hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Thanks, again, for providing extended feedback. I'll post the requested questions once I'm back at my computer (or maybe Raynor can). Corry, I actually disagree with you on several of your difficulty assessments, and while this is anecdotal, a lot of the specific difficult answerlines you provided were converted by teams for which I read. I don't think it's useful for me to systematically go through and explain why I deemed each one an appropriate hard part (and I agree with you on a few of them: Churchill, Hymir, Goguryeo), but I will if you want. The last two rounds were intended to be a step up in difficulty, so I'm actually cool with MUT-level hard parts such as Bashir Gemayel and Gromyko in those rounds.
Charlie, I still think you're a little confused. This tournament didn't try to (and no tournament should try to) have a mix of easy and difficult questions, but rather a mix of easy answerlines (George Washington) and hard answerlines (Heian Period). This isn't a new concept or anything, of course; we just announced it as a way of noting that HFT pulls from an expanded tossup answerline space, but still focuses on tossing up core things. I'm not disagreeing with you that some questions probably had earlier average buzz points than others, or that a few had difficulty cliffs, but I think it's pretty untrue to say that a significant chunk of the questions in this set were similar to ones in an A-set.
My bad. I completely misread the original tournament post - thought it said "hard and easy questions" not just "hard and easy answerlines".
However, regardless of whether this was unintentional, that feeling was at least anecdotally expressed by lots of people I talked to. That might even be why I got confused; to me, it really did feel like a mix of "easy" and "hard" questions. Whether you want to attribute difficulty to misplaced clues, answerline difficulty, or any such things, I heard experienced players state that the first lines of tossups or hard parts of bonuses often felt either far too easy or far too hard for the stated level. I don't know how to respond to the "significant chunk" part, as it's not something I'm really qualified to touch on. The only subjects I have any type of expertise in are myth and philo, and to me at least it felt like a number of these questions were either uncharacteristically hard, or uncharacteristically easy. I also want to make it clear that I'm not saying a lot of questions were "like A-set questions", merely that they had attributes (transparency, misplaced clues) that made them feel as if the clues or clue order came from a far easier packet.
I know a lot of my question requests got buried in the horribly rambly finals-week walls of text I've created, so I'll make them a little clearer. Can I please see the Philosophy bonus from round 10 with legalism, the Myth bonus from round 10 with Coyote / spider / foxes, the dwarves tossup, the hades tossup, the "death" tossup (myth, referenced "hercules wrestled a god of this type"), and the Locke tossup? Thanks.
