2024 ACF Regionals Discussion

[efleisig]

Players, staffers, and others involved in the making of ACF Regionals are invited to give their thoughts on the set below. The set will be posted in 1-2 days for anyone who would like to reference individual questions. (I’ll be putting up a separate thread for general thanks so as not to interrupt the discussion thread.)

[Adventure Temple Trail]

I enjoyed this set. It did a good job of presenting a lot of different cool things and balancing "canonical" and "innovative" approaches.

To start things off, here are some small notes I took during the day, sorted by letter designation of packet edited for comprehensibility. Most are quite minor:

• Packet C: It looks like they've come up a bunch recently as the asking of more pre-Columbian Peruvian cultures continues apace, but Norte Chico seemed quite hard for a three-dot middle to me, and asking for their second-most (?) important site also felt very hard even for a hard part. Has it filtered down in difficulty this much? Should it, relative to what players know?
• Packet C: I'm pretty sure this was moderator error regarding an instruction saying something like "prompt on the play within a play from A Midsummer Night's Dream", but a knowledgeable player got negged outright at our site for saying "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the tossup on Pyramus and Thisbe, which struck me as very uncharitable. It might make sense for future tossups like this to type out the second prompt that just says "prompt on A Midsummer Night's Dream" (if you didn't already).
• Packet D: If I remember right, the bonus part asking for "DNA adenine methylase" basically mentioned all of DNA, adenine, and the idea of adding a methyl group before teams' chance to give an answer, which seemed suboptimal to me.
• Packet "Waterloo et al." (G, I think): had similar thoughts to packet C above re: the bonus asking for a non-Muisca indigenous people of what's now Colombia, but I think this one was a hard part and the first two parts were more accessible, so was less thrown by it
• Packet H: the leadin to the "common law" tossup, which as I recall was that F. A. Hayek liked it and saw it as indicative of a good society, didn't seem especially unique. I'll look back at it when the set is posted.
• Packet I: I'll want to look back at the exact wording, but a middle clue in the "Rama" tossup mentions a poem about "a devotee of" the figure being asked about, and then calls said poem a chalisa by Tulsidas. I took the bait and negged here with "Hanuman"; looking over the text of the Hanuman Chalisa this morning, it does repeatedly and explicitly praise Hanuman specifically for his devotion to Rama. I don't think I had grounds to protest or anything -- the problem is largely with me for not knowing enough -- but it might be worth looking at the exact wording to make sure it minimized confusion and clearly ruled out Hanuman for people who do know the Hanuman Chalisa and what it says. I'm also curious if to this was to some degree intentional negbait for players Like Me. (UPDATE 1/30: I've spoken more with Ashish about this question. It was accurate as written and produced with good intentions. I am retracting some of this original complaint.)
• Packet M: Given that "Pontus" was already on the challenging side for an answer line, it seemed very early to say "its king Pharnaces" in the first line, which ends the tossup immediately for people who know the combatants at the later-mentioned Battle of Zela.
• Packet N: There was a bonus part asking teams to give a "first name" for the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl without specifying whether they wanted the author's actual first name (Harriet) or the pseudonym she used (Linda); it might have been good to explicitly rule out the incorrect name somehow.
• Packet N: I believe Georgia O'Keeffe's residences in New Mexico were at Ghost Ranch and in Abiquiú, a different New Mexico village dozens of miles from the Taos art colony. Though it does look like she stayed in Taos for one summer, and I don't think this materially confused anyone. (Also the first part / general framing was pretty cool; I know O'Keeffe was frustrated by the common interpretation and repeatedly denied it).
• Packet P / finals 2: There was a mention in the Paris tossup of a printer named "Petrus Camus" being killed; was that supposed to be "Petrus Ramus" or is this a separate person I hadn't heard of?
• Packet P / finals 2: I didn't like the tossup on The Women of Algiers In Their Apartment, which felt like a very old-style "corner-of-painting bowl" question in which the visual descriptions were not very specific. (Also, the description of jewelry and then a dark-skinned woman on the right sounded very much like Olympia). To be clear, I'm fine with the pendulum swinging back somewhat toward knowing what paintings look like -- I wouldn't demand you instead write a tossup on "Delacroix's trip to Africa" or something like that.
• Packet ???: The bonus linking Chingiz Aitmatov and Genghis Khan legends and Manas was very cool, but I don't think the intended easy part on "singing" did enough to rule out "oral" reception/transmission/recitation or other answers indicating memorized in-person recitation. I'm also curious if something like "chanting" or "recitation" was accepted; performances by manaschi often sound (to my untrained Western ear anyway) like they're in a range in between talking and singing and there are probably other answers that take that into account.
• Packet ???: What answers were acceptable for the tossup on which I answered "Latinas," that mentioned culture-specific phenomena such as susto and ataque de nervios? I liked the idea, and I thought it was a good instance of building on the multi-category public health focus in last year's Nats, but there's a lot of ambiguity and nuance here, given how diverse the people often grouped as "Latin American" are. (E.g. since "ataque de nervios" is the specific term inartfully translated as "nervous breakdown" for the title of that Pedro Almodóvar film, I'm curious if answers denoting Spain, rather than the Americas, were accepted and where.)

I'll also add, as a known disliker of excessive note-spelling, that the note spellings of the "Money" bass line in the leadin of the Dark Side of the Moon tossup (which incidentally had many other very cool kinds of clue that I'd like to see more of in pop music questions) and the "Rapunzel" theme in Into the Woods were correct and also unambiguously, unmissably important to their respective works. Nice!

[ErikC]

I enjoyed this set. It did a good job of presenting a lot of different cool things and balancing "canonical" and "innovative" approaches.

To start things off, here are some small notes I took during the day, sorted by letter designation of packet edited for comprehensibility. Most are quite minor:

• Packet C: It looks like they've come up a bunch recently as the asking of more pre-Columbian Peruvian cultures continues apace, but Norte Chico seemed quite hard for a three-dot middle to me, and asking for their second-most (?) important site also felt very hard even for a hard part. Has it filtered down in difficulty this much? Should it, relative to what players know?
• Packet "Waterloo et al." (G, I think): had similar thoughts to packet C above re: the bonus asking for a non-Muisca indigenous people of what's now Colombia, but I think this one was a hard part and the first two parts were more accessible, so was less thrown by it
• Packet M: Given that "Pontus" was already on the challenging side for an answer line, it seemed very early to say "its king Pharnaces" in the first line, which ends the tossup immediately for people who know the combatants at the later-mentioned Battle of Zela.
• Packet P / finals 2: There was a mention in the Paris tossup of a printer named "Petrus Camus" being killed; was that supposed to be "Petrus Ramus" or is this a separate person I hadn't heard of?
  
  
  I'll also add, as a known disliker of excessive note-spelling, that the note spellings of the "Money" bass line in the leadin of the Dark Side of the Moon tossup (which incidentally had many other very cool kinds of clue that I'd like to see more of in pop music questions) and the "Rapunzel" theme in Into the Woods were correct and also unambiguously, unmissably important to their respective works. Nice!

Thanks for the notes Matt.

Aspero was written as a replacement for another hard part that playtested hard and the original submission. I'll wait for the advanced stats to make final judgement but I'd agree it stands out in the set. I think Norte Chico has come up quite a bit recently and it's pretty important to the history of the region - I think this should be a case where difficulty has drifted correctly, but we'll see with the advanced stats. EDIT - after seeing the stats, Matt certainly was right about this bonus being too hard!

I think you're right on the Pharnaces clue - it's not the one from Zela, but people might get there anyways.

That was supposed to be Petrus Ramus - that clue was rewritten and at some point his name unfortunately got changed to a far more famous French thinker's name - unfortunate.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Hi all! I edited US History, Painting/Sculpture, Myth, and Abrahamic Religion for this tournament. Having been around the block a few times in all of these areas, my goals with each of these categories were fairly modest. In general, I just wanted to produce high quality, fairly controlled but still fresh-feeling questions and tried to change up parts of my style a bit and use some new answerlines. To use John Lawrence's terminology, I broadly aimed for a "Neoclassical" style with careful, deliberate revival of older trends while keeping up with modern sensibilities.

Painting/Sculpture - I deliberately tried to bring back more questions on (1) specific paintings and (2) more importantly, visual clues and descriptions of them. That question on The Women of Algiers with primarily visual cluing, hitting on both those areas, was deliberate*. There were two tossups on specific artworks and in an ideal scenario I'd have included a third**. I've taken approaches that push very far in the art history direction in the past - often a bit too far IMO, e.g. CO 2021 - and wanted to try something a bit more deliberately in another direction. There was a bit less world art than I'd like in general, but apart from that I was reasonably happy with how overall cross-distributional representation turned out.

Myth - My writing has, to this date, been quite favorable towards comparative, cultural, and anthropological approaches to myth. I don't want to repudiate any of this - I love that stuff - but I just wanted to do something different and explore the depth of more story-based and/or traditional "core" material from well-known traditions. My one real bound-pushing attempt in myth was the Knights Templar tossup which covered a bunch of "History Channel" (airquotes emphasized) stuff that I think is well known enough outside the core QB canon to merit representation. The Stanford submission on folklore around going to sleep on time (lol) was also very welcome in a similar vein as something that isn't from a pre-500 CE tradition and you still might run into in a modern Western world context.

US History and Abrahamic Religion - Nothing in particular. I try to not to aim for novelty first, but I was pleased with the results here and managed to write/edit a bunch of questions on topics my previous work hadn't covered as extensively.

Across the board, I tried to have a bit more restraint in hard parts compared to a set like IKEA or 2018 Regionals, where I think I went way too far out of the canon realm of things and/or did not default to "ask this in an easier way" often enough.

Would love to hear feedback on how I did with some of these goals, or in general what these categories did well/not so well on.

*I was partly inspired to write this tossup by reading Cezanne's comment that the painting's color makes you "drunk straight away" (also originally in the TU), which made me want to talk about how the rich, colorful details make the composition striking. While I agree with the general dislike of "corners of paintings" I don't think any of the details here are particularly minor - the red doors, wall patterns, and foot warmer aren't hard to pick out IMO, and the Black woman in Olympia isn't wearing a turban and walking past the scene. I'd also dispute that they aren't specific, especially when given in aggregate in tossup form, though I do think the lead-in could probably stand to elaborate a tad more. All that said, I strongly prefer that tossups such as this one are the exception, rather than the rule, but I strongly believe stylistic diversity is worth promoting. Similarly, since it got some playtest criticism (mostly on "I'm not a fan of this style" grounds), I'll readily defend the bonus part on Black Iris III - sure, most folks aren't trying to remember these titles, but it's definitely the O'Keefe painting I've personally encountered the most. It's not the most elegant bonus part or super-memorable title in the world, but IMO it's a totally fair ask given its ubiquity and relatively short, straightforward descriptive nature.

**One notable exception was Dartmouth's (yay, we have an active team again!!!) submission on Ingres's painting of Napoleon on his throne, but Aseem took a similar conceit with a tossup a few years ago and I thought it was a great work to explore with a wide-ranging bonus.

[Fisher]

Thank you to everyone who put work into this set - it was a very enjoyable set, and I often either said or thought that plenty of the harder stuff where I had no clue what was happening was creative and interesting, which I don't always find the case at this level.

One thing which did irritate me several times throughout the day was unclear, undirected prompting - examples I recall are when my teammate was prompted when he said 'High Church Anglicanism' (to which he correctly gave an acceptable answer of Anglo-Catholicism), and when an opposing team was prompted on their given answer of 'O'Keeffe painting [objects that look like] vulvas'. This latter one was particularly galling, as neither me nor that team understood which part was being prompted. There were at least three other occasions where something similar happened, but I don't remember the answers right now, I'll come back to edit this post if they come back to me.

Didn't affect us in our game, but I heard there was a serious editing error in the Portugal lit tu by suddenly swerving in the last line to something like 'FTP, name this city where an earthquake occurs in Candide'.

I'm pretty sure the Blue Boy tu said 'Jonathan Nuttall' instead of 'Jonathan Buttall', but luckily was close enough that I buzzed correctly anyway.

Every single room at the UK site had a neg on what seemed like huge bait on the natural log tu on the mention of Stirling approximation (I think the word 'factorial' came several words later).

Most of the early Frida Kahlo tu clues seemed a bit on the easy side, but especially 'viva la vida' being mentioned in like the third line.

(The set still isn't up by the time I'm posting this, so can't check yet) Was Tokarczuk really a medium part in the 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead' bonuses? Surely she has to be 'easy' at this level now?

The polynomial tu was fantastic I thought, and I only wish there were more such pure maths questions at the tournament! Dark Side of the Moon, Into the Woods, Russian art were some of my other favourite questions on the packets we played, so thank you to the writers and editors of those in particular.

[Oscario]

Bit of a nitpick, and I probably only remember this because of the protest-storm that followed, but the tossup on "being infected by a virus" as "this property" in packet O seemed to cause confusion. Also, not a biologist, but based on answers given to that tossup (and rejected by moderators also unfamiliar with biology), perhaps "infected by a bacteriophage" should have been explicitly listed as acceptable?

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

Fun regs, apologies if comments are more nitpicky than laudatory

Tholins bonus part would have been nice to be slightly more clear that it was sort of a broad calss of compounds (apologies if I just completely missed that)

champion's portion seemed like a good idea for a bonus part - maybe just me but I got confused from the wording and thought it was looking for like, a specific type of cut or a name beyond what was functionally described in the bonus part

Qiu Jin was a great bonus part

Too late to be useful but was a bit silly to have bonus parts on shadow puppets/puppets in same packet

seemed a bit suboptimal to just like immediately namesake a paradox in the paradox tu

It seemed anecdotally that ~half of the field at our site negged this indocaribbean tu w/ trinidadians w/o prompt - from what I can tell several clues seemed specific to trinidad and tobago proper so that seems a bit suboptimal

Probably skill issue on my part but I embarassingly ate a fat -5 on the log tu as well from buzzing on "the replica trick relies on this function (of Z)" before Z w/ the partition function oof

Minor thing that's probably hard to catch but my team's answer of "Please look after mother" wasn't taken although it is a title that it's been published as in english (probably more a function of the moderator than the editing)

I liked the bio and chem's clue selection for generally choosing things with a nice combination of classroom importance. Only major complaint I had (or could at least remember) was that the coat color(?) tossup pretty much had one plausible answer after the leadin

[naan/steak-holding toll]

I'm not sure what specific instructions I'd want to give for "High Church Anglicanism" - that seems like a pretty straightforward superset/subset prompt, as the Oxford Movement is a specific high-church movement, and I think the tossup's clues heavily implied such. However, I definitely agree the O'Keeffe prompt could have been better. Also it does indeed look like a typo in the Blue Boy tossup, so my bad on that.

Most of the early Frida Kahlo tu clues seemed a bit on the easy side, but especially 'viva la vida' being mentioned in like the third line.

It's not the hardest tossup in the world - "Viva la Vida" is about halfway through the question, in the fourth line. It has certainly come up before, but usually as a first line in HS questions or in collegiate hard parts on watermelons, etc. Sure, the early clues have surrealist vibes, but I honestly don't think the phrase "viva la vida" guarantees you that we are asking about a Hispanophone artist, given that (these days at least) the most famous association of that phrase and art involves Delacroix.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

I enjoyed this set. It did a good job of presenting a lot of different cool things and balancing "canonical" and "innovative" approaches.

To start things off, here are some small notes I took during the day, sorted by letter designation of packet edited for comprehensibility. Most are quite minor:

• Packet C: It looks like they've come up a bunch recently as the asking of more pre-Columbian Peruvian cultures continues apace, but Norte Chico seemed quite hard for a three-dot middle to me, and asking for their second-most (?) important site also felt very hard even for a hard part. Has it filtered down in difficulty this much? Should it, relative to what players know?

Thanks for the notes Matt.

Aspero was written as a replacement for another hard part that playtested hard and the original submission. I'll wait for the advanced stats to make final judgement but I'd agree it stands out in the set. I think Norte Chico has come up quite a bit recently and it's pretty important to the history of the region - I think this should be a case where difficulty has drifted correctly, but we'll see with the advanced stats (I'll revise this post).

I think you're right on the Pharnaces clue - it's not the one from Zela, but people might get there anyways.

That was supposed to be Petrus Ramus - that clue was rewritten and at some point his name unfortunately got changed to a far more famous French thinker's name - unfortunate.

I was spectating and not playing, but I wanted to comment that the archaeology in this set was excellent and the Pre-Columbian archaeology especially so. I also said this after the last set I played edited by Erik (Penn Bowl 2022), so I'm sensing a theme here.

Some of it was probably on the hard side for Regs (hard parts Montezuma [Castle], Costa Rica, Aspero, and a few others I'm not remembering now), but it was certainly a good range of topics, some of which I would have never expected to show up in this set. Aspero is certainly significant, since it's the first preceramic site in the Supe Valley to have been extensively excavated, the most coastal of the Norte Chico sites, and one of the inspirations for Michael Moseley's MFAC hypothesis after he excavated it, but it's probably on the harder side for this difficulty. I'm now quite curious as to what hard part Aspero replaced.

[Fisher]

It's not the hardest tossup in the world - "Viva la Vida" is about halfway through the question, in the fourth line. It has certainly come up before, but usually as a first line in HS questions or in collegiate hard parts on watermelons, etc. Sure, the early clues have surrealist vibes, but I honestly don't think the phrase "viva la vida" guarantees you that we are asking about a Hispanophone artist, given that (these days at least) the most famous association of that phrase and art involves Delacroix.

Fair enough, it's possible that clues about Kahlo & Viva la Vida have come up more in (non-quizbowl) UK quiz because of Coldplay being so popular and I'm overestimating how well known it is more generally because of that.

[Restitutor27]

I modded this tournament's UK site on Saturday.

General/category-wide comments, mostly history-centric:

• Difficulty seemed good; I thought last year's history was somewhat harder than usual and this set is broadly closer to what I'd expect at 3 dot.

• A couple of packets had three 20th century history tossups (G with Dole/Carnation Revolution/Borneo and L with power plants/Bengal/Chinatowns and the fourth being 19th century Catholics). Is this something ACF could start checking for more often, since I imagine it is possible to avoid considering how many submissions are received? In my experience there are far more history specialists who are better at certain periods than solely at certain geographical areas, and this could be seen to constitute a noticeable skew. Packets with one archaeology TU and three 20th century history TUs feel especially weird to play.

• The history had very little early medieval compared to late Middle Ages (I think only the Viking funeral bonus in European?). I'm not trying to say it needs to be increased massively but there is a noticeable gap in most tournaments from around 600 to 1000, there are plenty of askable things that aren't too hard for 3 dot, and probably a conscious effort needs to be made in quizbowl to avoid sets having 0-1 questions in this period consistently.

• Discussion with others has yielded the additional perception that there didn't seem to be a lot of early modern (I didn't really notice an issue myself, but haven't counted - this could just be a product of which packets were played at what site) and and that there was a lot of 20th century Europe even in geographical regions that are askable from earlier. 20th century is of course important, but given that there were a couple of packets with 3 20th century questions this might not have been ideal.

• The Other History seemed really heavy on pre-Columbian Americas archaeology.

Specific comments on questions:

• Some questions that I particularly liked: Aragon, Switzerland, Yuan dynasty, Teotihuacan, Jagiellonian, Viking funeral bonus, Ugarit bonus, Antigonus I bonus

• The Godwin tossup says Tostig twice and the best place for the name as a clue is probably the latter mention so it might have played better by just removing the name from the earlier sentence

• Bezbozhnik is probably too linguistically fraudable as a clue for state atheism as a hard part (this was discussed in playtesting but still made it into the set), considering it is doable from knowing very basic words in any Slavic language

• Thought the chariot racing factions/demes was a very good idea, although treating the drivers and the people that supported them as the same group is possibly a bit dubious

• Gondishapur is still too early in the Sassanid TU - even if people don't know the university it still contains the name "Shapur"

• Not sure about cluing being on the walls of Troy and being at the gates of Troy as the same location - you also need a prompt on "Scaean Gates" for the Helen clue

Packet M: Given that "Pontus" was already on the challenging side for an answer line, it seemed very early to say "its king Pharnaces" in the first line, which ends the tossup immediately for people who know the combatants at the later-mentioned Battle of Zela.

It's Pharnaces I rather than Pharnaces II, and the possibility of cluing the Pharnacids of Phrygia seems a very reasonable alternative thing it could be if you don't know the specific clue.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Not sure about cluing being on the walls of Troy and being at the gates of Troy as the same location - you also need a prompt on "Scaean Gates" for the Helen clue

Noted on the specific gate (I'd probably just accept it). Aren't gates usually part of walls, though - is that particularly confusing?

champion's portion seemed like a good idea for a bonus part - maybe just me but I got confused from the wording and thought it was looking for like, a specific type of cut or a name beyond what was functionally described in the bonus part

Also noted - It'd probably have been better to specify that the portion's name comes from its function.

[Restitutor27]

Not sure about cluing being on the walls of Troy and being at the gates of Troy as the same location - you also need a prompt on "Scaean Gates" for the Helen clue

Noted on the specific gate (I'd probably just accept it). Aren't gates usually part of walls, though - is that particularly confusing?

Yeah, just accept. I think it's definitely technically fine - if I were playing I might have paused and thought "do they want the walls or the gates" but am not sure how much of a problem that actually is.

[cwasims]

• Packet H: the leadin to the "common law" tossup, which as I recall was that F. A. Hayek liked it and saw it as indicative of a good society, didn't seem especially unique. I'll look back at it when the set is posted.
• Packet P: What answers were acceptable for the tossup on which I answered "Latinas," that mentioned culture-specific phenomena such as susto and ataque de nervios? I liked the idea, and I thought it was a good instance of building on the multi-category public health focus in last year's Nats, but there's a lot of ambiguity and nuance here, given how diverse the people often grouped as "Latin American" are. (E.g. since "ataque de nervios" is the specific term inartfully translated as "nervous breakdown" for the title of that Pedro Almodóvar film, I'm curious if answers denoting Spain, rather than the Americas, were accepted and where.)

This was the lead-in to the common law tossup:

The fact that this system exists “independently of anyone’s will” earned it praise from Friedrich Hayek, who emphasized how it is spontaneously created.

This clue is, as far as I'm aware, unique, although I can see that without knowing where the scare quotes are it might come across as a bit generic.

I had missed that ataque de nervios is also present among Iberian people, so there was no instruction in the answer line regarding that - it certainly should've been acceptable after the ataque de nervios clue although I gather the convention would generally just be to accept throughout. Hopefully no one ended up getting confused by that tossup - I had considered at one point including some parantheticals like "in the US" or similar to avoid some of these ambiguities but in the end thought that would be a bit awkward and clunky.

On another note, I gather that some people were confused by or disliked the macroeconomics tossup - I realize that the answer space for "subfield" is somewhat less well-defined but I had hoped all the clues would be pretty clearly pointing to the answer. I would be interested in hearing what specifically led people astray.

[ErikC]

I modded this tournament's UK site on Saturday.

General/category-wide comments, mostly history-centric:

• Difficulty seemed good; I thought last year's history was somewhat harder than usual and this set is broadly closer to what I'd expect at 3 dot.

• A couple of packets had three 20th century history tossups (G with Dole/Carnation Revolution/Borneo and L with power plants/Bengal/Chinatowns and the fourth being 19th century Catholics). Is this something ACF could start checking for more often, since I imagine it is possible to avoid considering how many submissions are received? In my experience there are far more history specialists who are better at certain periods than solely at certain geographical areas, and this could be seen to constitute a noticeable skew. Packets with one archaeology TU and three 20th century history TUs feel especially weird to play.

• The history had very little early medieval compared to late Middle Ages (I think only the Viking funeral bonus in European?). I'm not trying to say it needs to be increased massively but there is a noticeable gap in most tournaments from around 600 to 1000, there are plenty of askable things that aren't too hard for 3 dot, and probably a conscious effort needs to be made in quizbowl to avoid sets having 0-1 questions in this period consistently.

• Discussion with others has yielded the additional perception that there didn't seem to be a lot of early modern (I didn't really notice an issue myself, but haven't counted - this could just be a product of which packets were played at what site) and and that there was a lot of 20th century Europe even in geographical regions that are askable from earlier. 20th century is of course important, but given that there were a couple of packets with 3 20th century questions this might not have been ideal.

• The Other History seemed really heavy on pre-Columbian Americas archaeology.

The European history was actually subdistributed to have 4/4 20th century (specifically, 1914-2000), which is 25%. I think it was a function of the packets played. You are correct that 600 to 1000 wasn't really covered in European history with the Visigothic bonus and chariot teams tossup (which described the fans as "associated" with the teams, for what its worth) covered "early medieval" but in the 6th century. The early modern period was covered in several tossups and bonuses.

In general I wasn't using a terribly fine-toothed and specific subdistro. I don't want to cut a perfectly good medieval tossup because I need to cover a specific time period - for a housewrite I'd probably be a bit more specific for a long stretch of time missing. Similarily, I received three bonuses on pre-Columbian history and a fourth with a part on Costa Rica. I liked all these bonuses, but three of them ended up in packets 2-4 so I can see it coming off as too much.

It's probably worth discussion regarding how specific an editor for a packet sub tournament should be making their sub-distro.

As a side note, I'm a bit skeptical of concerns over lingfraud that requires some decent knowledge of a language that isn't super common among the community, especially if the answer isn't just the country the language comes from - but that's just my take.

[n3v3rgr33n]

Hi all! This is my first post on this site (somehow) so it might be a bit ragged but here we go.

I really enjoyed playing this set. It felt a lot better than last year in asking about topics in ways that were interesting; whether they had not been asked before, or had been asked at higher levels previously (I'll touch on this in the Oxford movement tu later). Will be commenting primarily on the literature and philosophy content, as it's more in my wheelhouse.

Things I loved:
Firstly, a big shout out to the people behind the Pyramus and Thisbe tossup, which I think might be the coolest tossup I've played in my time playing quizbowl. For people who actually know the play, this might not be the case - but for someone like me who is unfamiliar, the transition from answer-to-thought-to-answer when prompted on A Midsummer Night's Dream is personally one of the most satisfying feelings I've personally had in quizbowl. I was a bit worried when one of the mods at our site (Imperial) told me he'd negged someone for saying Midsummer Night's Dream, but this seems to have been the same type of unfortunate mod error that Matt J has already touched upon above. So yeah, huge compliments for that. Other questions I loved included the tossup on the Oxford movement, which feels like an important area of English history that often goes untouched in QB, the tossup on Florence that clued the inspiration of T.S. Eliot's Ash-Wednesday by Guido Cavalcanti, and the chemistry tossup on capsaicin, that despite me not knowing anything about chemistry, had just the right cluing to have me grasping for the word for "the heat causing thing from chilli peppers!!!" from the mid clues. Really enjoyed all of that.

Things I didn't love:
There were things I thought were not too hot. Firstly, I thought the obfuscatory use of "this state" in tossups like Ottoman Empire and Byzantine Empire were uncalled for and just served as a distraction to the content. The first of these I thought to be particularly egregious because I was unable to even formulate a guess due to the confusion (I thought we were talking about American states at one point). I think this sort of misleading language should generally be avoided. Also, while there seemed nothing explicitly wrong with the content, the philosophy tossup on France I felt was incredibly disappointing: at this level surely we should be either asking about countries with philosophical traditions not asked about as frequently (Ghana through Appiah/Amo, Kyoto School through Nishida/Tanabe/NIshitani etc), or just tossing up a more obscure philosopher? Other irritants were the history tossup on chariot racing factions which I thought should have had at least a prompt on "the blues and the greens", since a player on my team negged it with knowledge, and the math tu on factorial which is probably the hardest I've ever been neg-baited at a tournament. Starting that sentence with Stirling's approximation before saying factorial later on in the sentence seems...really bad. I'm not a mathematician but other mathematicians at my site fell into EXACTLY the same trap to the point where it was negged in almost every room! That question was probably the worst thing about the set imo.

With all that being said, the content in this set was far superior to some other tournaments I played last term, so good job on that front. This is a set I always look forward to playing, and I'm quite happy that I did play this year!

[vydu]

Apologies to everyone who negged on the Stirling's formula and replica trick clues in the log tossup due to my poor wording -- will definitely take more care to arrange clues like those so the equation comes earlier in the future.

[ErikC]

Hi all! This is my first post on this site (somehow) so it might be a bit ragged but here we go.

I really enjoyed playing this set. It felt a lot better than last year in asking about topics in ways that were interesting; whether they had not been asked before, or had been asked at higher levels previously (I'll touch on this in the Oxford movement tu later). Will be commenting primarily on the literature and philosophy content, as it's more in my wheelhouse.

Things I didn't love:
Also, while there seemed nothing explicitly wrong with the content, the philosophy tossup on France I felt was incredibly disappointing: at this level surely we should be either asking about countries with philosophical traditions not asked about as frequently (Ghana through Appiah/Amo, Kyoto School through Nishida/Tanabe/NIshitani etc), or just tossing up a more obscure philosopher? Other irritants were the history tossup on chariot racing factions which I thought should have had at least a prompt on "the blues and the greens", since a player on my team negged it with knowledge.

With all that being said, the content in this set was far superior to some other tournaments I played last term, so good job on that front. This is a set I always look forward to playing, and I'm quite happy that I did play this year!

Great to see a new poster and thanks for the feedback.

The France tossup was written primarily to adapt a submission about Petrus Ramus. I also thought I needed some more Enlightenment content, so I decided to link together Ramus with more familiar material. I'm sympathetic to asking about philosophy from outside the west, having both written tosusps on thinkers like Appiah and Amo and enjoyed playing them, but occassionally I think common links on a prominent country have their purpose to include things otherwise too hard, and to keep players honest.

I suppose a prompt on the Blues and Greens should have been included - playtesting didn't result in any problems with the conceit and it wasn't suggested, but seeing that answer now makes me think a directed prompt should have been made for that answer.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Glad to see some new posters in this thread!

I'm particularly glad that the Oxford Movement question was enjoyed in the UK. Newman and friends used to come up a lot more about a decade ago, but have fallen out of the canon recently, and Anglicanism in general doesn't come up much; I felt that turning a submitted bonus with one Oxford related part into a tossup to really give the topic some prominence was more than appropriate. I hope that for non-American audiences the pre-FTP clue about the Oxford Martyrs helped smooth things a bit as well. I didn't want to frame the tossup as a common link on Oxford because 1) some of the clues I wanted to use didn't take place in Oxford itself 2) I wanted to give knowledgeable folks a chance to answer with reasonable equivalents such as Anglo-Catholicism before they were read.

There were things I thought were not too hot. Firstly, I thought the obfuscatory use of "this state" in tossups like Ottoman Empire and Byzantine Empire were uncalled for and just served as a distraction to the content. The first of these I thought to be particularly egregious because I was unable to even formulate a guess due to the confusion (I thought we were talking about American states at one point). I think this sort of misleading language should generally be avoided. Also, while there seemed nothing explicitly wrong with the content, the philosophy tossup on France I felt was incredibly disappointing: at this level surely we should be either asking about countries with philosophical traditions not asked about as frequently (Ghana through Appiah/Amo, Kyoto School through Nishida/Tanabe/NIshitani etc), or just tossing up a more obscure philosopher?

Regarding the use of "this historical state" as an identifier in those tossups, I don't see how that's misleading. Maybe "this historical state" could have been repeated a few more times? Writing a visual arts tossup using the most straightforward identifier, "this empire," would probably require that I obfuscate a bunch of the clues instead, so I'm not going on for several lines saying "this empire with a bunch of medieval sounding Christian art" and just begging people to guess. I personally don't think the identifier "this polity" is that bad, as long as deployed sparingly, but ACF's stylistic preference here is fine too.

I didn't edit the phil, but I firmly agree with Erik here. I co-sign not deploying way too many country answerlines when they aren't needed, but it's not great writing practice to only deploy country answerlines in a predictable manner e.g. the absence of other possibilities to ask the philosophers in question. Early modern French philosophers is a perfectly fine topic for a question and you're not going to always have a clean non-country common link to tie together the harder thinkers (Petrus Ramus, Arnauld) and easier ones. Also, this could be a difference between trivia environments, but in my experience Akan and (especially) Kyoto School philosophy come up a couple times per year in QB fairly consistently these days - which seems about the right frequency.

[jirafman]

Want to mention that despite the wording I really thought the logarithm TU was an excellent idea with very well chosen clues. From someone who’s taken a Stat Mech course I liked (even though it took until the Stirling’s approximation clue to trigger my memory) how the clues were hitting on key transformations and equations you’d learn and use in a Stat Mech course. For me personally I didn’t find the Stirling’s approximation clue a bait b/c factorial didn’t make sense as an operation to use on any of the previous clues but I can see how someone might be tempted to binarily buzz on hearing Stirling’s.

[grapesmoker]

On another note, I gather that some people were confused by or disliked the macroeconomics tossup - I realize that the answer space for "subfield" is somewhat less well-defined but I had hoped all the clues would be pretty clearly pointing to the answer. I would be interested in hearing what specifically led people astray.

As one of the complainers, my issue here was the Dynare clue. I don't remember the specific wording so maybe it precludes these answers, but Dynare contains all sorts of stuff, so the clue there could be pointing toward rational expectations or DSGE or econometrics, which is the answer I gave (when prompted I said DSGE but was ruled wrong). It simply feels to me like "macro" is a very broad thing to ask for and hard to nail down in a concrete way that doesn't overlap with some other field or subfield of economics.

Overall this was a great set, lots of very good questions on fun topics. I particularly got a kick out of the philosophy questions. Some of the bonus variability was a bit wild though.

[DavidB256]

I'll probably post more comprehensively in the moderate future, but for now I just want to say that playing this set was a pleasure. The math, stats, and stats-spilled-over-into-other-categories (difference-in-differences, kriging, survival, and Bayes) seems to be top-tier. The physics was rad. The biology was great, but the evo/eco content seemed a bit heavy on "cool animal facts" and scientific names, though maybe I only feel compelled to opine so strongly in order to preface my salt over the paucity of quantitative genetics. The set clued a lot of contemporary content without ever feeling like it was just fishing from podcasts and the news in order to force extra-canonicity. Ditto Jerry on perceiving moderate, though not obnoxious, bonus difficulty variation.

I know very little about Ulysses and did not get the tossup on it, but I have never so quickly recognized and adored a question's conceit.

The full Oldboy spoiler in that tossup's giveaway seems kinda mean.

The protagonist of "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" is, or is at least heavily implied to be, a man.

David Cox was but a man of flesh and bone, so there's no need to all-caps his name in the tossup on survival.

[Sit Quietly, Alone]

-"pulmonary surfactants" was a weird answerline made weirder by the straightforward description that they lower surface tension and are in the lungs.
-"nizari" came too early in the "ishmael" tossup, in my opinion; i didn't want to buzz there, thinking it was bait, and sat on my buzzer for a bit.
-"mothers" ss tossup was, i think, transparent.
-i'm mad my moderator negged me for saying "emigrating to ireland" on the "settling ireland" tossup, esp. since i buzzed right after the clue describing soldiers being offered transportation in lieu of payment.
-i found it odd for there to be a tossup on "images" (focusing on ai content) as well as one on "openai" itself. it's fine, ig, and it seems they weren't in the same category, but...aren't there other things to ask about? (this is pure anti-ai bigotry speaking.)
-i also got negged for "dissociation" on the "dissolving" tossup. skill issue, probably.
-a tossup on both "laminar flow" and "turbulence"? surely there's more in physics, even just fluid mechanics, to ask about.
-also, on "turbulence," i buzzed on the adaptive optics clue with "refraction" and was negged. i'm almost positive i just wasn't listening properly to the beginning of the question, but thought i'd make note of that.
-for me, the "carnation revolution" and "portuguese empire" tossups were in consecutive rounds.
-that clue about the adoption of agriculture being mankind's biggest mistake has already come up this year.

[cwasims]

On another note, I gather that some people were confused by or disliked the macroeconomics tossup - I realize that the answer space for "subfield" is somewhat less well-defined but I had hoped all the clues would be pretty clearly pointing to the answer. I would be interested in hearing what specifically led people astray.

As one of the complainers, my issue here was the Dynare clue. I don't remember the specific wording so maybe it precludes these answers, but Dynare contains all sorts of stuff, so the clue there could be pointing toward rational expectations or DSGE or econometrics, which is the answer I gave (when prompted I said DSGE but was ruled wrong). It simply feels to me like "macro" is a very broad thing to ask for and hard to nail down in a concrete way that doesn't overlap with some other field or subfield of economics.

I would've supported accepting DSGE on protest (it was clued in the next line). That being said, the alternative answers you listed wouldn't typically be considered subfield of economics, at least in the sense of departments having faculty identifying as being in those fields; the scholars who have worked on those areas (with the exception of micro theorists of rational expectations, who would not be using Dynare) would overwhelming identify as macroeconomists or macroeconometricians.

[ryanrosenberg]

Detailed stats from ACF Regionals are now available here and on a site-by-site basis here.

[efleisig]

Packets are available here: https://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/3107/

[n3v3rgr33n]

Regarding the use of "this historical state" as an identifier in those tossups, I don't see how that's misleading. Maybe "this historical state" could have been repeated a few more times? Writing a visual arts tossup using the most straightforward identifier, "this empire," would probably require that I obfuscate a bunch of the clues instead, so I'm not going on for several lines saying "this empire with a bunch of medieval sounding Christian art" and just begging people to guess. I personally don't think the identifier "this polity" is that bad, as long as deployed sparingly, but ACF's stylistic preference here is fine too.

I didn't edit the phil, but I firmly agree with Erik here. I co-sign not deploying way too many country answerlines when they aren't needed, but it's not great writing practice to only deploy country answerlines in a predictable manner e.g. the absence of other possibilities to ask the philosophers in question. Early modern French philosophers is a perfectly fine topic for a question and you're not going to always have a clean non-country common link to tie together the harder thinkers (Petrus Ramus, Arnauld) and easier ones. Also, this could be a difference between trivia environments, but in my experience Akan and (especially) Kyoto School philosophy come up a couple times per year in QB fairly consistently these days - which seems about the right frequency.

Hey! Feels natural to continue the dialogue for a bit.

I think my problem with the Ottoman Empire question is mainly that for people who have some passing level of familiarity with the content, it increases the chance of "I don't know what you want" buzzing. Obviously, if someone has read the book, there's no issue, but most people won't have, and this seems like a problem. For instance, if someone identifies a Pamuk clue and says something like "the Turkish Empire", (which actually seems to be correct, and not in the answerline) they're getting negged for it, which seems quite unfair. The Byzantine question is a lot better, and there's been precedent for tossing it up in VFA before - I don't really have too many gripes with that.

My leading concern with the France question is that this sort of country-linked tossup has been sort of done to death. The point about 'keeping players on their toes' is obviously super valid and important to avoid transparency but simultaneously, topping the list of potential countries in questions such as this one seem to be France, Spain and Germany (perhaps not in that order). In this sense, perhaps this isn't keeping players on their toes, as one might just assume it's one of these three until it arises that it's actually the country of Kierkegaard, or Nagarjuna, or Francis Hutchison. There is also the danger that people could recognise the philosophers from their work but not know where they are from (perhaps thinking David Chalmers is American, for instance), although I don't really wish to defend that. The inclusion of Petrus Ramus in this tossup given it was a submission is very good writing imo. I'm mainly just bemoaning that there are philosophers from other countries that we may ask about instead, which isn't a particularly strong criticism admittedly, but still feels like a missed opportunity.

Thanks for the response!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

More insights from advanced stats later, but I wanted to respond to one comment in particular:

Bezbozhnik is probably too linguistically fraudable as a clue for state atheism as a hard part (this was discussed in playtesting but still made it into the set), considering it is doable from knowing very basic words in any Slavic language

As it turns out, this bonus part was (unfortunately) converted exactly zero times.

[MordecaiRickles]

I had a lot of fun playing this set, not too much I can say of any use. I just wanted to point to one particular answerline I wasn't thrilled about, which was the colonization of Ireland question. I buzzed somewhere during the second line with "land redistribution" and was negged, which felt a little unfair in a description acceptable tossup with the fairly ambiguous indicator "this process". There was nothing in the clues I'd heard by that point that explicitly told you to specify the country, so it's a little odd to me that an answer indicating a type of process rather than a specific instance (or, in this case, series of instances) of that type of process should be flat-out negged rather than prompted. Of course reading the clue in isolation might give you a better sense of the level of specificity the author is looking for but at game speed you're mostly hanging on to the last clue you heard and keywords from previous clues rather than nuances in phrasing from the first line. The question itself was completely fine, the clues were all solid and well-constructed, but I think in a description acceptable tossup requiring a relatively specific answer, it's good practice to provide clearer instructions for the kind of answer you're seeking or else to be fairly generous in your prompts. Anyway, relatively minor complaint; this same pack had a bunch of fun answerlines (this one, absinthe, biographies of samuel johnson) which is the main thing I remember from playing this round, so thanks for that.

[Restitutor27]

More insights from advanced stats later, but I wanted to respond to one comment in particular:

Bezbozhnik is probably too linguistically fraudable as a clue for state atheism as a hard part (this was discussed in playtesting but still made it into the set), considering it is doable from knowing very basic words in any Slavic language

As it turns out, this bonus part was (unfortunately) converted exactly zero times.

Fair enough haha - I think my issue with it is more reflective of a general writing style I have where I don't like clues whose difficulty hinges on players not recognising something that is nevertheless there. In other words it just isn't my preference to have questions that are in theory gettable from non-subject-relevant knowledge, even though doing so may actually be very difficult.

[ErikC]

I had a lot of fun playing this set, not too much I can say of any use. I just wanted to point to one particular answerline I wasn't thrilled about, which was the colonization of Ireland question. I buzzed somewhere during the second line with "land redistribution" and was negged, which felt a little unfair in a description acceptable tossup with the fairly ambiguous indicator "this process". There was nothing in the clues I'd heard by that point that explicitly told you to specify the country, so it's a little odd to me that an answer indicating a type of process rather than a specific instance (or, in this case, series of instances) of that type of process should be flat-out negged rather than prompted. Of course reading the clue in isolation might give you a better sense of the level of specificity the author is looking for but at game speed you're mostly hanging on to the last clue you heard and keywords from previous clues rather than nuances in phrasing from the first line. The question itself was completely fine, the clues were all solid and well-constructed, but I think in a description acceptable tossup requiring a relatively specific answer, it's good practice to provide clearer instructions for the kind of answer you're seeking or else to be fairly generous in your prompts. Anyway, relatively minor complaint; this same pack had a bunch of fun answerlines (this one, absinthe, biographies of samuel johnson) which is the main thing I remember from playing this round, so thanks for that.

I think that two separate things would have been needed to avoid this neg. There should have been some prompts about answers not indicating a place (in this case, region or country/island was accepted), and answers involving more synonyms like redistribution. The perspective of a player hanging onto the last things they heard is pretty different than how I think when writing, so I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.

I would warn against viewing a tossup on a country like France as "taking" a spot away from another country - its a conceit that can be done reasonably more times than this tournament philosophy was done in. If anything, a tossup on another western philosophy topic like Edmund Gettier is just as much "taking" a spot from non-western philosophy - I think there's plenty of good arguments that the subject is still too Eurocentric.

[ryanrosenberg]

Detailed stats from ACF Regionals are now available here and on a site-by-site basis here.

Detailed stats are now added from the games at the MIT mirror that recorded them.

I was remiss in my initial message in not thanking the people who helped compile these stats: Jordan Brownstein, whose qbj-processing script and initial website design made this possible; Ganon Evans, for communicating and compiling all the QBJs together; and all of the TDs and staff who used MODAQ and collected detailed stats. Thank you all for your hard work, it's awesome to see the results!

[n3v3rgr33n]

I would warn against viewing a tossup on a country like France as "taking" a spot away from another country - its a conceit that can be done reasonably more times than this tournament philosophy was done in. If anything, a tossup on another western philosophy topic like Edmund Gettier is just as much "taking" a spot from non-western philosophy - I think there's plenty of good arguments that the subject is still too Eurocentric.

Just clarifying something, I'm not making a comment on how Eurocentric the subject is - that is a(n important) problem that goes way beyond the scope of my complaint. I'm making a comment on how many other answerlines could have been asked about, whether we're talking about France or Gettier, that would have made for a more interesting tossup / more interesting content. For instance, why not have Paris as the answerline and include Ramus alongside more thinkers who attended the Sorbonne? We asked about Julia Kristeva (which was a very nice tu), why not some other thinkers like her - who may be lesser known in QB, to try and expand the canon a bit?

By the way, this isn't intended to be a personal attack at all; I thought the philosophy in this tournament was generally really well written. I have the same problems in lit (which I thought was also generally very well written) with tossups like Flannery O'Connor (who was asked about last year), or John Greenleaf Whittier or Abraham Lincoln (just a bit banal) where I felt...there is nothing explicitly wrong with those tossups but surely we can be a bit more creative than this? I hope this gets through as sincerely as intended because I did enjoy this tournament a lot.

[mutemagpie]

Thank you to everyone who worked on the set this year—I enjoyed many of the questions and generally had a great time!

I do have one particular gripe on the "utility" toss-up in Packet O, being that I buzzed part-way through the question (but prior to "the greatest expected value of this quantity" with "expected value" and was negged (with the protest ultimately not mattering and being thrown out). Being that expected value itself is a quantity that fits all of the clues in the toss-up and their wording (since probabilistic decision theory inherently involves working with expected values of outcome/utility) and that expected value of utility is equal to expected utility (an alternate acceptable answerline), I was dismayed by this apparent oversight while playing.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

By the way, this isn't intended to be a personal attack at all; I thought the philosophy in this tournament was generally really well written. I have the same problems in lit (which I thought was also generally very well written) with tossups like Flannery O'Connor (who was asked about last year), or John Greenleaf Whittier or Abraham Lincoln (just a bit banal) where I felt...there is nothing explicitly wrong with those tossups but surely we can be a bit more creative than this? I hope this gets through as sincerely as intended because I did enjoy this tournament a lot.

I don't think there's inherently anything inherently wrong with a Whittier or Lincoln TU. I would rather have a good tossup on an conceit that's been done 15 times before versus an experimental tossup with a tricky answerline that doesn't play as well. In fact, I think its important to have some of some core, canon questions like that to keep the set grounded. In American Literature alone, there were several cool tossups like "making a deal with the Devil," horse races, cruise ships, Buddhism from the Beat Generation, and Vietnamese authors, so I think it's far to say that the category wasn't being creative as a whole.

Flannery O'Connor is one of the most important American authors, so I don't think two tossups on her using largely different clues except for the giveaway is a big deal: I think an aversion to repeating answerlines to some degree isn't sustainable.

[touchpack]

I only played this on qbreader rather than an actual tournament since I'm retired from closed events but I just wanted to say the clue on laminar air flow hoods (which I used at work for years compounding sterile IV medications) made my day.

[yeah viv talk nah]

Just a minor comment - the (fantastic) bonus on Indigenous visual sovereignty states that "Lily Gladstone translated scenes into Osage and help restructure [Killers of the Flower Moon.]" However, most sources state that she, being of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, didn't speak Osage beforehand and learned it for the film. I'm guessing this line may be a misinterpretation of Gladstone's comment in this Hollywood Reporter round table, about asking the Osage language consultants to translate the script's English dialogue into Osage so she could better build her character. In addition, most sources, such as this interview with Gladstone, state that the rewrite was primarily a result of the filmmakers' interactions with the Osage Nation. Given the subject of the bonus, I feel it would have been better to clarify the Osage Nation's significant contribution as a whole to the film in addition to Gladstone's own personal input.

[vydu]

-a tossup on both "laminar flow" and "turbulence"? surely there's more in physics, even just fluid mechanics, to ask about.
-also, on "turbulence," i buzzed on the adaptive optics clue with "refraction" and was negged. i'm almost positive i just wasn't listening properly to the beginning of the question, but thought i'd make note of that.

The turbulence tossup was in astronomy and laminar in physics — agreed it’s not ideal answerline-wise, but I think they explored different enough topics that it hopefully wasn’t too jarring. Reading back, I think the wording of the adaptive optics clue isn’t clear enough to rule out “refraction,” so my apologies for that neg. From looking at the stats it seems like other clues in this tossup may have had similar issues getting players from knowledge to the correct answer -- if anyone has more feedback on this question, let me know.

I only played this on qbreader rather than an actual tournament since I'm retired from closed events but I just wanted to say the clue on laminar air flow hoods (which I used at work for years compounding sterile IV medications) made my day.

Thank you! That clue was from a cool sub by Columbia C :)

[Mitchellaneous]

By the way, this isn't intended to be a personal attack at all; I thought the philosophy in this tournament was generally really well written. I have the same problems in lit (which I thought was also generally very well written) with tossups like Flannery O'Connor (who was asked about last year), or John Greenleaf Whittier or Abraham Lincoln (just a bit banal) where I felt...there is nothing explicitly wrong with those tossups but surely we can be a bit more creative than this? I hope this gets through as sincerely as intended because I did enjoy this tournament a lot.

You must realize that this is a 3-dot tournament. Although it is meant to be challenging, it is not meant to be canon-busting, and especially for tossup answerlines. As Ganon (who heroically came to my defense) put it:

I would rather have a good tossup on an conceit that's been done 15 times before versus an experimental tossup with a tricky answerline that doesn't play as well. In fact, I think its important to have some of some core, canon questions like that to keep the set grounded. In American Literature alone, there were several cool tossups like "making a deal with the Devil," horse races, cruise ships, Buddhism from the Beat Generation, and Vietnamese authors, so I think it's far to say that the category wasn't being creative as a whole.

Flannery O'Connor is one of the most important American authors, so I don't think two tossups on her using largely different clues except for the giveaway is a big deal: I think an aversion to repeating answerlines to some degree isn't sustainable.

It is good to have a mix of creative answerlines with standard clues and standard answerlines with creative clues. In fact, I think it is necessary. According to qbreader, my idea for a tossup on O'Connor only cluing her two novels is something that has not been done since 2017 Skype Lit and a college qb tossup with an answerline of Whittier (a converted submission) hasn't been done since 2015 Missouri Open. I thought these very reasonable (and since they haven't been done in a while, refreshing) questions. As for Lincoln (which I agree, seems like an idea beaten to death), I chose to write that question because it gave me the opportunity to have the first two lines be on George Moses Horton (a slave-turned-poet who has merely been mentioned once before in qb) and one of the two poems in the "Memories of President Lincoln" section of Leaves of Grass which have hardly been mentioned in qb (there are only four, with the two notable ones being "When Lilacs" and "O Captain! My Captain!"). So as for your point of trying to expand the canon, these standard-answerline tossups do just that, or if not that entirely, they at least are a refresher of the many abandoned clues and ideas left behind in the desolate hell that is the packet archive.

[cwasims]

I do have one particular gripe on the "utility" toss-up in Packet O, being that I buzzed part-way through the question (but prior to "the greatest expected value of this quantity" with "expected value" and was negged (with the protest ultimately not mattering and being thrown out). Being that expected value itself is a quantity that fits all of the clues in the toss-up and their wording (since probabilistic decision theory inherently involves working with expected values of outcome/utility) and that expected value of utility is equal to expected utility (an alternate acceptable answerline), I was dismayed by this apparent oversight while playing.

That is a somewhat unfortunate neg, and I would've supported ruling "expected value" as promptable on a protest. It would not, however, be acceptable outright as it is an incomplete answer without specifying what variable the expected value is taken of. I will also note that the only clue in the first half of the tossup that is about expected utility specifically is the Choquet integral clue; the rest are about utility functions or values of utility.

[forrestw]

The turbulence tossup was in astronomy and laminar in physics — agreed it’s not ideal answerline-wise, but I think they explored different enough topics that it hopefully wasn’t too jarring. Reading back, I think the wording of the adaptive optics clue isn’t clear enough to rule out “refraction,” so my apologies for that neg. From looking at the stats it seems like other clues in this tossup may have had similar issues getting players from knowledge to the correct answer -- if anyone has more feedback on this question, let me know.

My neg on this question is probably a bit peculiar, but I'll still explain what happened from my perspective. Here is the clue I buzzed on, with my buzz marked by (#):

In accretion disks, magnetic fields act as springs in a mechanism leading (#) to the onset of this phenomenon, which causes increased angular momentum transport.

I will first note that the words heard before my buzz point more to the magnetorotational instability itself than turbulence--I have no doubt that you were aware of this and decided to include the directed prompt for that reason. Nevertheless, this could lead to the situation where someone recognizes the MRI and buzzes on it but has no idea it leads to turbulence (as happened to me.) I learned about the MRI from a friend studying it in a research project on planet formation, where the MRI causes pebbles to migrate . The answer I gave when prompted was migration since I was not familiar with the broader context/the mechanism of how it causes migration--I guess my answer is sort of correct for protoplanetary disks in particular though? Regardless, one could say that this is a skill issue, but I think my frustration was understandable. It's also worth noting that before this tossup, the only question to contain the words "magnetorotational", "instability", and "turbulence" or "turbulent" was from 2011 VCU Open, even though the MRI has come up many times--it's possible that many others just have a binary association between the MRI and accretion disks, which could have caused some of the other negs. (I am totally in favor of punishing this binary association though)

I negged before the adaptive optics clue, but if it had gotten there I probably would've negged with something like "convection" because I honest-to-god thought that the light distortion came from that -> changing density of air along the line of sight, no clue where I got that idea because it's clearly wrong based on a google search but does appear to be in the direction of truth (Wikipedia says the turbulence comes from air parcels of different temperatures interacting.) Maybe that could have led to some of the other negs? Not sure though.

I'm sorry if this post comes across as overly critical--I thought this was a really cool idea for a tossup that expands the astronomy canon into an area that deserves to be explored, I just think that the execution was flawed.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

I hope everyone enjoyed the set! Thanks to Eve for having me on the team late in the process and thanks to the other editors for being a pleasure to work with. Thanks to the playtesters and ACF members who helped proof my score clues too. I was really concerned with making sure my tossups were buzzable throughout, and I was glad that the vast majority were from the buzzpoints. I'm glad that the Into the Woods and Oldboy tossups seem to have been received pretty well, since they were some of my favorites to write, so I put them in early packets as a fun start to the day for most sites!

I had two things I wanted to briefly comment on/open up for discussion. One is that I did try to go for some more "Regs" easy parts to hit the 90% mark instead of 100%, but I was surprised with some of the low conversions on some. For instance, "George Harrison" with "lead guitarist of the Beatles who played the sitar" only getting 70% conversion was really shocking. Similarly, I expected Killers of the Flower Moon to be closer to a 100% versus 79%. These two parts were the first in their respective bonuses: did that throw people off at all? I like to have at least some E/M/H bonuses in a world increasingly dominated by M/E/H or H/E/M.

The other is that it seemed the ballet content played really hard. The Fokine TU (a great submission by ASU A) was the hardest of the tournament, being converted only 26% of rooms. I went out on a limb by making "arabesque" an easy part in the ballet bonus since it's such a core visual to the artform, but it got only 53% conversion. I would argue that both of these bonuses' conceits were pretty canon. Fokine is one of the most important choreographers of all time, but with the 49% neg rate on the tossup, I'd imagine many people might mix up the big names like Njinsky or Balanchine or whatnot. In general, I feel like OFA is straying more from ballet into other forms of dance, but I hope there's a balance found in the future.

I was really impressed with the quality of submissions and was able to use many of them, a list of which is below. In theme of the ongoing discussion of packet subs, many submissions I couldn't use because they were opera, which made up only 2/2 in my outlined subdistribution, but somewhere like a third or two-fifths of all the OFA submissions I received

improvisions bonus - Columbia A
sleepwalking/Bellini bonus - Harvard A
Nina Simone tossup - JHU A
Louis Kahn bonus - converted tossup from Claremont A
Handel opera bonus - Oxford A
Fokine tossup - ASU A
Alexander McQueen bonus - Toronto B
James Reese Europe - UNC C
Charlie Parker - Cambridge B
tattoo art bonus - Purdue A

There were a lot of cool questions I couldn't use. For instance, McGill B wrote a great one on Tehching Hsieh but was combined with ASU A and Toronto B in a packet so there wasn't room. South Carolina A had a great question on Mexican dance. I'd be happy to give feedback on specific questions if you'd like.

I decided to copy Chris a bit and make a YouTube playlist with at least one video that corresponds to every bonus - I did video here to capture both the visual and auditory aspects of OFA.

The full Oldboy spoiler in that tossup's giveaway seems kinda mean.

My bad. I wanted to contextualize the movie a bit more in the giveaway, but I should haven't spoiled it for those who may give it a watch after the tournament! I'll do better on that in the future.

Just a minor comment - the (fantastic) bonus on Indigenous visual sovereignty states that "Lily Gladstone translated scenes into Osage and help restructure [Killers of the Flower Moon.]" However, most sources state that she, being of Piegan Blackfeet and Nez Perce heritage, didn't speak Osage beforehand and learned it for the film. I'm guessing this line may be a misinterpretation of Gladstone's comment in this Hollywood Reporter round table, about asking the Osage language consultants to translate the script's English dialogue into Osage so she could better build her character. In addition, most sources, such as this interview with Gladstone, state that the rewrite was primarily a result of the filmmakers' interactions with the Osage Nation. Given the subject of the bonus, I feel it would have been better to clarify the Osage Nation's significant contribution as a whole to the film in addition to Gladstone's own personal input.

This is a great point, thanks for bringing it up. I watched an interview of Gladstone talking about how the rewrite and got the impression that she was helping in the process, but in doing, I phrased the question in a way that didn't credit the other translators like the Osage Nation. I wanted to keep this part relatively short, but I'll be more careful to make sure that cutting information out doesn't make it inaccurate in the future.

[Sima Guang Hater]

Disclaimer, not an editor.

[*] Packet D: If I remember right, the bonus part asking for "DNA adenine methylase" basically mentioned all of DNA, adenine, and the idea of adding a methyl group before teams' chance to give an answer, which seemed suboptimal to me.

I can see why this is suboptimal, but at least mentioning adenine makes sense to me - if you know the subject, the two possible answers are dam and dcm, and they're basically indistinguishable from each other unless you specify. Did people get to the answer just from the wording?

[*] Packet I: I'll want to look back at the exact wording, but a middle clue in the "Rama" tossup mentions a poem about "a devotee of" the figure being asked about, and then calls said poem a chalisa by Tulsidas. I took the bait and negged here with "Hanuman"; looking over the text of the Hanuman Chalisa this morning, it does repeatedly and explicitly praise Hanuman specifically for his devotion to Rama. I don't think I had grounds to protest or anything -- the problem is largely with me for not knowing enough -- but it might be worth looking at the exact wording to make sure it minimized confusion and clearly ruled out Hanuman for people who do know the Hanuman Chalisa and what it says. I'm also curious if to this was to some degree intentional negbait for players Like Me. (UPDATE 1/30: I've spoken more with Ashish about this question. It was accurate as written and produced with good intentions. I am retracting some of this original complaint.)

I would have made the same neg - I agree that the clue is probably unique, but I think second-order clues like this are a little unempathetic at game speed I try to avoid them. This is a personal choice, of course.

-"pulmonary surfactants" was a weird answerline made weirder by the straightforward description that they lower surface tension and are in the lungs

This is what it's actually called, I'm afraid. This was actually one of my favorite questions in the set, the leadin's pretty inspired (and will hopefully ensure that the MD candidates playing the set don't suggest using daptomycin for pneumonia, as one of my colleagues did and got chewed out)

[Cheynem]

For instance, "George Harrison" with "lead guitarist of the Beatles who played the sitar" only getting 70% conversion was really shocking.

Sorry, old man! The future is now.

[vydu]

My neg on this question is probably a bit peculiar, but I'll still explain what happened from my perspective. Here is the clue I buzzed on, with my buzz marked by (#):

In accretion disks, magnetic fields act as springs in a mechanism leading (#) to the onset of this phenomenon, which causes increased angular momentum transport.

I will first note that the words heard before my buzz point more to the magnetorotational instability itself than turbulence--I have no doubt that you were aware of this and decided to include the directed prompt for that reason. Nevertheless, this could lead to the situation where someone recognizes the MRI and buzzes on it but has no idea it leads to turbulence (as happened to me.) I learned about the MRI from a friend studying it in a research project on planet formation, where the MRI causes pebbles to migrate . The answer I gave when prompted was migration since I was not familiar with the broader context/the mechanism of how it causes migration--I guess my answer is sort of correct for protoplanetary disks in particular though? Regardless, one could say that this is a skill issue, but I think my frustration was understandable. It's also worth noting that before this tossup, the only question to contain the words "magnetorotational", "instability", and "turbulence" or "turbulent" was from 2011 VCU Open, even though the MRI has come up many times--it's possible that many others just have a binary association between the MRI and accretion disks, which could have caused some of the other negs. (I am totally in favor of punishing this binary association though)

I negged before the adaptive optics clue, but if it had gotten there I probably would've negged with something like "convection" because I honest-to-god thought that the light distortion came from that -> changing density of air along the line of sight, no clue where I got that idea because it's clearly wrong based on a google search but does appear to be in the direction of truth (Wikipedia says the turbulence comes from air parcels of different temperatures interacting.) Maybe that could have led to some of the other negs? Not sure though.

I'm sorry if this post comes across as overly critical--I thought this was a really cool idea for a tossup that expands the astronomy canon into an area that deserves to be explored, I just think that the execution was flawed.

Thanks for the considered response -- I think your feedback is all entirely fair. I did worry that the prompt on the magnetorotational instability would lead people to think of the eventual astrophysical processes that occur because of it, rather than turbulence -- accretion was the main one I was worried about, which is why I put it in front of the sentence, but I didn't know about/neglected to think of other contexts in which MRI plays a role, like planetary formation. I probably should have noted that this was some phenomenon occurring within the fluid/plasma, and frontloaded the more salient detail about it causing angular momentum losses in the disk. It's a good lesson in carefully phrasing clues in the form of "X leads to Y" -- often there are a lot of things downstream of Y that could be plausible answers. Thinking this way probably would have helped me write the adaptive optics clue better too. Regardless, I'm glad you appreciated the content, even if the question itself didn't work so well.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Scatterrshot thoughts on many areas, with some lessons learned about what today's field seems to know, based on looking at the detailed stats:

A lot of answers that used to be fairly run-of-the-mill, common bonus parts when I was an up-and-coming player (2013-16 era) have crept up to hard part difficulty. The Battle of Kirina, for example, played out as a hard part rather than a medium (11% conversion); Gayatri Spivak (14% - EDIT looks like this got obfuscated quite a bit) and Johan Gottlieb Fichte (14%) were similar.

Some other low-conversion numbers that surprised me: Martha Graham (with Noguchi mentioned! - 15%) reinforces the above view that the field really isn't great at ballet; Aegir (with Lokasenna, but not "sea god" - 25%) and Bless Me, Ultima (with full information - 26%) were also a bit surprising,

Olga Tokarczuk, contra earlier posts in this thread, certainly still seems like a fine medium part with 57% conversion; I wonder how much of the perception of her as "surely an easy part" comes from emphasis on Nobel Prize winners in many other trivia formats. Another such winner, Abdulrazak Gurnah, rang in at 46%.

Pedro Paramo and Han Kang have truly made themselves canon staples, with over 75% conversion each. Maybe they need a bit of a rest, ala Danticat of ages past.

I probably should have dropped "story" or some other clue from the quilts bonus part, which got nearly 80% conversion. It also seems like people are very much up on their Emily Kngwarreye knowledge, with Australia converted by 36% of players.

I kind of saw this coming due to current events and it looks like the bonus as a whole played out fine, but Amalek and the Book of Kings got similar conversion rates.

Limbo ended up with 40% conversion - I am guessing a bunch of folks said "purgatory" on that one?

Jonathan Magin was right, militias was a bit tough for an easy part. My suspicions that Judith Leyster might be a bit tough for a medium also played out, though 31% conversion isn't the worst in the world.

Jaguars with 63% conversion suggests to me that people's knowledge of Mesoamerican myth is far below what it was when I was younger, while their knowledge of Mesoamerican archaeology has increased dramatically. This is probably a relatively positive shift overall, bringing things more in line with general interest knowledge bases.

As I suspected, Robert Clive with full information is now a fairly solid medium part, at 40% conversion.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at 73% conversion, with Rosetti namedropped, is just wild to me; again, more stuff that used to come up way more is now harder!

Krishna at 76% with the Bhagavad Gita named is also quite surprising, given that regular difficulty sets seem to be more comfortable dipping deeper into Hindu content.

[n3v3rgr33n]

It is good to have a mix of creative answerlines with standard clues and standard answerlines with creative clues. In fact, I think it is necessary. According to qbreader, my idea for a tossup on O'Connor only cluing her two novels is something that has not been done since 2017 Skype Lit and a college qb tossup with an answerline of Whittier (a converted submission) hasn't been done since 2015 Missouri Open. I thought these very reasonable (and since they haven't been done in a while, refreshing) questions. As for Lincoln (which I agree, seems like an idea beaten to death), I chose to write that question because it gave me the opportunity to have the first two lines be on George Moses Horton (a slave-turned-poet who has merely been mentioned once before in qb) and one of the two poems in the "Memories of President Lincoln" section of Leaves of Grass which have hardly been mentioned in qb (there are only four, with the two notable ones being "When Lilacs" and "O Captain! My Captain!"). So as for your point of trying to expand the canon, these standard-answerline tossups do just that, or if not that entirely, they at least are a refresher of the many abandoned clues and ideas left behind in the desolate hell that is the packet archive.

Thought this was a great response, nicely done! Didn't realise the Horton uniqueness at all in the moment but looking back, that is a great way to clue Lincoln. Enjoyed this tournament and once again want to emphasise that I thought this was the best Regs I've played in my four years of QB.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

A lot of answers that used to be fairly run-of-the-mill, common bonus parts when I was an up-and-coming player (2013-16 era) have crept up to hard part difficulty. [...] for example, played out as a hard part rather than a medium (11% conversion); Gayatri Spivak (14%)

In my opinion, the reason this bonus part played poorly was that it was written pretty poorly.

"This thinker is often credited with anticipating epistemic injustice by positing the concept of epistemic violence, in which marginalized groups are unable to speak and are rendered as the other."

The only clue that seems unique to Spivak is the phrase "epistemic violence," which doesn't even that important to her work, but it is mentioned in the Wikipedia page for epistemic injustice (the first part of the bonus)! While I generally liked this set especially the social science (lot's of cool econ content!) and the literature, I felt that the philosophy was poorly executed. For example, in the editors packet, there was a tossup on Scholasticism, which in addition to be extremely transparent, is kind of a bad idea for tossup. It's like only marginally better than, say, writing a tossup on analytic philosophy or continental philosophy, because Scholasticism wasn't really a unified school or movement like, say, Stoicism, but more a way of doing philosophy.

[ErikC]

The only clue that seems unique to Spivak is the phrase "epistemic violence," which doesn't even that important to her work, but it is mentioned in the Wikipedia page for epistemic injustice (the first part of the bonus)! While I generally liked this set especially the social science (lot's of cool econ content!) and the literature, I felt that the philosophy was poorly executed. For example, in the editors packet, there was a tossup on Scholasticism, which in addition to be extremely transparent, is kind of a bad idea for tossup. It's like only marginally better than, say, writing a tossup on analytic philosophy or continental philosophy, because Scholasticism wasn't really a unified school or movement like, say, Stoicism, but more a way of doing philosophy.

The bonus cluing Spivak went through several versions from the original submission, and I agree the final product that didn't mention her work drawing on Gramsci (because I changed the easy part to ask for Gramsci) ended up being obscurant and too difficult.

The Scholasticism tossup was intended to engage with a few different thinkers from the period, but I'm open to the idea that it is too broad/disparate to be tossed up as a singular "thing". I am curious about why else you thought the philosophy was poorly executed, whether its the conceits behind questions, the clue selection, or technical problems.

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

The only clue that seems unique to Spivak is the phrase "epistemic violence," which doesn't even that important to her work, but it is mentioned in the Wikipedia page for epistemic injustice (the first part of the bonus)! While I generally liked this set especially the social science (lot's of cool econ content!) and the literature, I felt that the philosophy was poorly executed. For example, in the editors packet, there was a tossup on Scholasticism, which in addition to be extremely transparent, is kind of a bad idea for tossup. It's like only marginally better than, say, writing a tossup on analytic philosophy or continental philosophy, because Scholasticism wasn't really a unified school or movement like, say, Stoicism, but more a way of doing philosophy.

The bonus cluing Spivak went through several versions from the original submission, and I agree the final product that didn't mention her work drawing on Gramsci (because I changed the easy part to ask for Gramsci) ended up being obscurant and too difficult.

The Scholasticism tossup was intended to engage with a few different thinkers from the period, but I'm open to the idea that it is too broad/disparate to be tossed up as a singular "thing". I am curious about why else you thought the philosophy was poorly executed, whether its the conceits behind questions, the clue selection, or technical problems.

Actually looking back over the questions, I think my assessment above was way too harsh. Other than the Scholasticism tossup, I think most tossups were fine conceit-wise. I had bigger issues with the clue selection and execution. Some of the question, like, the Being and Nothingness bonus, for example, felt really phoned in. I feel like I've heard that exact same bonus with facticity as a hard part like a dozen times before. I wasn't a huge fan of the Popper tossup, because it did the classic thing where we spend most of the early clues talking about things people rarely read anymore. I thought the Bertrand Russell tossup was delightful, but I feel like it would have been suited to Other Ac, because it really doesn't engage with any of his philosophical work. The J.S. Mill and Gettier tossups were really excellent. In general, I would have liked to see more answerlines on concepts rather than thinkers, but I understand this can be difficult.