whitesoxfan wrote:1P, 1 SS
whitesoxfan wrote:I don't think that increasing the number of questions purely to increase the length of the game is a good objective. The reason to increase the number of questions is that the high school distribution lends itself better to 21/21 or 22/22 than 20/20, and 24 is the next nice round number.
Smuttynose Island wrote:These are just some of my thoughts on the matter so take them as you will:
It also has the potential to make sets harder. By increasing the number of questions that you have to write in "hard" areas, you start writing on even harder answerlines, which can negatively impact the game. If you believe that you can expand a packet's length in such a way that this doesn't happen, or is very minimized, then go ahead, and do so, but don't if you start having to stretch to fill historically difficult categories.
Also I think that there is a lot to be said about having a consistent national format as it allows teams to quickly familiarized themselves with how the game works.
Lastly, yes more questions can reduce the possibility of upsets, but where do you draw the line? 20, 24, 30, 100 questions? Eventually you are going to have to arbitrarily chose a cutoff point. Right now 20 TUs and 20 bonuses seems to work well and allows tournaments to finish at reasonable times. At some point the length of each round comes into play. NAQT manages to avoid long round lengths by having shorter questions, something that many people complain about and allow for, arguably, less gradation of knowledge, which can possibly override the purpose of adding more questions in this post's original thread, namely to reduce upsets.
Smuttynose Island wrote:whitesoxfan wrote:I don't think that increasing the number of questions purely to increase the length of the game is a good objective. The reason to increase the number of questions is that the high school distribution lends itself better to 21/21 or 22/22 than 20/20, and 24 is the next nice round number.
I think that you might have misinterpreted what I said, although if you did not then I apologize, although I do feel like what follows is probably still a worthwhile point to repeatedly expound. I am absolutely against making rounds longer just to make the game longer. That's what I cautioned against in my last paragraph. At some point the extra length added to each match becomes more detrimental to the game than the reduction in the probability of an upset occurring serves as a gain.
whitesoxfan wrote:I've thought this same thing before. It seems to me that every round should include at least 4 history, 4 science, 4 literature, 3 fine arts, 2 RM, 1P, 1 SS, .5 Math, .5 Geo, .5 current events, .5 trash. This adds up to 20.5, and those numbers are minimums in my opinion. The only options seem to be to reduce 1 or 2 categories each round, which would cause the result of games to fluctuate more, or to raise the number of questions in a match.
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:The reason I proposed 24 is because there is already a precedent for having that many questions in a match. 20 and 24 are both already arbitrarily chosen cutoff points, but nearly every single non-NAQT set uses the former. I don't think questions have to be as short as NAQT to make this work on time, with a reasonable linecap of sets that use 24/24 packets, this would add at most 15-30 minutes to a tournament.
jonpin wrote:The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:The reason I proposed 24 is because there is already a precedent for having that many questions in a match. 20 and 24 are both already arbitrarily chosen cutoff points, but nearly every single non-NAQT set uses the former. I don't think questions have to be as short as NAQT to make this work on time, with a reasonable linecap of sets that use 24/24 packets, this would add at most 15-30 minutes to a tournament.
I dispute this. In my opinion, turning a standard twelve-round 20/20 tournament into a tournament using 24/24 will either (a) shorten your tournament to eleven rounds, maybe even ten, or (b) add almost an hour to the tournament.
Leucippe and Clitophon wrote:In my mind, the important consideration is match length vs number of matches. If you had an eight team tournament, I wouldn't see anything wrong with playing a full round robin of 30/30, and there probably are other scenarios that would lend themselves to similar solutions. With larger tournaments, playing lots of matches becomes necessary, so it makes sense that question writers who want their questions used at several sites are going to keep producing lots of 20/20 rounds.
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:The reason I proposed 24 is because there is already a precedent for having that many questions in a match. 20 and 24 are both already arbitrarily chosen cutoff points, but nearly every single non-NAQT set uses the former. I don't think questions have to be as short as NAQT to make this work on time, with a reasonable linecap of sets that use 24/24 packets, this would add at most 15-30 minutes to a tournament.
Smuttynose Island wrote:Yeah, this is extremely optimistic. Let's say that you do move to 24/24 rounds. That means that it is reasonable to expect that every 5 rounds you've essentially added an extra round to your tournament. That means that you've added atleast 30 minutes and most likely 40-50 minutes to your tournament. At this point it is reasonable to expect a tournament to run 10 rounds, so that means that the additional questions add two whole 20/20 rounds to your tournament, which adds an extra hour to hour and 40 minutes to your tournament. Adding this amount of time to a tournament will probably have a detrimental effect on team participation as we already have problems getting some teams to stay for entire tournaments and newer teams may just get exhausted or bored by the length of a tournament, especially when they could be playing more rounds against more equal opponents in the same time.
JordanKuhn wrote:YAGHH I typed up a whole 4 paragraphs and then my computer froze so I lost all I had. But I'll restart, with a shorter version;Smuttynose Island wrote:Yeah, this is extremely optimistic. Let's say that you do move to 24/24 rounds. That means that it is reasonable to expect that every 5 rounds you've essentially added an extra round to your tournament. That means that you've added atleast 30 minutes and most likely 40-50 minutes to your tournament. At this point it is reasonable to expect a tournament to run 10 rounds, so that means that the additional questions add two whole 20/20 rounds to your tournament, which adds an extra hour to hour and 40 minutes to your tournament. Adding this amount of time to a tournament will probably have a detrimental effect on team participation as we already have problems getting some teams to stay for entire tournaments and newer teams may just get exhausted or bored by the length of a tournament, especially when they could be playing more rounds against more equal opponents in the same time.
Think about it this way, though; playing 2 extra rounds adds the time of, duh, 2 extra rounds. In between any rounds there is always an inevitable halt caused by the breaks. Simply adding 4 questions to a round would not add any extra score-calculating, any extra manouvering of people, no room switching, no more bracket figuring, etc. Adding 4 questions to a packet, and therefore adding 40 questinos through the tournament, is a lot easier and less time consuming than adding the same 40 questions in 2 whole new rounds. I propose that adding a simple 4 questions per round won't change the total length of the tournament by an hour and a half, but by substantially less, maybe less than 45 minutes.
Smuttynose Island wrote:30-40minutes is how long it actually takes slow moderators to straight up read 20/20.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:A bigger question is, are upsets that bad a thing? If everyone basically knew going into each round who was going to win, it would take more of the excitement out of the game. There's obviously a balance to be struck here; it shouldn't be random (like having potential 220 point swings on the basis of one tossup in the second quarter in Questions Unlimited format). But I don't think this is really a problem in any legit quizbowl format right now.
whitesoxfan wrote:I think the problem with 20/20 is that we're forced to choose between (A) punishing certain categories, such as philosophy and math, and (B) varying the distribution from round to round, which is also undesirable.
Fred wrote:Upsets happen often enough on 20/20 where they are a possible result without making it a meaningless "anyone can win regardless of talent level" thing. I'm not sure if "But I don't think this is really a problem in any legit quizbowl format right now." is trying to say that upsets are impossible on 20/20; if it is, I'd have to disagree.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Fred wrote:Upsets happen often enough on 20/20 where they are a possible result without making it a meaningless "anyone can win regardless of talent level" thing. I'm not sure if "But I don't think this is really a problem in any legit quizbowl format right now." is trying to say that upsets are impossible on 20/20; if it is, I'd have to disagree.
No, that's not what I meant. Upsets are of course possible on 20/20 and indeed do happen all the time. And if you went to 24/24, of course they could still happen too. I just don't see the level of upsets as a problem, and if anything, a bit of uncertainty probably adds to the fun of it for many teams.
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