The Quizbowl Resource Center

Mike Bentley

Oh also I should mention that a few questions from this set were playtested last year. I'm guessing most people have forgotten them but pay attention if you participated in that.

Mike Bentley

I'm going to be holding NSC playtesting between now and when the set's finished. There will be at least 2 waves. Wave 1 will definitely happen. At least one of Wave 2 or 3 will happen. Wave 1 - April weekends and the occasional weeknight starting this week: -Randomized (not packetized) tossups and b...

Mike Bentley

Given how hard most of those sample questions are and the sheer quantity of questions here, any consideration of making a version of this set just with the easier answers? I suspect that would get a much bigger interest. I'm personally uninterested in playing 600 tossups if 450 of them are going to ...

Mike Bentley

I'm looking for a few teammates. Happy to have anyone who fits the category of "I like playing quizbowl, but not hard tournaments, and I'm no longer eligible to play college tournaments."

Mike Bentley

Would it be possible to post a couple of sample questions?

Mike Bentley

Not sure how long these tossups are, but 600 tossups is 30 packets. Even at a tossup-only event you're probably looking at something longer than a typical tossup/bonus event. And if you're pushing for an in-person event I'm guessing in practice almost every mirror is only going to use a fraction of ...

Mike Bentley

Thanks for hosting this! I thought this was a great set with many interesting clues and answer lines. I encourage everyone to play it.

Mike Bentley

I'll be reading the remaining two packets to the top two teams at 8 PM EST tomorrow. Nick will be reading those packets to everyone else in a separate channel at the same time.

Mike Bentley

There's now a private discussion forum.

Mike Bentley

Would love to see a North American mirror of this. Since it would presumably be a large staff commitment, I'm personally willing to pay a higher than usual entry fee to attract more freelance staff.

Mike Bentley

Congrats to Bloc Jébécois for clearing the field and winning the tournament. Thanks to everyone who helped make the tournament happen. Stats are here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6815/ I mentioned in the other thread I was going to release the set soon, but I guess I'll wait a few more day...

Mike Bentley

Team contacts should have received a logistics mail earlier this week, including a link to the Discord server. Let me know if you need me to forward it to you. If you haven't already joined the server, please do so today so that I can get roles assigned prior to tomorrow morning.

Mike Bentley

Looks like not enough interest. I'll release the set following the mirror on Sunday.

Mike Bentley

Free agents have been assigned to teams. As of today, there's still one open spot for any late joiners.

Mike Bentley

I'm gauging interest in a second mirror of The World as It Is. Please vote in this date poll by Thursday. If there's not sufficient interest, I will release the set following the main mirror on Sunday.

Mike Bentley

Change of heart, I'm instead setting a field cap of 22 teams. There will be a prelim of 7 games, with some teams having one of those games be a cross-bracket game that mostly won't count. Top 2 teams from each bracket will advance to top bracket. They'll play 4 cross-bracket games for a total of 11 ...

Mike Bentley

With about 1.5 weeks until the tournament, there's still some open spots for teams. I'll start assigning free agents on to teams by next Wednesday, so form now. I'm also imposing the following restriction on any teams forming: If you're forming from people currently signed up on the free agent list ...

Mike Bentley

Did the email invite go out already? If so, I didn't receive it.

Mike Bentley

Quick update: We got a new influx of staffers so I'm officially expanding to 24 teams. I don't expect to move beyond this limit unless there's a huge demand to go to 27 or 28.

Mike Bentley

I'm going to increase the staff compensation to $75 on the hope it will convince a few more people to sign up to staff. To compensate, I'm also raising the entry fee per playing by $5 to now be $30 per person. There looks to be enough interest for 24 teams. I don't see the field expanding beyond tha...

Mike Bentley

We're going to try to do the last of the playtesting tonight at 7 PM EST. Social Science, Philosophy and some History bonuses are what remains.

Mike Bentley

It doesn't conflict per se, but ACF Regionals is on the Saturday before this, and The World As It Is is on the Sunday before this. I'd expect you'll get a lot of overlap between those three tournaments in a relatively small amount of time. I'd personally prefer this to be moved back a week or two. (...

Mike Bentley

Looks like there's a lot of interest in this tournament. I'd like to be able to expand the field to 20 teams (in which case we'd likely do two brackets followed by a top-2 from each bracket single elim playoffs) but we'll need more staff to do so. If you're interested, add your name to the above sig...

Mike Bentley

Also if you have a passion for proofreading and/or adding pronunciation guides, let me know. I'll pay $15 per packet for this for this set.

Mike Bentley

Still looking for some more playtesters. I've also pushed back the first playtesting to next Friday.

Mike Bentley

Confirming the tournament will take place on SUNDAY, January 24th. I've increased the field cap to 12 teams and will probably expand again to 16 if there's interest / enough staff.

Mike Bentley

I've played a couple of tournaments recently with the following format: -Two prelim brackets. -Top 3 teams from each prelim bracket make the top bracket. -Top bracket plays a full round robin of 5 games. -Winner determined solely based on the record in the 5 playoff games. Both times, this format ha...

Mike Bentley

I'll keep the poll open for two more days. My preferred date right now is Sunday, January 24th since that gives me a bit more time to polish the set over the early January dates. But if holding it on a Sunday is going to be an issue for you, make sure to vote your preferences in the poll.

Mike Bentley

I'll be doing playtesting of The World As It Is throughout December. If you're interested, please email me at bentley.michael.[email protected].com to get the Discord server invite. Although if you're on the fence about the tournament you should play the actual event and not just do the playtesting. Here's th...

Mike Bentley

The advantage of text is that it gives people a backup when their microphone isn't working. It also makes it easier in some circumstances to collaborate on bonuses since you can type while the moderator is still reading. But you can probably do a tournament without text channels so long as it's plan...

Mike Bentley

This post is for the main online mirror of The World As It Is , the Modern World tournament I'm writing. This will be an open mirror. There may be other mirrors of this tournament but this is the main event. The tournament will take place on Sunday , January 24th, 2021. The tournament will start at ...

Mike Bentley

Some quick thoughts after playing ACRO-DEMIA this weekend: I was reminded that buzzer apps generally work well, but have the disadvantage of requiring the window to be focused for your buzz to work. Since you typically don't have a great visual indication of this when you have it opened side-by-side...

Mike Bentley

This was a lot of fun, thanks for writing it! As someone whose trash interest has waned over the years, having each question be tied to an academic subject was a fun hook for me.

Mike Bentley

A few thoughts: I agree that Zoom is the simpler platform to host a tournament on. It also generally has better audio and video, although it's a relatively small difference and I've anecdotally heard some people having better experience with one vs. the other. I do like Discord's chat features, plac...

Mike Bentley

Has the logistics mail been sent?

Mike Bentley

Hi everyone, this much-delayed tournament is finally getting close to completion. It's about 95% written and 60% edited. There will be 11 packets of 20/20. There is an 875 character cap on tossups and 750 character cap on bonuses. The majority of questions are written by either myself or Nick Jensen...

Mike Bentley

I'll also mention that I have no problem with having both this event on a different date and a more traditional Festivus. There's some danger that it would dilute the number of packets for both events but my suspicion is that there will be more packets available this year than last year given the la...

Mike Bentley

On Discord there's been some pushback to this. As someone who I think suggested that Em take the lead in organizing this, let me mostly offer a defense. I agree that there's some charm in last-minute Festivus submissions. As such, I think it makes sense to push back the packet deadlines and to expli...

Mike Bentley

I suspect one reason is that citations offer no direct benefit to the main purpose of quizbowl questions, playing them in a game. And in fact I suspect they'd actually make the in-game experience worse if you end up getting delays for people asking "what was the citation for that leadin" i...

Mike Bentley

Having sent a lot of emails (to both established teams and less established teams), there seems to be a few things restricting teams from joining online. 1. A lot of teams only have school issued chrome-books for computers to use, which generally cannot be used for discord tournaments. This and sti...

Mike Bentley

JA01 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:08 pm Have you considered recording the training sessions for those who cannot attend on the given dates?

Yes I'm hoping to record this one.

Mike Bentley

The second (and for the moment final) training session is coming up this Saturday. Sign up via the link above if you're interested.

Mike Bentley

Came across two articles today on how to setup equipment for optimal online meetings: https://jonpurdy.com/2020/03/how-to-improve-your-zoomskype-teleconferencing-game/ https://www.benkuhn.net/vc/ They're both overkill for meeting the basic requirements of reading/playing an online tournament but hav...

Mike Bentley

I've heard some tournaments are going with an approach where each room (and room/round pair?) is a separate Zoom meeting which is linked on the schedule. Does anyone have details about how that works? To me, it seems like such an approach would alleviate some of the headaches with moving people betw...

Mike Bentley

I'm in general in favor of an approach like this for "serious" tournaments. It's a relatively low barrier to entry and will make a lot of cheating more difficult. Of course, in practice it's going to be hard to get through to people that you need to do this setup and stick with it through...

Mike Bentley

I'll also note that I personally find the USB Extension Cord + Web Cam much easier to set up than a separate phone rig with multiple accounts. It's a one-time thing you do and then it basically works forever if you're playing tournaments from the same room.

Mike Bentley

I'm in general in favor of an approach like this for "serious" tournaments. It's a relatively low barrier to entry and will make a lot of cheating more difficult. Of course, in practice it's going to be hard to get through to people that you need to do this setup and stick with it through ...

Mike Bentley

There's been some discussion on Discord recently about how it's better to discuss cheating allegations there to avoid showing up in search engine results. Aalok suggested, and I agree, that a separate protected sub-forum should be set up so that these discussions can be had here without this search ...

Mike Bentley

I've long used Google Books when writing quizbowl questions. In March, I remember reading some headlines about the Internet Archive offering books from its virtual library for free during the Covid-19 pandemic. It didn't really dawn on me until now that this would be extremely useful alternative to ...

Mike Bentley

Also I'm not going to set up a separate thread to discuss the set but feel free to post any thoughts here or on the quizbowl Discord if you want.

Search found 3718 matches