The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is the global announcement for Sun God Invitational, a regular difficulty tournament set to be mirrored in Fall 2018. We will be aiming for the controlled end of ACF Regionals/something like Terrapin 2016, with an overarching goal to make questions as accessible as reasonably possible.

The tournament will be primarily written by current members of the UCSD quiz bowl club, with significant help from a few others. If you would like to assist in the production of this tournament as a writer or potential editor, please contact me at [email protected].

For now, this will be a closed collegiate tournament with a single online open mirror prior to all physical mirrors, just like with the last couple of Early Fall Tournaments. Any requests to bend eligibility rules should go through the host site, who should notify me.

Head Editor:
Jason Cheng

Editors:
Will Alston
Aseem Keyal
Jonathan Luck

The tentative distribution will look like this (subject to change):

4/4 Literature
-> 1/1 Long-Form Fiction
-> 1/1 Non-Epic Poetry
-> 0.5/0.5 Drama
-> 0.5/0.5 Short-Form Fiction (blurred lines such as novels vs novellas will probably end up in long-form fiction)
-> 1/1 "Miscellaneous" (nonfiction, literary criticism, epic poetry, other literary questions, mixed, or more drama/short fiction)

4/4 History
-> 1/1 United States
-> 1/1 Continental Europe
-> 1/1 Non-European, Non-Commonwealth ("World")
-> 1/1 Classics, Commonwealth, and Other

Historiography will appear in any of the 4 history categories as the editors see fit, either as clues or as answers in tossups/bonuses.

4/4 Science
-> 1/1 Biology
-> 1/1 Chemistry
-> 1/1 Physics
-> 0.5/0.5 Math
-> 0.5/0.5 Other Science


3/3 Arts
-> 1/1 Painting and Sculpture
-> 1/1 Music
-> 1/1 "Other" Art

4/4 RMPSS
-> 1/1 Religion (expansive)
-> 1/1 Mythology (inc. questions about mythography/folktales)
-> 0.73/0.73 Philosophy (will reflect a "heterodox" approach, whatever that means)
-> 1/1 Social Science (will reflect a "heterodox" approach, whatever that means)

1.72/1.72 Geography/Misc. (tiny amount of trash, but mostly other academic/general knowledge)

Hosts who wish to mirror this set should contact me at [email protected]. The mirror fee for a host site is $45 per team in attendance.

Hosts:
November 10th

• Johns Hopkins
• UIUC
• Rutgers
• New College Florida

November 17th

• UC San Diego
• Toronto

December 1st

• UT-Austin

It's obviously incredibly early to tell, but is this tournament expected to be ready for the early fall slot (like EFT), the mid-late November slot (like Terrapin/WAO II) or some other time?

The tournament will probably be ready by early fall, but we’ll let it be mirrored for as long as demand exists until, say, early winter 2019

We’ll have a firm date for the online open mirror (which will precede all physical mirrors) at some point further along the production timelin, likely at the end of this season when people start scheduling for next year.

Now that we've written about 10% of the set, I can fairly comfortably say that this set will be on the upper end of "medium / standard" difficulty. The questions are about halfway in difficulty between 2018 Regionals and 2017 EFT, and we intend for the set to turn out at about this difficulty as well. I can comfortably say this set is appropriate for "strong novice teams and up."

A couple of updates:

1) We will be making a detailed stats platform (buzzermetrics/buzzpoint data/detailed conversion stats etc) available to hosts for our questions. As such, we are seeking bids from hosts that can guarantee internet access for moderators to use online scoresheets and train moderators to use online scoresheets that will be used to create detailed stats. We do not anticipate moderator training to be difficult; the online scoresheets look similar to paper scoresheets, and there is a short 5-minute tutorial video available which can be easily played in the morning.

We highly encourage hosts to use of the stats platform for the useful data these stats provide to writers and editors on how their questions played out at tournament sites nationwide, with a variety of players, teams, and circuits with a variety of different strengths.

2) In accordance to this, we will be requesting that all mirrors be held on the two weekends of November 10, 2018 (11/10) and November 17, 2018 (11/17). We are willing to make exceptions in extreme cases--for example, hosts who've already made arrangements with me or any potential out-of-US hosts--but we will adhere to this schedule in order to foster better discussion of sets after they're played. This is a change from my previous post stating that this tournament would be generally available for mirrors for the entire Fall 2018 period.

3) The Skype playtest mirror will still be in September on a Saturday or Sunday between September 15-29 depending on what I decide once I've actually thought about this--the set will certainly be ready for mirroring by then!

4) The set's over a third done and I think it's p good

Jason Cheng wrote:A couple of updates:

3) The Skype playtest mirror will still be in September on a Saturday or Sunday between September 15-29 depending on what I decide once I've actually thought about this--the set will certainly be ready for mirroring by then!

4) The set's over a third done and I think it's p good

Updates:

1) The playtest mirror will be Saturday, September 29th. An announcement will be forthcoming

2) We're 50% done at this point, and I think it's still p good. I do hope Jason and Isaac agree

Updated the announcement post with a current list of hosts; reminder to prospective hosts to contact me as soon as possible about potential/concrete bids so we can sort out a slate of mirror sites!

Are there any plans for a mirror of this in California?

UCSD and Berkeley, which both have representative editors on this set, are in the process of figuring something out for their respective sides of the state--no confirmed dates yet, however (most schools in California inc. UCSD haven't started yet and Berkeley has run into some other scheduling issues, from what I've been told)

Is there any update on the list of hosts? Thanks

Progress update: The set is 98% done at this point and mostly packetized.

I think we ended up hitting our target difficulty of "about halfway between 2017 EFT and this past year's Regionals" though the set obviously has a different field than an introductory tournament like EFT. I'm obviously biased but I think it should be a comfortable set for strong novices and experienced high school players, if you're on the fence about bringing more teams.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: ↑Mon Nov 05, 2018 3:23 pm I think we ended up hitting our target difficulty of "about halfway between 2017 EFT and this past year's Regionals" though the set obviously has a different field than an introductory tournament like EFT. I'm obviously biased but I think it should be a comfortable set for strong novices and experienced high school players, if you're on the fence about bringing more teams.

Chiming in to say that this is an excellent set and did a great job of hitting its target difficulty. You should all definitely play it.

The private discussion forum is up--apply to join under Usergroups in the User Control Panel ("2018 Sun God"). Feel free to join and post your thoughts, comments, and concerns about the set!

As an update, which is far too late (and was entirely my fault for not announcing earlier), we cut down Philosophy by 4/4 in this tournament (total of 11/11 across the 15 packets of pure philosophy), with the intention of making up somewhat for it in other clue space. To briefly summarize from the private discussion group:

...we wanted to make room for more Other Ac / Misc questions. We felt philosophy was an easy place to trim from because it's one of the less accessible categories - we got this idea from MUT 2014. The usual trend is to cut into myths/legends for this, and we chose differently.

Again, I apologize for not updating the distribution sooner--we had made this decision last December (almost 12 months ago), and I simply neglected to announce this choice.

Scoresheets have been sent out for this upcoming weekend's mirrors. Thank you for playing or staffing Sun God Invitational!

Currently the distribution adds up to 20.45/20.45
Is the geo/misc distribution supposed to be 1.27/1.27?