General Discussion

[Demonic Leftovers]

Once again I want to thank everyone who helped make this tournament happen and those who played it.

Here is the breakdown of who edited what categories:
Me- Sports, Video Games, Other Trash.
Nolan-Music, Trash Lit/Comics.
Brian-Movies/TV.
Note that everyone wrote questions for all categories.

A few general thoughts.
While I think the set was good, I definitely think it could have been better. Looking through the set I think the bonus difficulty could have been better controlled. While I know this is difficult to do at any tournament, I think it could have been better here. I thought TU answer selection was generally strong, and TU's were generally pretty good, although there certainly were some that need some improvement.

I'd like to hear what people thought of the distribution. For movies and tv we focused on time era's, which I thought would be helpful avoiding the tendency in some trash tournaments to focus too much on old things, especially old tv. I also included more video games than normal, and made movies and tv separate 4/4 categories (which might have been slight overkill). Overall we tried to make sure this tournament focused primarily on recent things, with not more than about a 1/4 to a 1/3 being on older things.

I also have a point I'd like to make about writing trash in general. I found it extremely useful to playtest, as many times I learned my beliefs about clue difficulty were way off when other people played them. Trash, more so than academic I think, is something that we experience on a very personal level, and therefore our understanding of difficulty can diverge greatly from the general understanding.
Because of this writing good trash questions takes the input of many.

Please post any general thoughts you have about the tournament in this thread.

[Cheynem]

Overall we tried to make sure this tournament focused primarily on

Is that you, Ted?

Seriously, this was a pretty good set. I'll reiterate that bonus difficulty was a bit inconsistent and that there were way too many actor tossups. Actor tossups are just to me sort of aesthetically unpleasing if done too much but also a bit harder than what I think a number of writers believe. One way I think of improving them is to just focus on a couple prominent roles and use deep clues from them (and there were a few questions that did this).

I also think that the quizbowlese in some of these packets was a bit too much. The Bob Saget and Helen Mirren tossups are examples of questions I had a hard time parsing.

As for the distro, I think the movies one was fine. For television, I don't know if using a fixed distro is the best idea, but I really can't say. I'm not sure if the fixed modern distro led to more questions on creators and showrunners--this was a pretty good idea in general but since I think few tournaments do this, it was weird hearing quite a lot of questions on that topic (and I kept waiting for Darren Star!).

[Demonic Leftovers]

A few more specific thoughts.
Sports- One thing I tend to do in sports questions is use stats clues a decent amount. While I know many people dislike them, I think they are an important element of sports and I think that they can be useful as context clues. I'd be interested to hear what others think about this.
TV/Movies- One complaint Mike brought up was an overabundance of actor questions. I don't mind this in particular, but I know some do. I also think we included a fairly heavy amount of TU's on characters from TV shows. I've heard complaints about such questions in the past, although I think that as long as the character isn't too obscure there is nothing wrong with them. If anyone has comments on these types of questions I'd be glad to hear them.
I wonder what people thought about the way the categories stacked up against each other. In deciding to do this I debated whether having subject area editors was a good decision or not and I'd like to know how that turned out.

[Bartleby]

As the person who edited the television, I think that 30/30 2000s TV over the course of a 12-packet set was probably a touch too heavy. I definitely support the idea to skew modern, and I think television is the category that benefits the most from a modern skewing (the world needs less, and not more questions on John Amos!), but I know that I would occasionally sneak in references to pre-2000s stuff in questions just to keep things fresh, and in some cases accessible. In the future, I would want to keep the same total amount of 1990s and 2000s TV in the distro, but just leave it at 3.5/3.5 non-specified between time eras, which would give writers a bit more flexibility, I think.