CaptainSwing wrote:Here is how I see this situation:
The November schedule, as usual, is locked down w/ Fall, MO, and Delta Burke. That doesn't need to be changed.
Late October has Penn-ance, which seems like the right kind of event to put immediately before Fall. Now, two harder tournaments in the fall is something that can and should happen, but I don't think one of those events should happen in early October. Carleton is on it's way with writing a MUT-level event, and we are looking to team up with Illinois. In the fall, when teams are trying to recruit and people are looking for warm-up events for ACF Fall, I think that kind of tournament is more appropriate. I would like to offer up Carleton's tournament or our impending collaboration to go in the early October slot.
MIchigan's harder tournament should happen in mid or late September alongside ACF Novice. This can be an event that veteran quiz bowlers can play while teams as a whole are busy assembling their membership for the new year, etc. This seems like a more efficient use of time and gives us a nice balance in the fall: Two novice events (ACF Novice and Delta Burke), two easier tournament (ours and Fall), a regular difficulty tournament (Penn-ance), a regular+ tournament (Mich), and a true open event (MO).
Guys, we're on track for
one regular-difficulty event in the fall. One. Don't pretend that four easy tournaments, two hard tournaments, and one regular tournament is a "nice balance". It isn't. The point of scheduling reform is to get a schedule of multiple tournaments that
all college teams can play against all other college teams, and that means maximizing the number of
regular, for-everyone tournaments while minimizing the amount of everything else. (I also don't think that getting circuits to host two separate events in the latter half of September is realistic, when a lot of schools aren't back until late in the month (or early October) and teams are scrambling to get their novices to one place and their experts to another within that two-week window, but I could be persuaded by a good argument.)
This is why I'm trying to argue that Michigan should reduce its difficulty, rather than reduce the number of possible regular events to one by keeping it BARGE-level (and thereby hard). What I was trying to get Michigan to realize was this: I didn't actually make a consession in the last post, I made an if statement. It's only
if all your bonuses' easy and middle parts look like ACF Regionals, and
if sixteen to eighteen of the tossup answer lines per packet would look reasonable at ACF Regionals, and
if no tossup exceeds the eight-line limit -- basically, if the "plus" next to "Regionals" is as small as you can make it -- that this tournament is going to be an appropriate event to add to the fall. Otherwise, move it or don't write it. I would like you guys to have a plan for actually controlling yourselves more this time, given that MOO had some of the worst difficulty and length control of the past year - whether that involves playtesting, or inviting a suitable non-student to supervise you, or something similar.
The reason why it's bad to have multiple hard tournaments in the fall, Libo, is the same reason it's bad to have multiple hard tournaments in the spring (and the same reason I'll argue against having more than one hard tournament in the spring besides ICT and Nats, and the same reason I think BARGE and PR should not have both happened). It's because hard tournaments crowd out space for
regular tournaments that everyone can just play, which is the most important thing to secure in a healthy college circuit.
As I said before, there does seem to be a spot in December. If people want to go ahead and say December should never have college tournaments, due to the ubiquity of exams and the possibility of high school tournaments, they should come out and argue that explicitly, which would make managing October and November all the more important.