Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

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db0wman
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Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by db0wman »

Overview
This is an announcement for the Mid-Atlantic collegiate site of the 2021 Southeast-Midwest Housewrite, which will take place on March 6th, 2021. This tournament will cost $70 per team, with discounts outlined below. Aidan Leahy will be directing this tournament through Discord.

Registration Information and Discounts
The registration form for this tournament can be found here.

Payment for this tournament will be exclusively over Venmo; further information concerning payment will be available upon registration. If this is an issue, mention that in the email and we can work something out.

The base entry fee is $70. The following discounts are available for teams to claim:

-$20 for a shorthanded team of 1 or 2 players
-$20 if the university has not fielded a team at a tournament since August 1, 2019

Staffing
To sign up to staff for this tournament, fill out this form. Staffers will be paid $40 for 9 rounds of moderating.

Set
The difficulty of the Southeast-Midwest Housewrite is around the level of 2018 PACE or 2019 ILLIAC; about 1.5 dots on the dot scale. The set is edited by Aidan Leahy [UGA], Govind Prabhakar [Georgetown], Arjun Nageswaran [Adlai E. Stevenson], Katherine Lei [MIT], Dylan Bowman [UIUC], Ethan Strombeck [Stanford], William Groger [Miami Valley], and Ethan Ashbrook [UMN] with featured writers from Yale, UIUC, Stanton College Prep, Lambert, and University Lab. Taylor Harvey [UF] will be acting as a general overseer. The distribution per packet is as follows:

4.00/4.00 Literature
4.00/4.00 History
4.00/4.00 Science
3.00/3.00 Fine Arts
1.00/1.00 Religious Beliefs and Traditions
1.00/1.00 Myths and Legends
0.75/0.75 Philosophy
0.75/0.75 Social Science
0.50/0.50 Current Events
0.50/0.50 Geography
0.50/0.50 Popular Culture and Other Academic

Eligibility
This tournament is exclusive to college teams; middle school and high school players may not play or moderate for this tournament. There will be no formal restrictions on strong players but a good rule of thumb would be “if you played ACF Winter, you can probably play this tournament.”

This tournament is restricted to teams from the following states: Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, and Washington D.C.. The regions are outlined in the map below.

Image

Misconduct
This tournament will not tolerate misconduct such as, but not limited to: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, verbal harassment of players or staff, and generally inappropriate comments. A link to the misconduct form as well as the IKEA Code of Conduct, to which we’ll be adhering, will be available and visible on the server.

Cheating
Cheating will not be tolerated at this tournament. Video will be required for all players; if this is not an option please let us know beforehand via email or Discord. We reserve the right to remove anyone whom we believe to be cheating from the tournament. Our protocol for dealing with cheaters can also be found on the Code of Conduct linked above.
Dylan Bowman
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Kino Noir »

Current Field (Updated 3/3/21)

(18/18)

Columbia (1)
William and Mary (2)
Pitt (2)
Johns Hopkins (1)
Lehigh (2)
Swarthmore (1)
Rutgers (3)
NYU (3)
Penn (2)
Geneva (1)

Edit 3/3: Geneva has been moved off the waitlist due to a team dropping from the field.
Last edited by Kino Noir on Wed Mar 03, 2021 1:52 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Aidan Leahy
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Kino Noir »

The field for this tournament is full. We are still determining staffer availability to see whether the tournament field can expand. I'll be finalizing the field size on Wednesday, at which point an email with a link to the server and additional information will be sent out.

On that note, if you're available to staff this tournament, please register at this link. Staffers will be paid $40 on the day for full moderating.
Aidan Leahy
UGA '23 but also UGA '24
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Kino Noir »

Kino Noir wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 10:35 pm The field for this tournament is full. We are still determining staffer availability to see whether the tournament field can expand. I'll be finalizing the field size on Wednesday, at which point an email with a link to the server and additional information will be sent out.

On that note, if you're available to staff this tournament, please register at this link. Staffers will be paid $40 on the day for full moderating.
After determining staffer amounts for our Mid-Atlantic and Central mirrors, it's currently untenable for a field expansion to occur for the main Mid-Atlantic site. However, given the size of the waitlist and availability, I believe it will be feasible to host an overflow mirror for the Mid-Atlantic on Sunday, March 7. The field for that site would be the following:

Gettysburg (1)
Stony Brook (1)
Cornell (1)
James Madison (1)
Carnegie Mellon (1)
RIT (1)
VCU (1)
Virginia Tech (1)
UVA (1-2)

An email will be sent out tomorrow for all teams in the main field as planned with further information and a link to the server. For those teams on the waitlist, I will send out an email confirming availability for this change in plans. Sorry for the inconvenience on teams on the waitlist, but we believe this is the best way to get the teams that are interested in playing a chance at the set.
Aidan Leahy
UGA '23 but also UGA '24
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Votre Kickstarter Est Nul »

I don't mean to be overly confrontational, but I suppose I'll reraise the unaddressed issue of no advantaged final here. The email indicated there will be no advantaged final here. I still think is a quizbowl norm, and any set being presented (and charged for) as a full quizbowl tournament should conform to that norm. I don't think "we didn't write enough packets" is a reason, which is the only reason offered in the other thread. People are going to want to play quizbowl—Swapnil and MIT played despite his argument, I will be playing this weekend—and so on some level I suppose this can just be ignored, because there are no real consequences. I know a bunch of the mirrors have already happened, but I still struggle to see how the solution isn't write more packets or don't host this as two sets.

EDIT: finally found Cody's post, though I think it may be behind a discussion privacy walls, so here is the general point (can be found viewtopic.php?p=366666#p366666)
Cody Voight in TO Discussion wrote:This is not true (the notion that tournaments need not write at least 11 packets). There are multiple field sizes that require 12-round formats in order to give teams 10+ games (including 9, 10, 14, and 21 teams). The absolute minimum number of packets you can produce for a college set that provides for a substantial number of formats + finals is 13, and even that is unwise (due to the previous). It may be feasible to cut to 14 packets, but more than that is a bad idea and as a community we should strongly discourage and/or boycott any set that does not provide enough packets to run a tournament on. (Because being able to guarantee your field has the right number of teams is generally impossible due to drops.)
Even when accounting for online tournaments being shorter, this post gets at the general notion that advantaged finals are a notion that needs to be accounted for when writing sets, and that tournaments shouldn't write less just because they can, because full finals are a norm and field sizes change; that it's a hassle to, in that case, write packet 14 and 15 of a Nats- set doesn't cancel that.
Emmett Laurie
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Rutgers University '21
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Zealots of Stockholm »

Votre Kickstarter Est Nul wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 3:28 pm I don't mean to be overly confrontational, but I suppose I'll reraise the unaddressed issue of no advantaged final here. The email indicated there will be no advantaged final here. I still think is a quizbowl norm, and any set being presented (and charged for) as a full quizbowl tournament should conform to that norm. I don't think "we didn't write enough packets" is a reason, which is the only reason offered in the other thread. People are going to want to play quizbowl—Swapnil and MIT played despite his argument, I will be playing this weekend—and so on some level I suppose this can just be ignored, because there are no real consequences. I know a bunch of the mirrors have already happened, but I still struggle to see how the solution isn't write more packets or don't host this as two sets.

EDIT: finally found Cody's post, though I think it may be behind a discussion privacy walls, so here is the general point (can be found viewtopic.php?p=366666#p366666)
Cody Voight in TO Discussion wrote:This is not true (the notion that tournaments need not write at least 11 packets). There are multiple field sizes that require 12-round formats in order to give teams 10+ games (including 9, 10, 14, and 21 teams). The absolute minimum number of packets you can produce for a college set that provides for a substantial number of formats + finals is 13, and even that is unwise (due to the previous). It may be feasible to cut to 14 packets, but more than that is a bad idea and as a community we should strongly discourage and/or boycott any set that does not provide enough packets to run a tournament on. (Because being able to guarantee your field has the right number of teams is generally impossible due to drops.)
Even when accounting for online tournaments being shorter, this post gets at the general notion that advantaged finals are a notion that needs to be accounted for when writing sets, and that tournaments shouldn't write less just because they can, because full finals are a norm and field sizes change; that it's a hassle to, in that case, write packet 14 and 15 of a Nats- set doesn't cancel that.
Obviously I have already staked my claim in the "this is fine, especially since it results in 2 full(ish) tournaments of this set" camp in the other thread, but I'll reply to some of these points.

You bring up price, but seeing as the normal price to attend a regular season collegiate qb tournament is often in the $120-$140 range, so its not true that this is the same you'd pay for a full in-person event. Other events have also dropped their prices for online qb, but I still often see something like $90-$120 (I believe the ACF events were $120 base this year) for other sets, so $70 seems like quite a fair price to me.

The most egregious part of this post is accusing the writers and editors of this set of "not writing enough" when in fact they wrote 20 packets! Even going by the standard of 15 packets, that's still 5 extra full packets! I don't think this set was produced in a more extended time frame than usual, so imo the writers/editors should be applauded for taking initiative to produce these extra packets. I believe its well within the editors' rights to try to get the most teams to play the most questions possible, by splitting the set in 2.

I do agree that in a completely optimal world, there would be enough packets for an advantaged final. But, I just don't see having an advantaged final on a set that's easier than EFT as a bigger upside than having a full extra day of qb in a semester with a pretty barren calendar.
Chandler West
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Auburn University '20
Good Hope High School (Cullman, AL) '16
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Votre Kickstarter Est Nul »

Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 9:50 pm You bring up price, but seeing as the normal price to attend a regular season collegiate qb tournament is often in the $120-$140 range, so its not true that this is the same you'd pay for a full in-person event. Other events have also dropped their prices for online qb, but I still often see something like $90-$120 (I believe the ACF events were $120 base this year) for other sets, so $70 seems like quite a fair price to me.
Most tournaments, barring ACF have been $80, is what I gather from a brief glance. I suppose this is a $10 discount. Maybe that's fine. Though, for what it's worth, if we take 20 packets to be 1.5 times what a normal set is, and $80 is what a set makes (not really true, since sets are often hosted by schools, not the editors, who take some of the money, but that's neither here nor there), then a scaled price is $120, not $140. I don't want to get bogged down in the money, since my point in noting it was more "paying for a full tournament" and less the exact dollar value, and as I hope I've made it clear, I'm not accusing people of greed.
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 9:50 pm The most egregious part of this post is accusing the writers and editors of this set of "not writing enough" when in fact they wrote 20 packets! Even going by the standard of 15 packets, that's still 5 extra full packets! I don't think this set was produced in a more extended time frame than usual, so imo the writers/editors should be applauded for taking initiative to produce these extra packets. I believe its well within the editors' rights to try to get the most teams to play the most questions possible, by splitting the set in 2.
I didn't accuse them of not writing enough by some vague notion of what enough is. I said they didn't write enough for two sets. This is different, true, and not a malicious accusation. They didn't write five extra packets; they're not extra, they're simply packets 6-10 of set number 2. As Swapnil pointed out, 20 packets is somewhere in the 1.5-1.75 sets of writing, even when accounting for fewer games online. If I promised two packets and wrote 32 tossups, I'd be correct in saying I wrote many tossups and also incorrect to say that counts as two packets.

Props to them on writing 20 packets. That's alot. It's also not 2 whole sets, and I don't think there's anything in saying that that impugns the effort they've put into writing what they did.

Perhaps I'm making too big a deal of nothing. I'm generally thankful for more quizbowl, but I think "set needs to have enough packets to play a full tournament with all usual guarantees" is a standard worth upholding. Maybe it doesn't much matter.
Emmett Laurie
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Rutgers University '21
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

100% agree with Emmett's position here. I get that online quizbowl is more tiring and less engaging than in-person quizbowl and that winning any sort of online tournament is just considered "not as good." I don't think this is a reason to cut corners on basics like providing a proper finals, not to mention being able to only service a fairly limited set of field sizes. Sure, from a utilitarian perspective, this packet only serves a small portion of the audience in terms of "who gets to play it." On the other hand, finals games mean a lot to people, especially teams that don't often make the finals of tournaments; they're also fun to watch, and the packets are available for other purposes as well.
Will Alston
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Re: Southeast-Midwest Housewrite @ Mid-Atlantic, 3/6/21

Post by Arabidopsis failiana »

UVA is not able to send a team to a mirror of this set on this Sunday (3/7) but would be able to send a team if there were a mirror next weekend (3/13).
Mark Bailey
T.C. Williams High School class of 2019
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