Perhaps this is me making too many assumptions, but this strikes me as a rather disingenuous assertion given that you seem to both a) post fairly often and b) maintain a reasonably robust Discord presence. This, and the fact that several Michigan people played the online mirror, during which we told people we were using an advanced stats system, makes this really seem like you're playing dumb to pile on the bandwagon and score some points here, when in reality you played four fucking house teams, including a number of experienced moderators. Colin Parks appears to have identified the problems on both sides accurately at least.CPIGuy wrote:Y'know, Thursday's great and all, and if we'd been more on top of things we could perhaps have mitigated the 30-minute delay that happened because staffers didn't know how to use the system (although I sent out the instructional video to all of our rotating staffers a week in advance) -- but what would have been even better would have been a few weeks' notice, since you clearly knew about this for a really long time, and yet you didn't really indicate it anywhere in the tournament announcement (at least not that I saw). That way we could have actually planned on having an appropriate number of staff, rather than realizing four rounds in that we had insufficient staff and the tournament was going to be delayed. Even if we'd realized this as soon as we'd gotten your email, it would have been pretty difficult to completely restructure our staffing on two days' notice.
Furthermore, you insisted on almost certainly delaying things by rotating your staff, when one of the big advantages of the whole stat system is that the mods shouldn't even have to leave the room to keep the tournament running. So, the folks running the tournament compounded whatever problems that may have existed due to lack of familiarity with a new system (which many people have commented is quite easy to get used to after a few rounds) by effectively eliminating the ability of mods to get used to it during the day.
The fact is that the people who were coordinating logistics and sending out the emails are juggling day jobs, set editing (to make the set as high quality as you insist it was), and a number of other quizbowl responsibilities, and still managed to respond to forums feedback to improve the system. In fact, Ophir went out of his way to spend time making the system even easier this week after already making a number of improvements to the system in response to previous criticism - most notably, a feature where you can just type in three ones or zeroes (instead of having to go into each box and write a 10 or 0). We provided comprehensive instructions, a demo video, suggestions as to how to best use the system, and more. The only errors on our part were things that were already acknowledged.
Here is the list of skills it requires to use the system efficiently as a solo moderator:
1) Viewing a YouTube video / Showing one to all your staff (I was informed that staff were never shown a video)
2) Tabbing between browser tabs
3) Knowing how to use arrow keys / shift / keyboard shortcuts, to move around easily (this is something that you start to figure out and get used to more and more)
4) Efficiently using time (enter the tossup value after you've read the first bonus part and the other team is collaborating, things like that - more stuff you pick up over time)
I would have sympathy for people who aren't digital natives / used to spreadsheets who are introduced to this system. For a team that seems to be fairly young and composed of digital natives, however, these do not strike me as particularly difficult. In particular, in my experience it's a faster to type "10", push an arrow button a few times, then write "101" to indicate a team getting Part A, missing Part B, and getting Part C than it is to write all these down on paper. The buzzpoints just require a click on the packet to use (and you're already in the packet anyway) and only need to be copied at the end of the game. Thus, I have reason to suspect that many folks who were taking 45 minutes without a scorekeeper might have been taking almost as long with a traditional system, and that this would almost certainly be true if the instructions we took care to provide before the tournament were followed.
Again, there were communication issues which I apologize for, but I resent the consistent implication that this is some sort of onerous requirement, when a) it is clearly not and b) in this case, the people implying this seem to have actively contrived to prevent people from getting used to the system. In fact, we would have said "yes" to a request to just use paper scoresheets (and we let Minnesota do so) had you asked, but there was no email communication after we sent out information Thursday night, aside from some supplemental instructions from Ophir.