We Need To Talk About Online Tournaments

[Shahar S.]

In my region and many others, despite conditions which would allow us to host in-person competitions without significant threat of COVID transmission, we are still defaulting to online competition. On the surface, it makes sense. Many schools have extremely tight restrictions preventing them from hosting or even attending in-person competitions. However, the hidden cost of forcing schools that are capable and excited for the return to in-person to attend online ones exclusively is more staggering than most realize. This opinion was mostly based on my experiences involving the west coast’s approach (or lack of an approach) to mirroring ACF Fall, Penn Bowl, and ACF Winter. The TLDR is that there exists a fundamental dichotomy between players who overwhelmingly prefer to attend competitions in person when possible and TDs who overwhelmingly prefer the workload of online to in-person. I feel strongly that there should be a way to minimize this conflict of interest and that we can do more to reform our views on how we handle “regional” online play to address it.

For starters, I want to talk more about how each of the aforementioned tournaments were organized in order to better explain the problem. I’ll start with Berkeley’s online upcoming mirror of ACF Fall, which I had the most direct involvement in. The reason why our mirror got so flooded with teams initially is because the tournament was intended to cater to a very large region. What we didn’t anticipate is that we were one of the only mirrors to be held online, which caused many teams from other regions to register for our mirror (most notably from the area surrounding New York). Under the current model, teams are most likely to sign up for an online mirror if their region has no in-person mirror, regardless of whether their region matches up with the online host. Simultaneously, we’re also implicitly holding onto the notion that online mirrors can substitute in person ones for an entire region, despite there being differences in schools’ abilities to go to an in-person competition. A couple of time-zone dependent online mirrors for something like ACF Fall make sense because there are schools which cannot go to in-person mirrors either because of isolation or because of restrictions. That doesn’t mean that it makes sense to substitute in-person competitions for online ones in the context of a region. In an ideal world, every school should have the ability to choose between either going to an online competition or attending an in-person one no matter what region they’re in.

The west coast’s handling of ACF Winter and Penn Bowl serve as opposite ends of the coin in terms of what we could be doing better with regards to online competitions. The “regional competition” for ACF Winter on the west coast being held online is causing a significant number of our players to drop from the field entirely, which is especially bad considering ACF Winter is one of the few competitions which are actually appropriate for their level of experience. My question is, why are we hosting regional mirrors online at all? I don’t want to speculate too much on the west coast’s ability to organize an in-person mirror in the absence of UCSD’s online bid, but I feel that a much higher emphasis can and should be placed on at least giving teams a chance to choose whether they want to travel for an in-person competition or not, and that reserving an online mirror for an entire region in lieu of that makes less sense. Likewise, there should be more opportunities for schools to attend competitions near their time zone for non-ACF or NAQT sets. Not having a nearby in person mirror for something like Penn Bowl is one thing, having your only option to play be an online mirror held 3 hours ahead of your time zone is another. It should be normalized for all sets to create more options for teams that cannot attend an in-person event when possible.

I think a big part of the reason why so many schools are still defaulting to online events is just how profitable they are and how easy it is to pull in big crowds because of it. We’re artificially creating demand for online tournaments by limiting their supply in some regions while also making it impossible to attend anything but an online mirror in others. As many quizbowl programs have cited difficulties with restrictions when it comes to hosting in-person, I think it would make sense to create a centralized location where we can talk about those difficulties and what we can and have done to work with them in the future. We did the same thing during the switch to online last year, I feel it appropriate to do the same for our move back.

I apologize for how rambly (and horrifically unedited) this post was, I’m quite tired and I don’t know when I’ll have time to look into the issue again but I encourage the community at large to start talking through our process. Online tournaments should be used primarily for reaching out to isolated schools, but we should no longer be using them as a replacement for in-person events if we can at all avoid it, and I’m curious to hear what solutions we can come up with to create more options for our players.

[tiwonge]

For the northwest, at least, the early date of ACF Fall makes it hard for us to find an appropriate host/field for an in-person tournament. Washington, which is the most obvious place to host a tournament, is just starting their fall quarter and the club doesn't really have time to prepare for it. If Boise State hosts, then UW still will struggle to be able to organize teams to drive to Boise, and without those teams, there's probably not a viable field. (It's hard to get people to drive from Seattle to Boise in the best of circumstances.)

This early date of ACF Fall (because of the introduction of ACF Winter) coincides with tournaments going online, so that became an easy solution for us in the northwest. I can't say that without an online tournament, ACF Fall wouldn't happen in the northwest, because that might pressure the circuit into making sure that it happens, but we struggled (and failed) even to get an in-person mirror of ACF Winter this year, and that's 5 weeks later.