Announcements from the AQBL: Late September

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a Joe
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Announcements from the AQBL: Late September

Post by a Joe »

The AQBL has five announcements.

1) We had put out a survey after our September tournament. We were very happy to hear that the overwhelming majority of teams enjoyed the event and the set. There was one negative constant, however: over 90% of respondents felt the events were too long and were extremely disappointed by the length of our events.

We know this is a near-universal issue at tossup-bonus events; we considered multiple options to remedy this, including cutting rounds, further automation, and moving all our tournaments to tossup-only or using a different bonus scheme. We decided instead to add a game clock to the rounds; we know this is not a perfect solution, but we feel it is the least bad and the most consistent option.

At tossup-only events, there will be no game clock.
At tossup-bonus events of easy and medium difficulty, games will be timed to 2 15-minute halves, or 30 minutes per game.
At tossup-bonus events with difficult-level questions, games will be timed to 2 17.5 minute halves, or 35 minutes per game.
We haven’t decided on what we’ll do for the ONCT yet; we’ll let you know when we get there, but it will almost certainly be timed.

The clocks will be implemented beginning at our November event.

This moves into our second announcement:

2) We will be implementing a new comprehensive staff training system for all moderators and scorekeepers. We’ll be offering a few-hour-long course on the precise mechanics of Discord, our scoresheet system, our rules, gameplay, professionalism, and common situations that arise and how to handle them. Most staffers will be required to take the course in lieu of a long morning staff meeting. We’re working on designing the training now and expect to have it ready by our November events. This should translate well for other events, so anyone who wants to take the course can do so (though there will be quite a bit of AQBL-specific content).

3) Our website will be getting an update in the next week or so to overwrite out-of-date information. If you notice anything out of date, please let me know at [email protected] so I can update it, especially in the tournament information pages. In addition, if you have any suggestions for the pages in the resource guide, we’d love to hear them. Like we said, we’re looking to create comprehensive guides to the most important topics in Quizbowl, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

4) As part of the next update, we hope to finally implement direct credit card processing for the convenience of our customers. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know when it rolls out (hopefully in the next week or two).

5) Finally, we’ll be updating our rules before our October events regarding the new timing rules, as well as correcting a few minor issues we ran into during the September tournament with spectators giving answers (the procedure for handling that was unclear in the rules).

If you have any questions about any of these, please let us know below or by shooting one of the admins (or me) an email.
"THE" Joe Feldman
President, The Long Island Quiz Bowl Alliance
President, Suffolk County Community College Traveling Trivia Team
Founder, American Quizbowl League
President Emeritus, Smithtown High School West

Ask me how I (almost) monopolized Quizbowl
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