Regional

There is obviously a lot of potential for overlap between these categories, and many questions could have been placed in more than one. I find that it is good to view quizbowl distributions more as a rough guideline for what should be covered, rather than as a rigid stencil. In any case, I was very happy with the breadth of coverage across all 32 questions (though it is unavoidable that players won't get to hear everything).

The conscious changes I made from last year included having non-Egyptian Ancient Near Eastern history take up a slightly larger proportion of the 3/3, since I find it is often not asked about much in quizbowl; reducing the ancient Americas content, for which four questions seemed a bit much; and having a little more Greek history (covering Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods) and a little less Roman history, in order to balance the Greco-Roman content more evenly between the two.

Submissions
My choice of which submissions to use was often heavily dependent on distributional factors, since my view is that choosing to use certain submissions for arbitrary reasons should not be done at the expense of maintaining a good balance of content across the entire category. I should also note that a large number of teams submitted questions as Other History that did not fit the specified definition as "ancient history, archaeology, AUS/CAN/NZ commonwealth, or cross-regional"; I think further steps should be taken in the future to ensure that teams are fully aware of what they should be submitting. I chose some submissions for their answerlines being a good complement to what was already written, which resulted in some being heavily edited. I'd like to thank the following teams for submissions that fit well into the distro that didn't need a lot of editing:

McGill A (Nubia tossup)
Arizona State A (Quiet Revolution tossup)
Toronto A (Joh Bjelke-Petersen bonus)
Oxford A (Hadrian's Wall tossup)

Thanks, etc.
I really enjoyed working on this set (even if I did end up staying up until past 2am UK time on a few occasions to attend playtesting sessions) and would be positively inclined to apply to work on other ACF sets in the future. I'd like to thank Ani Perumalla and Jeremy Cummings for their work as head-editors, all my co-editors for being helpful and always pleasant to work with, and also the playtesters, who provided a lot of useful feedback.

Finally, I'd like to morally condemn Civilization VI for apparently making it sound like Sparta was the only Greek city that had hoplites, because three different people buzzed on a mention of "hoplites" alone on that basis in playtesting and I had to get rid of the word for an utterly illogical reason.

I hope players enjoyed the questions; let me know what you thought!

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

I found this set very enjoyable! I noticed in general there were a reasonable amount of questions that had a kind of funky choice of pronoun/descriptor and do feel there were a few questions that were on items that were probably too general that played badly as a result (off the top of my head I found this extremely frustrating in the tossups on "chemical reactions" and "instruments" edit: would probably also include heavy metal poisoning as well)

EDIT - would probably add there were a few more clues than I'd like that required a little bit of jumping around a sentence to remember what it was actually asking for which is a bit un-"player friendly"

[jschnipper]

Overall I enjoyed this tournament, and enjoyed most of the questions in a vacuum. For some praise, I really enjoyed the "Other" categories, especially geography and current events. I enjoyed much of the World and Other history content as well. However, the packetization felt slightly off. Certain categories, like classics and military history, felt somewhat more prevalent than usual (I recall a packet with 3 classics tossups). The two stats questions also seemed really strange, especially considering the broad category of miscellaneous science. I recognize that this could very easily have been a result of packet submissions, it's easy to imagine a glut of classics and military history questions. Even the Stats questions could theoretically be explained by the large number of people forced to learn it for their major. That being said, there were definitely a few times where I wished for more variety.


I apologize for being critical. Again, I genuinely did enjoy the tournament. It appears like my criticisms may put me in the minority, but I felt they were worth sharing.

[superdooku]

General Thoughts and Thanks

I really enjoyed editing the biology and mythology for this set! This is only the second collegiate set I’ve ever edited after 2023 ACF Fall, and I’m extremely thankful to my fellow editors for their helpful feedback during production, and also for just being a fun group to be a part of. I also want to praise Jeremy and Ani as co-head editors for keeping us organized and clear on deadlines and expectations, as well as for implementing tools that helped streamline parts of the production process (as Ani mentioned above). Maybe I'll make another post when detailed stats are published, but I'm generally happy with how my categories played, and I hope they were enjoyable to those who have the same enjoyment for them that I do.

I have a lot of people to thank for their role in helping me with my questions. First, a big thanks to Eric for his comments on the bio (especially the medicine, which helped me fix a few of those questions), as well as to Abhinav Rachakonda for freelancing 4 excellent myth questions. I also have to thank our large cohort of playtesters, especially Jason Golfinos, Evan Knox, Mitch McCullar, Kane Nguyen, Dan Ni, Shahar Schwartz, Ashish Subramanian, Kevin Thomas, Forrest Weintraub, and Geoffrey Wu, who all provided essential feedback that helped me polish my questions. JinAh Kim and Tracy Mirkin also provided helpful feedback on some of my questions internally. Lastly, I want to thank my former teammate and good friend Jacob “Mr. RNA” Martin for his opinion on some bio questions that I felt unconfident about, your feedback was much appreciated.

Editing Philosophy + Distros

I sub distributed Biology and Mythology as the following:

5/5 Cell / Molecular (including genetics)
4/4 Anatomy / Medicine
3/3 Ecology and Evolution
2/2 Organismal Biology / Zoology
1/1 “Techniques” / Analytical Bio
1/1 Other / Any

4/4 Greco-Roman
4/4 Asia (including 1/1 Subcontinent)
1/1 Americas
1/1 Egypt
1/1 Africa / Oceania
1/1 Norse / Germanic
1/1 British Isles
1/1 “Other European” (Slavic, West European, etc.)
2/2 Mixed / Any

Across both of my categories I tried to keep things mostly aligned with the canon, while stepping a little more into the deep end on topics that I felt were either underasked or deserved some canon expansion. For myth, this meant an attempt to ask about some minor myth systems outside of Europe that I felt don’t come up a ton and/or trying to ask about the familiar ones from different angles. For bio, I made an effort to dive deeper into some ecology/zoology topics and keep the cell/molecular and medicine content a little more canonical.

As someone who majored in "Ecology and Evolution" as an undergraduate, I’ve been dissatisfied in the past with the way quizbowl asks about “macrobiology” (ecology, zoology, environmental biology, evolutionary biology, etc.), but I’ve never really sat down and actually collected my thoughts on this. Perhaps one day soon I’ll actually make a longer forum post about my thoughts on this topic. Anyway, this is all to say that my main goal with the bio was to align the ecology and organismal content with coursework from my ecology degree. Most of the ecology/evolution and zoology questions I included in this set were on topics that came up multiple times in multiple courses I took, as part of an effort to award a more “academic” engagement with those disciplines. I hope my focus on the macro side of things didn’t take away from the medicine and microbio, and would love to hear opinions on the way I conducted this category.

For myth, I tried to keep things focused on textual/narrative sources, as these are the sources I personally engage with to learn about world mythology, and also because for a lot of systems those are the sources we have to engage with how these societies understood themselves and their surroundings. I did try to include some clues about worship and iconography across various questions, as these are undoubtedly a massive part of the religious aspects of these cultures, but hopefully I wasn’t too heavy handed on cluing epics and written sources. On a stylistic note, I’m not a huge fan of commonlinks with clues from multiple very different myth systems, and prefer having mythology questions geographically situated within a region rather than jumping around a lot. There were a few cases where I had to commonlink to ensure proper difficulty, but for the most part I tried to avoid that. Again, would love opinions about whether my approach to this category was successful or not.

Submissions

One of my big goals in editing for this set was to use as many team submissions as I possibly could, which resulted in me using 38 submitted questions (with varying degrees of editing required) across my categories. So, I guess I also owe a big thanks to all the teams that submitted excellent content to help me achieve this goal. A few submissions I want to particularly shoutout are:
-Brandeis A’s super creative tossup on sex change in Hindu myth
-Brown A’s banger tossup on folklore in the Amazon
-Chicago A’s interesting bonus on linkage disequilibrium and fine-mapping
-Indiana A’s enjoyable tossup on Eukaryotes
-Oxford A’s based bonus on shooting an apple off the head of one’s child
-Maryland B’s extremely dank tossup on Philippines folklore
-Toronto A’s very cool tossup on heavy metal poisoning
-Purdue A’s fun bonus on metabolic theory in ecology


I also want to shout out a few submissions I enjoyed but didn’t use for various reasons. These include:
-ASU A’s tossup on cannibalism in animals
-Berkeley A’s tossup on radiation exposure
-CWRU A’s tossup on Sedna
-Florida A’s tossup on Gylfi
-GWU A’s tossup on cephalopods
-JHU A’s tossup on skin
-Michigan B’s tossup on dogs in east asian myth
-Minnesota B’s tossup on quiescence
-OSU A’s tossup on Cupid and Psyche
-the 3 teams that submitted Thunderbird content
-the 4 teams that submitted Kalevala content
-the 11(!) teams that submitted various content on myth systems from the British Isles, including two submissions on Culhwch and Olwen, a tossup on Bors the Younger by Iowa A, and a bonus on the Ogham alphabet by WashU A


Getting feedback on submissions I wrote for the last three regs tournaments has probably been the greatest factor in my improvement as a writer/editor over the years, so I’m more than happy to provide feedback on any submitted bio/myth questions, just message me here on the forums or on discord.

This is already a longer post than I intended but I’ll end by saying that I’m extremely grateful for the chance to serve in the role of editors I once (and still) looked up to. Maybe this is a silly sentiment idk, but I feel proud to have progressed here after starting out as third scorer on Maryland B only 3 years ago. I definitely plan to continue editing in the future, so any feedback about my categories in this thread or in private is much appreciated and will serve to help me improve for my future work.

[slowdie]

Chair rocking aside, and having given it a day of thought, I think this year's set was still interesting even though I maintain that it was harder than last year's set.

I'd probably direct most of my critique, or at least feelings of uncertainty, towards the answerlines for this set: they often felt too up to moderator interpretation or otherwise felt just slightly too hard. Which brings me to my next point, that I think the difficulty creep and the desire to write something new, interesting, or otherwise "not too canon" impacted writing just slightly.

I don't mind when new, interesting, or weird lines are used (ask my team: I have written some truly heterodox questions), but I do think that this year's set leaned a little too much into being unique and original. This, of course, is a little too meta of a discussion for a Regionals set discussion, and it probably says a little bit more about the skill level of the average Regionals participant and writer going up, but all the same I think the conceit of unique answerlines should be curbed in exchange for unique clues on canon answerlines.

Otherwise, still a fun set even if I was losing it by the end.

[etotheipi]

This set, as I indicated in the Discord, was possibly the best set of its difficulty I've played: I can't think of any tossups I felt baited, hard done, or confused by, and I can think of very few I was annoyed by. In particular, I think this set did a wonderful job of knowing it was a three-dot set and acting accordingly; this is just a vague and general impression, but I felt like, even though this set was unafraid to experiment, be interesting, and include clues about deeply important yet underasked things, even ones underemphasized in academia (off the top of my head, the The Spirit of Romance clue in the Occitan question was a great example of this), it did this in a way that did not feel like it was battling against its stated difficulty. For one, there seemed to be little to no "here's a four-dot conceit, let's write it at three dot" and also little to no "let's smuggle in this clue or answerline that I found very cool but ultimately isn't really difficulty-appropriate, or requires a nonsense common-link to be difficulty-appropriate." I think this set ought to be a model to future Regionals and future housewrites at this difficulty in these regards.

Certain categories, like classics and military history, felt somewhat more prevalent than usual (I recall a packet with 3 classics tossups).

I don't think three classics tossups is egregious at all; given the vital importance of the Greco-Roman world to the establishment and self-assertion/self-definition of the Western identity which most of our humanities questions seek to reflect, classics is if anything criminally underasked about compared to e.g. the intellectual backwater named the United States.

[jschnipper]

I don't think three classics tossups is egregious at all; given the vital importance of the Greco-Roman world to the establishment and self-assertion/self-definition of the Western identity which most of our humanities questions seek to reflect, classics is if anything criminally underasked about compared to e.g. the intellectual backwater named the United States.

Admittedly, some of this is personal preference as someone who prefers 19th and 20th century content. Even accounting for that though, the issue is that the questions are too highly correlated. If a packet contained a history TU about Napoleon III, a VFA TU on Renoir, and a philosophy TU on Voltaire, that would still be somewhat problematic IMO because you're giving a significant advantage to Francophiles to the point where that can end up being the thing that determines close matches. Classics is way worse in this regard, because the correlation between two disparate fields is so much stronger (e.g. Socrates and Peloponnesian War TUs are more likely to be answered by the same person than Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone TUs). If one treats quizbowl as a test of knowledge (or at least a test of correctly buzzing in on knowledge), that distribution essentially tests for the same thing multiple times.

[etotheipi]

Admittedly, some of this is personal preference as someone who prefers 19th and 20th century content. Even accounting for that though, the issue is that the questions are too highly correlated. If a packet contained a history TU about Napoleon III, a VFA TU on Renoir, and a philosophy TU on Voltaire, that would still be somewhat problematic IMO because you're giving a significant advantage to Francophiles to the point where that can end up being the thing that determines close matches. Classics is way worse in this regard, because the correlation between two disparate fields is so much stronger (e.g. Socrates and Peloponnesian War TUs are more likely to be answered by the same person than Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone TUs). If one treats quizbowl as a test of knowledge (or at least a test of correctly buzzing in on knowledge), that distribution essentially tests for the same thing multiple times.

I don't think this is a fair comparison for a couple of reasons.* First of all, Renoir, Voltaire, and Napoleon III were all active essentially within the same hundred-year span and in the same city, whereas what we call "classics" stretches over a period of almost a millennium, from Archaic Greece to Late Antiquity, and all across the Mediterranean at that. More importantly, I think that there's a substantial difference between being a France person and being a classics person, in that everyone who is seriously interested in the intellectual history of the West and/or humanities in the West ends up becoming a classics person, in some way, shape, or form.

This is most pronounced in philosophy: you're simply not doing (Western) philosophy if you're not working within the tradition of problematics which Plato and Aristotle set forth; and likewise you're not understanding the work of any Western thinker of the past few centuries, at least in the Continental tradition, if you're failing to apprehend the thinker's recognition of themselves as working on these problematics in the terms in which the Greeks set them. But there are plenty of other examples: the predominance of Greek, Roman, and Christian legends (all of which are "classical" phenomena in the quizbowl sense) in basically every domain of the arts; the fact that the three major intellectual events of the modern West (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment, and the modernist phenomenon) were all more or less conceived by the people who drove them forward as a turn back toward Greece or Rome or both; more specifically, the fact that German high cultural identity was so determined by the perceived closeness between Ancient Greece and modern Germany (the same thing is probably true of France and Rome); so forth. I also think it likely true that the participants in many of the historical events quizbowl asks about, inasmuch as they were educated, and insofar as education back then involved a firmly classical education, conceived of their participation in those events with reference to a very much classical cultural substratum. This is all to say: whereas there are ways to interact meaningfully with the Western tradition that do not involve the French intellectual sphere (or so the Germans would say...), there are no ways to interact meaningfully with the Western tradition that do not involve the classics. France is within the tradition; Greece is at its beginning, its heart.

So yes, asking more about classics advantages people who care about classics, but in my view this is entirely proper.

*n.b.: I also don't think it's particularly egregious to have three tossups on 18th and 19th century France in the same packet.

[yeah viv talk nah]

Speaking as a co-head editor, I'd like to summarize my thoughts on the set as a whole.

First, I'd like to thank our co-head editor Jeremy Cummings; he was a pleasure to work with and I think we made a fantastic team. We didn't have hard boundaries in terms of roles, though we generally divvied up oversight for categories (e.g. Jeremy oversaw science while I oversaw literature, etc.), and I handled the technical aspects, whereas he was in charge of handling submissions and playtesting. He also took sole charge when I fell ill for a few weeks in January, which was a huge ask in crunch time, so I'm grateful for that.

I'd strongly recommend that future ACF sets be welcome to co-head editors, as I think everyone on the team would agree that splitting the workload was extremely beneficial in terms of both time and effort, and ultimately made for a much higher quality set.

I'm really satisfied with the logistics of the set production. We had a Discord server where we used threads to playtest each question, and a Drive folder to store questions and documents. As Jeremy mentioned, I developed (1) a script to print answerlines from submitted packets to a spreadsheet where editors could mark interest in each question; and (2) new features for Jordan's playtesting bot that made playtesting much smoother for editors and playtesters. I'm hopeful that we can make both publicly available soon.

I think we did a good job of responding in a timely manner to queries from teams about eligibility, submissions, etc.; apologies if there's anyone to whom we didn't respond. We read every email and tried to respond ASAP.

Although I've been a subject editor for a few tournaments, this was my first time being a head editor. I'll let Jeremy offer his thoughts as well, but (perhaps naively), I didn't come into the set with any "philosophy." Instead, I approached editing at the "ground level," with a view to keep individual question interesting but concise and not too hard. Jeremy's and other editors' opinions aided in keeping the difficulty on point; we valued internal playtesting data strongly. I kept a strict eye on meandering prose, confusing clauses, and long answerlines; the character counting script and proofreaders helped significantly there. I was also harsh on cutting clues on less important / obscure things that have nevertheless "leaked" into the canon via old sets.

---

I also edited Other Fine Arts. Per the stats, it looks like the tossups were a bit on the harder side compared to other categories, and while the easy parts and hard parts hit the mark on average, the medium parts were also slightly hard. Apologies for that!

Generally, I'm satisfied with the OFA questions. I tried to hit a few core topics (e.g. I. M. Pei, bass, Pagliacci) in interesting ways while also introducing a few important figures to the canon (e.g. Michael Mann, Anna Sui, Mike Leigh, Angelo Badalamenti). I hope players enjoyed the questions overall.

My main regrets were (1) that I wasn't able to use as many submissions as I'd intended; and (2) the low amount of non-Western music/art (which I remedied slightly with the TB bonus). The main reason for (1) was that, unfortunately, many of the "Other Fine Arts" submissions were really just Painting and Sculpture or Classical Music questions, even though it's specifically stated in the guidelines not to do that. We had similar issues for other categories, mainly Other History and Other Science. We didn't reject any packets because we ultimately felt all were of decent quality, but in the future, I'd recommend that head editors and/or ACF as a whole emphasize the distinction between categories, and perhaps be a bit harsher if teams fail to comply with the "Other" categories. I was ultimately ok with (2), since I dedicated most of my time to head editor duties.

[yeah viv talk nah]

I'd probably direct most of my critique, or at least feelings of uncertainty, towards the answerlines for this set: they often felt too up to moderator interpretation or otherwise felt just slightly too hard. Which brings me to my next point, that I think the difficulty creep and the desire to write something new, interesting, or otherwise "not too canon" impacted writing just slightly.

I don't mind when new, interesting, or weird lines are used (ask my team: I have written some truly heterodox questions), but I do think that this year's set leaned a little too much into being unique and original. This, of course, is a little too meta of a discussion for a Regionals set discussion, and it probably says a little bit more about the skill level of the average Regionals participant and writer going up, but all the same I think the conceit of unique answerlines should be curbed in exchange for unique clues on canon answerlines.

Sorry to hear that; would you mind giving a few examples of such questions? I understand some categories played hard, which is fair. But part of our approach was specifically cutting down answerlines that were needlessly confusing just for the sake of being "interesting" or "fresh," and we were satisfied with how the set turned out in this regard. Generally, the harder or "extra-canonical" questions were on specific people/places/things etc. rather than common links.

[yeah viv talk nah]

See attached a zip file containing the packets as they were played on Saturday, in PDF and DOCX form. We stipulate that these files are not to be uploaded to any public archive or server, as they are not in final form. We will update here when we upload the finalized packets to the database.

Advanced stats for all sites except for Canada are now available at this link: https://2025-regionals.vercel.app/

We've cleaned the data significantly, but note that errors may remain; please let us know via email at [email protected] if you notice any.

Also note that there are a few rounds at the UK site and Midwest site that are missing. The use of different packets across rooms in a single round is a case that the current version of the buzzpoints app cannot handle, so until we add that feature we have removed those rounds.

The stats will also be added to the QBStats database when they are finalized.

[thedoge]

My main regrets were (1) that I wasn't able to use as many submissions as I'd intended; and (2) the low amount of non-Western music/art (which I remedied slightly with the TB bonus). The main reason for (1) was that, unfortunately, many of the "Other Fine Arts" submissions were really just Painting and Sculpture or Classical Music questions, even though it's specifically stated in the guidelines not to do that. We had similar issues for other categories, mainly Other History and Other Science.

I do wonder how much of this was due to the presence of "Any Science" and "Any History" as possible question topics (both appeared in the Columbia A half-packet distribution we received before we were confirmed as hosts), which I interpreted as you could write in any 1/1 in Science and History, respectively. It could benefit future ACF Regionals head editors to clarify that these are, in fact, different from "Other Science" and "Other History" (or perhaps it was a mistake on the part of ACF to include the word "Any" here?)

[benchapman]

Overall I thought this was a strong Regionals set, if slightly harder than last year (but still at a good 3-dot difficulty). I appreciate you posting the uncorrected packets quickly, as I find it much easier to give feedback confidently when the tournament is fresh in my mind and I can refer to the questions.

I personally enjoyed what felt like an emphasis on having 90%-conversion rather than 100%-conversion Es and thought they did a good job of providing a concrete, knowable clue rather than forcing teams to reason their way to the obvious guess. It does seem looking at the advanced stats that these tended to play a bit hard, but I am suspicious of some of the numbers (e.g. only 76% for Kant given Critique of Pure Reason, 75% for Frankenstein given "Mary Shelley novel about a scientist who reanimates dead matter").

On the contrary, I thought this set's bonus length control was a bit too lax. There were quite a few easy parts that gave you two full meaty sentences before hitting you with the one clue they really expect everyone to know. For example (just picked by me opening a pack at random), the "hair" E in Pack B gives you basically 4 lines of cluing before saying the word "braids". Obviously every bonus part shouldn't be a terse half-line sentence, but there is a happy medium that this set strayed from a bit too much.

[yeah viv talk nah]

It does seem looking at the advanced stats that these tended to play a bit hard, but I am suspicious of some of the numbers (e.g. only 76% for Kant given Critique of Pure Reason, 75% for Frankenstein given "Mary Shelley novel about a scientist who reanimates dead matter").

Quick note on this: we caught and fixed some errors in the advanced stats over the past day or so, and now they should be significantly more accurate. For reference, both the Kant and Frankenstein parts now have 100% conversion across sites.

[henrygoff]

Hi all! I was responsible for this set’s American and European Literature. My goal for my categories was to create a sufficiently challenging set of questions as befits a Nationals qualifier event, without leaving newer lit players feeling completely helpless. To this end, I aimed for more straightforward answerlines in my tossups, almost exclusively asking for authors, works, or languages; I tried to avoid answers that felt “fresh for the sake of freshness.”* When I chose more difficult answerlines, I did so in the name of canon maintenance (e.g. Jarry) or overdue canon integration (e.g. Auster).

Generally, I’m satisfied with the difficulty reflected in the advanced stats; because Regionals is meant to identify strong teams but open to all teams, I think it’s okay if the average buzz on a tossup runs slightly late or a bonus’s conversion runs slightly below 90/50/10. However, on a question-by-question basis, I think the difficulty ended up being more uneven than I would’ve liked in my categories, especially in the bonuses, where the average medium part was a little too tough and the average hard part a little too easy. I’d appreciate feedback from players of all levels on whether they thought this set fairly tested their American and European lit knowledge, and I hope everyone enjoyed playing!

This set was very enjoyable to work on, largely due to Ani and Jeremy’s leadership. I appreciated the trust and confidence they showed in the editing team by generally letting us work at our own pace (playtesting deadlines aside) and deferring to us on cluing choices. The playtesting technology they implemented was also incredibly helpful to me as I tinkered with my questions. Other than them, I want to give kudos to:

• JinAh, Tim, and Abhinav for chipping in some great questions to my categories;

• my colleagues on this set, but especially Rahul, JinAh, Tim, and Ani, for providing consistent and thoughtful feedback when I playtested the first drafts of my questions;

• the internal playtesters, but especially Henry A, Jordan, Jason, Mitch, Jamie, and Forrest, for providing consistent and thoughtful feedback on the second drafts of my questions;

• Ophir, who used his unmatched eye for improving wording and clarity to help me improve my questions’ wording and clarity;

• and Tim one more time for going out of his way to answer a question I had about Twin Peaks.

I should also thank all the teams who submitted questions for the set! I tried to use as many submissions as possible, or at least use them as inspiration. Some particularly cool/immediately usable submissions included:

• Virginia Tech’s Foucault’s Pendulum bonus with that epic telluric currents hard part;

• Arizona State’s Jhumpa Lahiri TU;

• Illinois B’s Edna Millay TU;

• Purdue’s well-made play bonus;

• Harvard A’s House of Bernarda Alba TU;

• Johns Hopkins’s Regina Giddens→Little Foxes TU and wine→drunk TU;

• Oxford A’s insanely cool Schoenberg TU, which I sadly had to bonusify;

• Rutgers A’s David Foster Wallace and Dada bonuses;

• and Berkeley A’s Daisy Miller and Italy TUs.

I also want to give love to some great submissions that I wasn’t able to use for one reason or another:

• Claremont’s Antigone TU;

• Toronto D’s superfluous man TU;

• Washington B’s God in science fiction TU;

• Brown’s Emperor Norton bonus;

• Northwestern’s bonus about Victor Hugo’s plays;

• and WashU B’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline bonus.

If any submitting team would like feedback on their American and European lit questions, I'd be happy to provide it--just message me here on the forums. Thanks again for playing! And apologies for the textwall.

*with the possible exception of the In the Penal Colony machine TU, which multiple people have already noted as frustrating to play and which I’d like to have back with hindsight. Maybe I’d feel better about it if there weren’t two consecutive prepositions in the answerline.

[yeah viv talk nah]

See attached a zip file containing the packets as they were played on Saturday, in PDF and DOCX form. We stipulate that these files are not to be uploaded to any public archive or server, as they are not in final form. We will update here when we upload the finalized packets to the database.

The packets have now been published to the archive (in DOCX form for now; PDFs pending, as the file size was too large to upload directly).

[yeah viv talk nah]

Advanced stats for all sites except for Canada are now available at this link: https://2025-regionals.vercel.app/

We've cleaned the data significantly, but note that errors may remain; please let us know via email at [email protected] if you notice any.

Also note that there are a few rounds at the UK site and Midwest site that are missing. The use of different packets across rooms in a single round is a case that the current version of the buzzpoints app cannot handle, so until we add that feature we have removed those rounds.

We have now updated the advanced stats to include set-wide player, team, and category statistics, as well as tables for individual players' buzzes. A huge thanks to Jordan Brownstein, Ryan Rosenberg, Geoffrey Wu, and Ophir Lifshitz for helping with the development of these features!

In addition, the aforementioned missing rounds have been added, and we have fixed misattributed/misplaced buzzes that individuals informed us about.