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General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 8:51 pm
by marianna
This thread is for general discussion of the set! Things like overall difficulty, difficulty per category, question length, stylistic issues, or any other general trends can go here. For discussion of specific questions, see the other thread.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 8:56 pm
by marianna
Things we're currently aware of:
- repeats (memory and Keynes tus, Surrealism and Vanity Fair bonuses)
- hard and long history in general
- fluctuating bonus difficulty in packet 14 (finals packet)
- unreadably tiny subscripts

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 11:16 pm
by czheng0708
I've never been to an actual Prison Bowl tournament until this iteration, but the questions (compared to the last two or three years) this year were noticeably different. Overall, I thought the difficulty was still manageable and pretty much just the way it was advertised. For the most part, I liked this set and Prison Bowl, in general.
But anyway, while I was at this year's iterations of Prison Bowl, I heard some talk about how it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of humanities.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 11:23 pm
by marianna
czheng0708 wrote:the questions (compared to the last two or three years) this year were noticeably different.
Anything specifically that stood out? Much of Prison Bowl for the past couple years was written by the class of 2012, so this year is a big turnover in writing style.
czheng0708 wrote:Overall, I thought the difficulty was still manageable and pretty much just the way it was advertised. For the most part, I liked this set and Prison Bowl, in general.
Yay I'm happy to hear that!
czheng0708 wrote:I heard some talk about how it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of humanities.
Hmm that's odd. We used a pretty standard distribution: 4/4 Lit, 4/4 History, 4/4 Science, then 2.5/2.5 Arts, 2.5/2.5 RMP, 1/1 Soc Sci, 1/1 Geo, 1/1 Trash and CE. We made sure that categories were distributed pretty evenly within packets (1/1 Lit, 1/1 Hist, 1/1 Sci every quarter), and we distributed minor categories evenly across rounds.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 11:25 pm
by Banana Stand
czheng0708 wrote:I've never been to an actual Prison Bowl tournament until this iteration, but the questions (compared to the last two or three years) this year were noticeably different. Overall, I thought the difficulty was still manageable and pretty much just the way it was advertised. For the most part, I liked this set and Prison Bowl, in general.
But anyway, while I was at this year's iterations of Prison Bowl, I heard some talk about how it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of humanities.
People more accustomed to NAQT's lighter fine arts distribution said this?

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 11:29 pm
by marianna
Banana Stand wrote:
czheng0708 wrote:I heard some talk about how it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of humanities.
People more accustomed to NAQT's lighter fine arts distribution said this?
Hmm that might be it. We actually decreased the Arts distribution this year, down to 2.5/2.5 from the 3/3 used for all prior Prison Bowls.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2013 12:04 am
by czheng0708
Banana Stand wrote:
czheng0708 wrote:I've never been to an actual Prison Bowl tournament until this iteration, but the questions (compared to the last two or three years) this year were noticeably different. Overall, I thought the difficulty was still manageable and pretty much just the way it was advertised. For the most part, I liked this set and Prison Bowl, in general.
But anyway, while I was at this year's iterations of Prison Bowl, I heard some talk about how it seemed like there was an overwhelming amount of humanities.
People more accustomed to NAQT's lighter fine arts distribution said this?
Completely possible and likely.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 8:49 pm
by Huntur
As one of the moderators and hosts of the Virginia Tech mirror, we were really happy with the quality of the set. We used 9 of the 15 packets in a 10 team round robin. The difficulty of the set was perfect for what we were planning on running and we'll probably try to mirror again next year.

The only things I and others from the site would like to see (outside of those already addressed) in the future would be power markings and maybe one more read over for typos, repeated words, etc.

Thanks for putting together a really quality set.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 8:59 pm
by marianna
Huntur wrote:As one of the moderators and hosts of the Virginia Tech mirror, we were really happy with the quality of the set. We used 9 of the 15 packets in a 10 team round robin. The difficulty of the set was perfect for what we were planning on running and we'll probably try to mirror again next year.
Great, I'm so happy to hear that!
Huntur wrote:power markings
Unfortunately, we're not planning on power-marking the set in the future. Power-marking is a gimmicky thing that requires a lot of careful work and extra time that we think can be better invested in other aspects of the set. Speaking personally as a player here, I don't think the lack of powers detracts terribly from set experience.
Huntur wrote:and maybe one more read over for typos, repeated words, etc.
Ah apologies for that. We did quite a bit of editing after our main site, so mechanics fell down the priority list. Let me know if there are any specific questions you'd like to see or need special attention. We'll certainly do a thorough proofreading before the next mirror.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2013 10:04 pm
by Huntur
serasuna wrote:
Huntur wrote:power markings
Unfortunately, we're not planning on power-marking the set in the future. Power-marking is a gimmicky thing that requires a lot of careful work and extra time that we think can be better invested in other aspects of the set. Speaking personally as a player here, I don't think the lack of powers detracts terribly from set experience.
I agree that I don't think it detracts from the set terribly. It's a "In a perfect world" kind of suggestion. :grin:

Re: General discussion

Posted: Sun May 19, 2013 11:28 pm
by jabekens
My feelings about this set were generally good. The difficulty of the questions wasn't anything worrying, and some unique answerlines kept the tournament fresh and interesting for a lot of teams. I felt like the NAQT-style bonuses and beginnings of bonuses (Pokemon science bonus, other bonuses I can't directly recall but had snarky first clues or trash-like themes) were a bit overdone, making games more entertaining, but getting old quickly. As well, there were a few question-length problems in the set, with several questions going to 8 lines, and I distinctly remember the Louis XVI tossup being a whopping 9 lines long. Thankfully for me at least, I didn't have to read all of them because of a good buzz in my room on the 2nd line, but glancing over the questions and seeing that concerned me. Other than a few clues that were flat-out incorrect that a few other staffers noticed while reading and some missing words or poor grammar every now and then, I liked this set.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Sun May 19, 2013 11:34 pm
by marianna
jabekens wrote:My feelings about this set were generally good. The difficulty of the questions wasn't anything worrying, and some unique answerlines kept the tournament fresh and interesting for a lot of teams.
Great!
jabekens wrote:I felt like the NAQT-style bonuses and beginnings of bonuses (Pokemon science bonus, other bonuses I can't directly recall but had snarky first clues or trash-like themes) were a bit overdone, making games more entertaining, but getting old quickly.
We just didn't want things to get boring, so we tried some tongue-in-cheek leadins. I'm sorry if we came off as snarky.
jabekens wrote:As well, there were a few question-length problems in the set, with several questions going to 8 lines, and I distinctly remember the Louis XVI tossup being a whopping 9 lines long. Thankfully for me at least, I didn't have to read all of them because of a good buzz in my room on the 2nd line, but glancing over the questions and seeing that concerned me.
History definitely suffered from some length control issues, but on my computer, the Louis XVI tossup is 7 lines and a word.
jabekens wrote:Other than a few clues that were flat-out incorrect that a few other staffers noticed while reading
Do you remember any specific ones? EDIT: Never mind, that discussion's in the other thread!
jabekens wrote:some missing words or poor grammar every now and then
Sorry about the mechanics; we did a lot of editing after VTech, so grammar and the like fell through some cracks.
jabekens wrote:I liked this set.
We're glad you liked it!

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon May 20, 2013 12:08 am
by jabekens
serasuna wrote:
jabekens wrote:As well, there were a few question-length problems in the set, with several questions going to 8 lines, and I distinctly remember the Louis XVI tossup being a whopping 9 lines long. Thankfully for me at least, I didn't have to read all of them because of a good buzz in my room on the 2nd line, but glancing over the questions and seeing that concerned me.
History definitely suffered from some length control issues, but on my computer, the Louis XVI tossup is 7 lines and a word.
That's strange. Are you looking at it 12pt TNR? I think when we received the electronic version of the set, it was all 10pt TNR.

Re: General discussion

Posted: Mon May 20, 2013 12:11 am
by marianna
jabekens wrote:
serasuna wrote:
jabekens wrote:As well, there were a few question-length problems in the set, with several questions going to 8 lines, and I distinctly remember the Louis XVI tossup being a whopping 9 lines long. Thankfully for me at least, I didn't have to read all of them because of a good buzz in my room on the 2nd line, but glancing over the questions and seeing that concerned me.
History definitely suffered from some length control issues, but on my computer, the Louis XVI tossup is 7 lines and a word.
That's strange. Are you looking at it 12pt TNR? I think when we received the electronic version of the set, it was all 10pt TNR.
Yeah, I'm looking at it in 10pt TNR. Playing around shows that a full 6 lines in 10pt TNR = 8 lines in 12pt TNR. We were aiming for 5-6 lines in 10 pt TNR on all tossups, but history tended towards the 6 line side of that range. We'll make sure to enforce hard limits on question length next year.