This reminded me of the fact that adherence to packet submission guidelines is abysmal. For ACF Fall we returned about 20 submissions back to teams for fixing things. There were probably a few more that we didn't get to examining, and some packets that erred but it was not worth our time to do more back and forth. Fairly early on, we started doing a quick heuristic approach to checking packets - If your packet got the basics right, we figured you got most things right. Even then, there were enough non-adherent submissions that it was worth our time to make a template email with recurring mistakes on it that was sent back to the teams with errant packets. All kinds of teams were guilty of lapses - it was not limited to "younger teams."ThisIsMyUsername wrote: [...] quite a few teams made no attempt to conform to the required distribution for the Fine Arts. [...] A consequence of this is that very many questions have to be thrown out and replaced, regardless of quality, because people either could not or did not follow instructions.
Charlie's original post suggested that teams that did this would have their packets sent back to them, and would not earn the discount corresponding to the deadline at which they turned the packet in. [...]
In future, when you're submitting packets, please make everyone's life easier by simply following the distribution.
I'd like to know: why is everyone so awful at following these guidelines editors keep telling you about? They aren't asking you to do a favor. Non-adherence genuinely affects the ability of editors to produce tournaments.
You want to know why your questions weren't used? Well, probably because I (or another editor) can't be bothered if you can't be bothered. An editor probably looked at your questions and said "Crap, this team didn't do what we told them to do. Their stuff is probably no good." Or you want to know why a specific bonus wasn't in-line with the rest of the bonuses? Well, probably because we didn't have the time to do fine tune the middle part of a bonus when there were entire categories whose distributions needed to be well balanced.
Do what your editor asks you to do. I don't ask for anything more. Follow distributions, format your documents appropriately, help make everyone's experience better.