2019 ILLIAC - General Discussion

[John Ketzkorn]

This thread is for the general discussion of ILLIAC.

Huge thank you to the team of writers (tagged in their questions) who helped make this possible.

Special thanks to Eric Mukherjee, Jordan Brownstein, Billy Busse, Adam Silverman, John Lawrence, Alex Fregeau, and Tyler Vaughan for helping look over / edit / review the set. I'm very appreciative for these more experienced players / editors taking the time to look over the set and catch the many, many errors I didn't see. I'm sure there were more, so that's what I imagine this thread will be useful for.

The subject editors were Cole Timmerwilke (history), myself (science), Brad McLain (RMPSS), Mitch McCullar (literature), and Bryan Lu (arts) -- with Cole and I serving as head editors. I had the final say on most questions, so feel free to direct your complaints towards me whether in this thread or privately.

We highly encourage the discussion of distribution / length / "set feel" / difficulty / etc in this thread. For many of us, this was our first big house write project, so any feedback is greatly appreciated!

[tiwonge]

Thanks for producing this set.

I really appreciated the TU on Marian apparitions. I was a bit thrown when it switched from Guadalupe to Fatima (and ended up missing it because of that confusion), but I still really liked it. The TU on the BoM was first-clue answered by the BYU team I faced which, I guess, is a good thing?

Overall, I thought the tossups did a good job with the target difficulty, but felt that the bonuses tended to skew a bit hard with the middle clues (and some of the easy parts of bonuses wouldn't have been out of place as an easy part of a regular high school tournament).

[VSCOelasticity]

I'm kind of tired, but I think this set had a lot of issues common to tournaments that are rushed while editing. In particular (as has already been mentioned), I think the bonuses suffered from either not having a true easy part or having a hard part that was really hard. Also, this tournament seemed to do ACF Fall+ more as "we'll pick harder answerlines" rather than "we'll pick harder clues". I think more of a mix of both would have been good.

More nit-picky stuff: There were a lot of small grammar mistakes or typos that caused issues when I was reading. My tiredness affected my reading on Saturday, but those didn't help. Also, one of the packets randomly had reading guides highlighted. Please do that to the other reading prompts in the set if you're gonna do it to one packet (I would recommend highlighting in a less jarring color than yellow, but that might just be personal preference).

[jzlau2]

Link to the ILLIAC Discussion Discord Server:
https://discord.gg/ySWV45R

[Mike Bentley]

I thought this tournament did a pretty good job hitting its difficulty targets, although playing in an open Discord field without any new to quizbowl teams makes this a bit hard to judge. Overall, the tournament seemed pretty good. Thanks to the editors for all of their hard work on the set!

My main piece of constructive criticism for this tournament was that it felt a bit of an earlier age in quizbowl. This was mainly felt in terms of answer selection and overall distributional choices. For instance, the religion in this tournament leaned very heavily into asking about relatively minor world religions, whereas many recent tournaments have moved to ask more deeply on major faiths or traditions. The current events questions were very heavily skewed towards NAQT-style "what's on TV news at the moment," asking mostly about American political personalities and the dumb/funny things they've said. I'd much rather see most of the CE distribution devoted to issues of social policy, technology, and important bits of recent history. On the literature side, I'd personally find a distribution that incorporated more non-fiction and long-fiction in place of non-epic poetry as I have a strong suspicion that these subjects are much more widely read among an intellectually curious general audience than poetry.

Given that this tournament is targeted towards newer players this is probably less of a big deal. But I think a tournament like ACF Fall 2018 showed how you could both keep the difficulty under control and respond to some of the justified critiques of what the quizbowl canon looked like as recently as a few years ago.

All that being said, I think there's definitely a solid core here that the (as far as I'm aware) pretty new to collegiate editing team can build on for great events in the future.

[John Ketzkorn]

For instance, the religion in this tournament leaned very heavily into asking about relatively minor world religions, whereas many recent tournaments have moved to ask more deeply on major faiths or traditions. The current events questions were very heavily skewed towards NAQT-style "what's on TV news at the moment," asking mostly about American political personalities and the dumb/funny things they've said. I'd much rather see most of the CE distribution devoted to issues of social policy, technology, and important bits of recent history. On the literature side, I'd personally find a distribution that incorporated more non-fiction and long-fiction in place of non-epic poetry as I have a strong suspicion that these subjects are much more widely read among an intellectually curious general audience than poetry.

The religion thing completely slipped my radar (I'm not a religion player, I don't really follow the discussions on how the meta-game is shifting), so I mostly helped with what was submitted. I did try to do my best to include non-fiction in the other category of lit -- though you likely only heard Emerson / Paz / Montaigne. It appears the remaining non-fiction tossup and bonus both got packetized into round 14 (along with a bonus in replacements), which was definitely non-ideal (and obviously these numbers were still lower than ideal).

Long-fiction and poetry both got 1/1 category subdistros and more long-fiction made it into misc than poetry, so I'm not sure I understand how much more long-fiction would be necessary, especially since poetry is well studied in academic settings (even a colonial History class will make you read "The White Man's Burden"). Perhaps more a debate for genre distributions in another thread than here (though I do appreciate all of the distributional feedback). As for non-fiction / lit criticism / essays and the like, I wish I had just done a better job of representing it in miscellaneous.

[Father of the Ragdoll]

The religion distro issue is 100% on me. When I first answerblanked, I aimed to cast a wide cultural net and ended up with too little of the major faiths (esp egregious was the lack of major Indian relgions in the tossups). I had intended to go back and redo it but ended up hitting external deadlines that did not let up until it was too late to rewrite that much of the distro. Not an excuse for how it ended up by any means, but that is the reason it managed to slip up that way.