Geography Monstrosity discussion

[Important Bird Area]

Set to be posted soon, I hope.

In general I thought this tournament was awesome, but it's fairly well known that I like lots of really difficult geography questions. I did think there were a handful of tossups per round with potentially troublesome clue placement and/or answer selection; more details once the set gets posted.

[ClemsonQB]

I’d like to thank all teams who submitted packets, Trygve Meade for writing a few pseudo-geography tossups, and Jeff Hoppes for conceiving of the idea for the tournament and helping me along in my first head editing duties.

[Cheynem]

This was fun to play. My only real quibble, seeing as how I don't know anything about geography, is that:

a. The difficulty of the packets had definite swings, with, at least in my judgment, the first being packet being by far the easiest and the second being one of the most difficult.

b. Like Jeff, I did think some clues seemed out of wack. I got a 20 on "Yosemite" because it mentioned "Hetch Hetchy," which is one of the most famous aspects about Yosemite. Knowing about the ETA could get a 15 on "Basque." Of course, my stuff probably had lots of clues out of wack as well--for the record, I wrote the Winnemac, Balearic Islands, Lake Maracaibo, Mackinac Island, Ben Nevis, Lodice, Wake Island, Murray River, Lesotho, and probably a few more I can't remember off the top of my head.

Speaking of clues out of wack, my original lead-in to the Lake Maracaibo tossup mentioned duckweed. Good thing I saw that NSC discussion thread.

[ClemsonQB]

This was fun to play. My only real quibble, seeing as how I don't know anything about geography, is that:

a. The difficulty of the packets had definite swings, with, at least in my judgment, the first being packet being by far the easiest and the second being one of the most difficult.

b. Like Jeff, I did think some clues seemed out of wack. I got a 20 on "Yosemite" because it mentioned "Hetch Hetchy," which is one of the most famous aspects about Yosemite. Knowing about the ETA could get a 15 on "Basque." Of course, my stuff probably had lots of clues out of wack as well--for the record, I wrote the Winnemac, Balearic Islands, Lake Maracaibo, Mackinac Island, Ben Nevis, Lodice, Wake Island, Murray River, Lesotho, and probably a few more I can't remember off the top of my head.

Speaking of clues out of wack, my original lead-in to the Lake Maracaibo tossup mentioned duckweed. Good thing I saw that NSC discussion thread.

I'm guessing the first packet was the Simons packet, and the second was the Chiego packet, but I could be completely wrong.

Hetch Hetchy might be misplaced, but I've been to Yosemite and I'd never heard of it upon writing the question.

Now that I look at the Basque tossup again, the last four lines are pretty much of equal difficulty. Sorry for that.

EDIT: I'd also like to note that if the Simons and Chiego packets are the one's you're referring to, I did not have as much time to even out the difficulty for those two packets because they came really late.

[Cheynem]

The Chiego packet definitely came later, as Mr. Chiego himself was reading that packet to us (and apologies to Chris if it sounded like I was belittling his work, it's hard to resist that instinct to complain when you're playing a packet).

I definitely understand the handicaps the editor(s) were under, so take all of my above points with that in mind. My idea of Hetch Hetchy's difficulty may be clouded by having taught environmental history for three collegiate semesters, but I had several others agree with me. I think that geo on the whole though is a hard thing to decide which clues are more or less well known (especially middle clues).

[the return of AHAN]

In the Simons packet...
"As a part of Britain’s Operation Totem, the city of Maralinga in the northeastern part of this region was the subject of a nuclear test which drove away the Spinifex tribe and led to the creation of the Woomera Prohibited Area. Much of this region is a part of the Eucla Basin, which runs from Israelite Bay in the West to Fowler’s Bay in the East, and its city of Mundrabilla contains numerous meteorites. The world’s largest single piece of limestone, a train crossing this region running from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta contains the world’s longest stretch of straight railroad, and a famous hoax saw a half-naked woman living among a family of kangeroos, this region’s namesake “nymph.” Sandwiched between the Great Victoria Desert and the Great Australian Bight, for 15 points, name this arid region located in South Australia and Western Australia which, true to its name, contains no trees. "
This TU on 'Nullarbor Plain' was negged with 'South Australia' after mentioning 'Eucla Basin'. There were no protests lodged, but I could hear the grumbling by question's end.

In the Chiego packet...
"Bertram Thomas was the first European to cross this region, and Iram of the Pillars is a legendary city of the people of ‘Ad at the site of a collapsed limestone cavern in it. St. John Philby searched in this area but only ended up finding freshwater clam shells and hippo teeth in the Mudafan sector, and there are several meteor craters at Al-Hadidah. Bounded on the east by the Hajar Mountains and the west by the Asir Mountains, many caravan routes crossed this from the Frankincense-producing areas near Salalah. The Shaybah field is located on the northern edge of this area, while further to the west in this region is the Ghawwar oil field, which is the world’s largest. For 15 points, identify this desert located in northern Yemen and Oman as well as southeastern Saudi Arabia, sometimes called The Empty Quarter."
This Rub al-Khali TU was criticized in my room (Auroni moderated that round) as not being able to eliminate Yemen until about 2/3 of the way through (Shaybah Field?).

[ClemsonQB]

In the Simons packet...
"As a part of Britain’s Operation Totem, the city of Maralinga in the northeastern part of this region was the subject of a nuclear test which drove away the Spinifex tribe and led to the creation of the Woomera Prohibited Area. Much of this region is a part of the Eucla Basin, which runs from Israelite Bay in the West to Fowler’s Bay in the East, and its city of Mundrabilla contains numerous meteorites. The world’s largest single piece of limestone, a train crossing this region running from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta contains the world’s longest stretch of straight railroad, and a famous hoax saw a half-naked woman living among a family of kangeroos, this region’s namesake “nymph.” Sandwiched between the Great Victoria Desert and the Great Australian Bight, for 15 points, name this arid region located in South Australia and Western Australia which, true to its name, contains no trees. "
This TU on 'Nullarbor Plain' was negged with 'South Australia' after mentioning 'Eucla Basin'. There were no protests lodged, but I could hear the grumbling by question's end.

Man. I apologize for that. Checking to make sure my answer space is lenient/allows early prompts/etc. is something I did with the vast majority of questions, but it was probably something I forgot to do for a few questions in the later packets.

[Important Bird Area]

I too thought that Hetch Hetchy was too early in the Yosemite tossup.

The second packet read was (I believe) the one George intended as a finals packet (and thus a step up in difficulty); we pressed it into service because we only had seven packets total. I know I warned some people that the difficulty would be up there, but the alternative was cutting back to five teams.

Other stuff that irritated me:

The "Wallonia" tossup might have been better off either as "Walloons" with "this ethnic group..." language, or with more recent clues in the leadin. As it was, it contained a whole bunch of medieval-era stuff, which punished knowledge when Brendan Byrne buzzed in with "Hainault."

In a similar vein, the tossup on Guatemala that began with "this entity" should have just had "this nation;" I negged with "Peten" and might not even have been the only one hoping for tossups on sub-national regions of Guatemala.

OK, that's kind of negative; this tournament was loaded with amazing awesome stuff, like the above-mentioned tossups on Lodice and Lesotho. I both enjoyed playing it and learned a lot of new things.

[ClemsonQB]

I too thought that Hetch Hetchy was too early in the Yosemite tossup.

The second packet read was (I believe) the one George intended as a finals packet (and thus a step up in difficulty); we pressed it into service because we only had seven packets total. I know I warned some people that the difficulty would be up there, but the alternative was cutting back to five teams.

Other stuff that irritated me:

The "Wallonia" tossup might have been better off either as "Walloons" with "this ethnic group..." language, or with more recent clues in the leadin. As it was, it contained a whole bunch of medieval-era stuff, which punished knowledge when Brendan Byrne buzzed in with "Hainault."

In a similar vein, the tossup on Guatemala that began with "this entity" should have just had "this nation;" I negged with "Peten" and might not even have been the only one hoping for tossups on sub-national regions of Guatemala.

OK, that's kind of negative; this tournament was loaded with amazing awesome stuff, like the above-mentioned tossups on Lodice and Lesotho. I both enjoyed playing it and learned a lot of new things.

I definitely should have used nation or country instead of "entity" in the Guatemala question, but the first sentence (at least) is about stuff that isn't in Peten. The Baldwin and Philippa sentence should have started with something like, "A subregion of this entity..." to avoid confusion. Again, I apologize for the mistakes I made, but I'm glad that people were satisfied overall.

[cchiego]

Iram of the Pillars is a legendary city of the people of ‘Ad at the site of a collapsed limestone cavern in it

The ruins of Iram of the Pillars were discovered in the 80s in the Dhofar region of Oman, which should've eliminated Yemen by itself right there.

And yeah Hetch-Hetchy was super-early. I thought the answer was going to be some national forest at that point since there was no way it could come up that early in a Yosemite question.

I thought overall there were a few too many "random foreign states" questions, which seem to me to get a bit too trivial. I agree with the difficulty swings; it was hard to tell sometimes if the answer was going to be some very obvious thing you've heard of or some river in the middle of nowhere that's worth 20 points. I'm also not that big a fan of city TUs since it's hard to differentiate most cities well without describing a lot of history instead of geography and those questions tend to have pretty large difficulty cliffs (the Novosibirsk one I wrote is probably a prime example of that). I think the high amounts of world geography, esp. 3-4 Latin America, may have been a bit too much; I think North American geography deserves a significantly higher distribution than just 3-4 out of 20.

But I definitely enjoyed seeing the crazy stuff people came up with, especially the fantasy geography TUs. I enjoyed the chance to play a tournament where I felt like I had a legit shot at answering every question and I certainly hope for a repeat geography tournament in the future (I'll start writing my packet right now to make sure I get it in on time; thanks to George for working with me as I furiously wrote most of my packet in 24 hours and for providing a few extra questions at the end).

[Important Bird Area]

I definitely should have used nation or country instead of "entity" in the Guatemala question, but the first sentence (at least) is about stuff that isn't in Peten.

One more reason this was a silly neg...

[Important Bird Area]

I think the high amounts of world geography, esp. 3-4 Latin America, may have been a bit too much; I think North American geography deserves a significantly higher distribution than just 3-4 out of 20.

I'm pretty sure I overreacted to the (in my opinion) too large North American quota in NAQT's geography distribution. If I run another one of these next year, I'll at least switch the two categories (to 4 NA and 3 LA).

[ClemsonQB]

I think the high amounts of world geography, esp. 3-4 Latin America, may have been a bit too much; I think North American geography deserves a significantly higher distribution than just 3-4 out of 20.

I'm pretty sure I overreacted to the (in my opinion) too large North American quota in NAQT's geography distribution. If I run another one of these next year, I'll at least switch the two categories (to 4 NA and 3 LA).

Another thing that might have gone wrong with the LA distribution is that like half of the questions were on northern South America (Cali, Cartagena, Orinoco, Maracaibo, Venezuela, Tepuis, Suriname, and maybe one I'm forgetting).

[Important Bird Area]

That's definitely about two tossups too many on Venezuelan stuff... but that tossup on tepuis was awesome.

[Strongside]

Yeah. This tournament was pretty fun, and I liked being able to play such a unique tournament. Thanks to Jeff and George for making this tournament happen, and to Bryce and Katy for TD'ing.

[swwFCqb]

Just here to pile on the thanks to everyone who made this tournament possible, including all the volunteer readers/moderators/TDs, other writers, and especially the editors, who when all was said and done did a pretty good job of doing their thing depsite not having very much time to put this thing together. I loved the idea of this tournament when it was announced and despite the fact that it might not have been as good as it could have been, I had a great time actually playing it. LIke Chris, I would definately be up for playing another of these in the future.

[shlack]

I'm not going to criticize any part of this tournament (I had fun) since I didn't write any questions, but I want to show gratitude to the writers and editors and TDs who put in the work to make this such a cool tournament.

And, for anyone that wasn't there, you missed a truly spectacular performance by Jeff Hoppes. Perhaps the most utter one man demolishing of questions ever. To quote teammate Matt Weiner (I hope he doesn't mind): "That was more intimidating than playing Andrew Yaphe on literature questions."

[ClemsonQB]

To Mike, Steven and Ted: This tournament was edited solely by me, so all the blame for its shortcomings should be aimed at me. And Ted, feel free to criticize the questions even if you didn't write any, because I can always use the feedback.

[cdcarter]

http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/a ... omonst.zip

[The Atom Strikes!]

Though I had to leave a bit early, I totally loved this tournament-- where else would I get an opportunity to get tossups on the Ungava Penninsula?