(part of this is copied over from the Discord)
I want to first thank all the other contributors to the set, who helped make the final product much more diverse and interesting than anything a single person could have made. In particular:
- Brian Chen/betaveros contributed a whopping 33 tossups in a variety of areas, despite having little QB experience beforehand. I was very impressed by how quickly he caught on to quizbowl writing style and cluing, to the point where his last tossup (on technical interviews) went into the set with basically zero editing.
- I was starting to burn out towards the last few weeks of writing, so Benji Nguyen was a real lifesaver by writing a handful of fun and interesting questions that required no editing. He also helped out with proofreading and left very useful feedback on both individual questions and the set as a whole.
- At the same time, Wayne Zhao contributed novel tossups that filled gaps in areas I knew very little about (e.g. the more physics-oriented questions on the no-cloning theorem and MRI).
- Josh Xiong, Ryan Gossiaux, and Ryan Rosenberg (who was also a playtester) also contributed excellent questions on a variety of topics.
- The playtesters (Aakash Patel, Ryan Rosenberg, Steven Silverman, and Ming-ho Yee) all provided incredibly helpful comments across the set, catching many suboptimal clues or answerline choices.
Before the mirror, my biggest worry was difficulty - I aimed to keep the answerlines accessible on average, with a few harder topics here and there, but I had no clue how many of the questions would play. Thankfully, it seems like most people I talked to on Sunday were having fun, so I hope I succeeded in making a set that was hard but not a slog. Benji also helped a lot with this, by pushing for easier answerlines throughout the set.
I'll end this with two personal notes:
- When announcing this tournament, I did not fully appreciate how much time question-writing can take - I sunk way more time and effort into the set than I'd like to admit. (I have no clue how Will Nediger does it.)
- However, I also found first-hand how fun and rewarding it can be to do quizbowl writing. So, while I don't plan on making another mostly-solo event any time soon, I would be happy to contribute to similar events others may be writing, and might try to get more into writing/editing in general.
