Spartan Housewrite: General Discussion

[Ciorwrong]

Hello. On behalf of all the editors and writers thank you for playing the set. Please use this thread to make any broad comments on the set or its categories. Commentary on any specific questions should go in that thread. If you have yet to fill out the Google form, I'd advise you to do so. It can be found here. On Sunday, I will probably write a long-form version of my thoughts on the set, but in short--and note I am writing this before the Discord mirror takes place--I thought the writing process went well. Eric and Joe were huge helps with picking up the slack in categories we did not have editing experience on and Conor and Nour both wrote some great questions.

Edit: if you'd like to see the entire set in QEMs, let me know so I can add you to the set and you can leave comments on each question in a way is easy for us to see. Note that this requires you to have an account with QEMs so PM me if you'd like to do this. We also have a Discord you can use to chat about the set.

[Ciorwrong]

So I am writing this post after the Discord mirror as hopefully a way of getting the conversation started here. Please note that these are my thoughts alone and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of any other member of the team behind the set.

EDIT: one thing to keep in mind before commenting, is that I tried to shove all the more interesting answerlines and unique questions into the Discord mirror to maximize feedback. There were a lot more boring questions in packets 10-14 that never got read. I am glad that I read all of the weirder answerlines but I hope this didn't skew people's view of certain categories such as SS or Philosophy or Religion where the sample size is small.

First of all, we have gotten some great feedback from Justin French, Mike Bentley, Will Alston and countless others on the Discord which is much appreciated. This post will contain how I thought some categories broadly played out at the Discord mirror and hopefully people can post their own thoughts.

General:
-The set needs a lot more polish. Will Alston noticed, quite correctly, that a lot of sentences connected unrelated ideas with the word "and". This is sub-optimal and is one of those things you immediately notice while reading the set out-loud or listening/playing it. This will be rectified and we will be more consistent on pronoun usage.
-I am quite pleased with how the set turned out difficulty wise aside from a select few bonuses and tossups. Major changes to difficulty will not be made. I I half-expected the set to skew hard, so I am glad this was not the case for the field of the Discord mirror.

Literature:
-Generally, it seems people thought the lit was acceptable and it went about how I expected. A few minor issues aside, such as multiple references to Danilo Kiš and some pronoun issues on the _Brothers_ and _Dream of the Red Chamber_ tossup, I think this category was fine. I'm curious how difficult people found it.

History:
-I think a lot of tossups in this category did not play as well as I would have liked such as _France Invading Algeria_ and I think some such as _Egypt_ skewed kind of hard while trying to stay within the theme. A lot of these questions will be improved and revised before the first mirror but I am pleased with a lot of the ideas Jakob and others had. Some tossups such as _Sicily_ will be cut as we get more time to replace them with better ideas.

Science:
-This category went alright I'd say. Some stuff was too easy such as the _Strings_ tossup and some physics tossups need additional, more evocative, clues. Some people have said some of the questions felt fraudable. Was this because the possible answerspace is very small, as in the _Age of the Universe_ tossup, or were the clues pointing in only direction? Honestly, just saying a question felt "fraudable" says very little. If the question is on a country and it uses several words from that country's national language in power, that's fraudable obviously, so I'd like to see a little bit more explanation here.
-I'm curious what people thought of the expanded Other Science subcategory and the slightly reduced Chemistry. I wrote the 1/1 Material Science questions (_Carbon & Iron_ and cubic bonus) so I am curious how people felt those played. Conor's math was really fun to read for sure.

Fine Arts :
-Speaking broadly, people seemed to like the Music and Painting with some exceptions such as the Chinese _Painting_ tossup. Did the difficulty of these categories match the others overall? I felt the field did really well on these categories.

Religion and Myth:
-I don't have much to say here. These categories played out similarly to how I would have expected. The questions on Arjuna will be improved to minimize the amount of "word soup" and stuff like _USA_ will be made more player-friendly. Are there any comments on the subdistros of these categories? I tried to balance all the different myth and religion systems kinda evenly among the packets but when teams only hear between 9 and 11 packets, some pacektization issues may come out.

SS and Philosophy :
-There were several tossups in these two categories that did not play well at all. I like to ask about research and more "classroom content" here, but those clues do not always work. Stuff like writing an _Anarchy_ tossup out of hard Benjamin Tucker and Spooner content is probably not the way to go, and the _Rational_ tossup kind of failed on all levels. I would maintain that asking about research is much preferable than asking about old, dead thinkers in Social Science. However, it's hard to write a really good tossup on _Cognitive Biases_ as I tried to using of social psychological and behavioral economic research.
-For philosophy, a lot of stuff will be improved as I try to do more reverse clue look up. I'd like to issue a personal mea culpa for the lack of prompts and accepts on the _Aesthetics_ tossup and for not checking the uniqueness of a clue in the _Averroes_ tossup. The _Consciousness_ tossup I will defend as a good idea but it will be trimmed.

Geography, Trash and Other Academic :
-Geography will be edited a lot between now and the first mirror. I don't think people really liked the tossups on _Green_ or _East_ despite those being some pretty creative ideas in my opinion. This category will be greatly improved.
-I didn't get much feedback on the trash or current events overall which makes sense as these categories are small. Please post if you have something to say here.
-I wanted to use Other Academic to experiment so I wrote the tossups on _Bernoulli_, _UFO_s, The _Western Canon_, the marketing bonus and the quantitative finance bonus. I wanted to test things in ways that are kinda dissimilar to the ways things are usually asked about in quizbowl here. Conor's _busing_ tossup was also in this vein I feel.

Overall, I'm excited to have the opportunity to improve the set before the next mirror, and I like players of all skill and experience levels to chime in with their thoughts.

[ryanrosenberg]

I thought this set was a solid start to a good set; having the Discord mirror this far in advance should give the team more than enough time to fix things. Major things that stood out to me:

• The set's prose was overall not good and made reading questions pretty difficult. Shortening sentences and avoiding unnecessary conjunctions would help a lot here.
• The lit was good, I have a few comments on specific questions but I'll put those in QEMS.
• A lot of the thought was either very transparent or unbuzzable in the beginning. This stood out as the weakest category of what I saw and should be revised heavily.

[VSCOelasticity]

Thank you to the editors and question writers for producing this set! I had a lot of fun yesterday, and there were some issues, but the field at UF looked like they were enjoying themselves.

I thought the science in this set was generally ok, but I had a couple issues with it.

1) It seemed as though a few questions were not edited thoroughly so there was some very misplaced clues. I don't have a copy of the set so I may be painting with too broad a stroke, but some examples off the top of my head are: the Stark effect in the electric field TU, the Ising model in the ferromagnetism TU, and PAMs seemed to come up early in the CRISPR TU. I see that the Ising model was mentioned in the specific question after the discord mirror so I'm surprised it wasn't moved further down than where it ended up (although I should probably be buzzing on the earlier clues, but meh)

2) The physics sub-distribution was a little weird. There was a lot of QFT/particle physics stuff. I remember that there was a TU on gluons, a bonus about mesons/kaons, and then a bonus about abstract algebra in physics QFT (quaternions/weak/?) . I think there was also a question that asked for the higgsino? Although that might've been in one of the already mentioned bonuses. (Edit: and color charge!)

In general, I felt that the difficult across categories was uneven. For example, I don't have PPB per category in front of me, but it seemed that the hard part of history bonuses was significantly harder than the hard part of science bonuses.

I can provide better feedback once I'm done writing Nats questions for the deadline today lol.

[Slightly Less British]

I modded instead of playing this tournament, so any comments I’ve got about question difficulty and whatnot should be viewed with a pinch of salt. I was also fairly irritable all day due to tournament issues that were nothing at all to do with the set.

That being said, this was the least-polished set I can remember reading in my time modding quizbowl tournaments. It seemed like every packet had about five points in it where I had to substitute in what words I assumed the question wanted, because what was written on the page was not a coherent sentence. I could just about cope with this, but (and this obviously isn’t the set’s fault) our site had two or three rooms run by less experience moderators who I understand had a harder time of things. Other polish notes:

• Some foreign language works included the original language title, others didn’t. This led to me having to ask a player to translate a title into English because of my lack of Mandarin skills, which really shouldn’t have to happen.
  The feng shui was a little off: a couple of bonus answers were already named in previous parts of the same bonus set, and there were a few unfortunate randomisation things (“trees” being both the first tossup and an answer to part of the first bonus set in one packet raised a few eyebrows).
  Moreso than the difficulty of the answerlines, the generosity of powermarks seemed to vary massively: one player in a significant match actually assumed I was joking when I first said a buzz was in power.

I’m sure this improved between our mirror and the mirrors in the US, but it’s fairly disappointing to see comments on how much work the prose needed being made over a month ago, and for the set to still have been sent out in the condition it was.

[VSCOelasticity]

Moreso than the difficulty of the answerlines, the generosity of powermarks seemed to vary massively: one player in a significant match actually assumed I was joking when I first said a buzz was in power.

I’m sure this improved between our mirror and the mirrors in the US, but it’s fairly disappointing to see comments on how much work the prose needed being made over a month ago, and for the set to still have been sent out in the condition it was.

This was definitely not the case. The powermarking was highly variable, and seemed more forgiving in some categories than others. I think most notably the first TU of the tournament had a stock clue about Henry IV in power for Italy in drama.

[TaylorH]

I want to thank the writers and editors for producing a fun and interesting set! It certainly needs a bit more polish, as has been noted, but as Jonathen said everyone at our site had a great time with it. The set managed to ask about a ton of cool and interesting stuff and kept things relatively accessible. The biggest negatives were probably cliffy TUs, inconsistent power marking, inconsistent question lengths, and high variability of question difficulty. Frankly, there were toss ups that would not have been out of place in a regular high school set (Robert Frost, sand, conditioning, Wordsworth, stones in religion, Chicago World's Fair, Lakshmi, plasma) while there were others that felt like ACF Nationals questions (Acres of Diamonds, Die Bruke, Annales School, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, Imagined Communities, A-flat Major, French Invasion of Algeria, Battle of Leutra, Battle of Poitiers, Bandung Conference, Burger's Duaghter, Naming and Necessity, Waiting for Lefty). A mod remarked that some TUs were three lines longer than others. This does not seem ideal. Some powers seemed ridiculously generous while other stingy. I would need the set in front of me to give specifics.

All things considered it was a solid set, especially for a younger writing team. Good job to all.

[Ciorwrong]

I want to thank the writers and editors for producing a fun and interesting set! It certainly needs a bit more polish, as has been noted, but as Jonathen said everyone at our site had a great time with it. The set managed to ask about a ton of cool and interesting stuff and kept things relatively accessible. The biggest negatives were probably cliffy TUs, inconsistent power marking, inconsistent question lengths, and high variability of question difficulty. Frankly, there were toss ups that would not have been out of place in a regular high school set (Robert Frost, sand, conditioning, Wordsworth, stones in religion, Chicago World's Fair, Lakshmi, plasma) while there were others that felt like ACF Nationals questions (Acres of Diamonds, Die Bruke, Annales School, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, Imagined Communities, A-flat Major, French Invasion of Algeria, Battle of Leutra, Battle of Poitiers, Bandung Conference, Burger's Duaghter, Naming and Necessity, Waiting for Lefty). A mod remarked that some TUs were three lines longer than others. This does not seem ideal. Some powers seemed ridiculously generous while other stingy. I would need the set in front of me to give specifics.

All things considered it was a solid set, especially for a younger writing team. Good job to all.

Thanks for the feedback Taylor.

The set will definitely be polished more in the coming weeks. I think me and the other editors were more concerned on finishing the set and replacing bad tossups from the Discord mirror than polishing the set. I also had wisdom teeth surgery and I started a part time job between the Discord mirror so I had less time than I anticipated. This doens't excuse the lack of polish (and the dupe tossup sorry UK!), however and we will seriously work to improve the grammatical issues.

I would however disagree with some of your assessments on question difficulty though. The Wordsworth tossup was mostly on the Lucy poems, and despite the answerline, was not at all a high school tossup. The conditioning tossup was mostly about contemporary conditioning research and Rescorla-Wagner which, again, would be a dumb way to construct a high school conditioning tossup. I also certainly didn't feel that stones, Lakshmi, Columbia Exposition and plasma were too easy as those all did not have absurdly early buzzes in my room. Of course, all these answers could work for high school, but I don't think this heuristic is always the best way of assessing difficulty. Hard questions on easy answerlines are common as I am sure you are aware.

I appreciate your identification of which tossups felt hard but I really don't think Leuctra, Poitiers, Burger's Daughter or Die Brucke are Nationals-only level answerlines. I think the others you identify were certainly difficult but I think almost all of them were converted in my room. Some such as A-flat major and Imagined Communities might be reconsidered.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

I'm going to try for some general feedback by category, though I may be wrong at some points due to not having a copy of the packets.

First, I do want to say that I generally agree with Taylor's list of "hard" answerlines, but would remove Poitiers (and maybe Burger's Daughter) and add a few lit tossups which I remember feeling were on the harder side yesterday (will edit later if I remember which ones). I'm unsure about his full list of easy tossups but did definitely feel that Chicago World's Fair was extremely easy and our two science players seemed to think that both plasma and sand were also quite easy.

Also, mods at the Florida site seemed to struggle several times per round, but the lack of polish has already been mentioned several times.

Fine Arts: I thought this was by far the best part of the set, at least in categories I know anything about. I thought the visual arts were the best I've heard in a set this year, and succeeded by having interesting but accessible clues, even in power, and only Die Brucke standing out as a harder answerline (I generally think 1-2 of these per category over the course of the set isn't bad). I've just started studying music over winter break, but I felt that I was rewarded in that category with accessible middle clues and convertible answerlines (think the only one that I didn't know was A-flat major).

Literature: I thought most of the lit in this set was solid overall. I don't remember too many exciting/different answerlines that stood out to me really, but maybe I'm just forgetting. I do want to point out that the Tin Drum tossup seemed incredibly easy by dropping jazz trio around the third line, still in power. This was by far the easiest lit tossup of the day in my opinion, and illustrates a bit of the dichotomy created between some of the easier questions such as that one to some of the harder lit answerlines throughout the day.

History: Admittedly I am not much of a history player, despite majoring in history, though I masqueraded as one yesterday since our history player couldn't come. I tend to know much more about American history than other subcategories, but I don't remember having much of an impression of the US hist. I did think the Reconstruction tossup was interesting and good. At times some of the european and world history tossups just felt very hard and above this set's target difficulty, and while this could just be my lack of knowledge in those areas, it seemed other players were having a similar experience. I realize this tournament aimed for an expanded world history distro, but it seemed at times to just result in tossups that played very hard.

Trash: I really enjoyed the "Low Rider" tossup, and was ecstatic to power the Childish Gambino tossup. I though the sports tossup on Vancouver was okay, and I would advise adding something in the first line before the word "rookie" that indicates it's referring to his professional career (though I'm sure the actual content of the clue only refers to Vancouver).

Additionally, I don't know much about Social Science overall, but enjoyed the psych I heard yesterday.

To finish, I wanted to add that, as one of our mods yesterday noted, many of the bonuses yesterday across categories seemed to have extremely easy parts which did no real gradating between teams, while having quite difficult middle and hard parts.

Overall I thought this set was solid and a good time to play, while being a bit rough around the edges. Thanks to the writers and editors for producing it!

EDIT: added bit about bonuses

[Ewan MacAulay]

This set was really fun (apart from the games we lost obvs)

So I may have had a few before writing this but eh.

It's really good to see a bunch of new-ish writers and editors produce a full regular-difficulty set. It's a bigger ask than anyone ever realises going into it, and I'll cop to having made that underestimation before.

The set (at least in bits I know about) was broadly pretty fine - sure, a few more rounds of proofreading and playtesting wouldn't have gone amiss, and the question on "Hamiltonians" which kept referring to "this quantity" made me cry - but to me it seemed that for the most part people had put in some good effort to find some good clues and questions.

In chem, the questions on 5 and lanthanides had some solid fresh clues - shibasaki catalysts are terrifyingly trendy rn. Glycerol, Nitrogen & sulfur, mixing and the Wittig common link also were fun to play.

Will have another read through in a bit and say some more, but yeah some solid some stuff from all involved - thanks!

[Judson Laipply]

I did enjoy this set and that may not become apparent in this lengthy list of minutiae, so let me reiterate that before this list of stuff that I hope can be fixed before the next mirror, but is mostly not egregious errors.

I haven't really read through the rest of the discussion here thoroughly, so there may be some repeated stuff, but here are some comments on (mostly) stuff that I think could be improved in the science and other parts of the distribution I don't suck at like American history, christianity,and Jazz (\citep{hsquizbowl2015NatsWriteup})

Packet 1 Bonus 9: If the bonus says “This process… raises the energy of an electron.” You need to include a prompt on excitation/optical excitation. I know the inclusion of the laser clues means that I should have said pumping but I’m dumb so whatever

Packet 2 TU 2: Killing fields doesn’t belong in the first line of a GR tossup.

Packet 2 TU 8: As much as I dislike triply eponymous things, if you are going to clue Knuth-Morris-Pratt, you can actually say it instead of just giving an acronym for it.

Packet 2 TU 13: The power section of this tossup is “Hey this is a notable scientist with stupid opinions in the news” so it's probably not the best idea.

Packet 3 Bonus 1: Leadin needs better delineated equation. Looking at it I am having trouble figuring out if you meant “1 /(2*k*r^2)” or ½ k*r^2”. You also really don’t need to say “1 squared.” Ever. Just as a general rule.

Packet 4 TU 4: The first clue of this tossup is “Name a notable equation in electrochemistry.” Not ideal for a nernst eqn tossup.

Packet 4 TU 8: Huge fan of this idea especially since I know people who work on the Cherenkov array. Would possibly like an Askaryan clue but otherwise great.

Packet 4 Bonus 11: Should include prompt instructions specifically for things like “cp” and “cpt.” Not commenting on what they might be since I’m bad at particle physics, but this should be addressed. This bonus is also not particularly hard.

Packet 5 TU 1 and 2: A St. Petersburg tossup followed by a Russia tossup is not optimal from packet feng-shui perspective.

Packet 5 Bonus 13: isochoric is more of a hard middle part than a real hard part. Carnot and fridge are both easy.

Packet 6 TU 2: Include something like “It’s not related to diffraction” before “function named for Airy”

Packet 6 TU 11 and 15: I know you already have “British Columbia” in the answerline, but on the prompt instruction for “BC Lions” it might be worth it to say it again.

Packet 6 TU 17: Don’t do this. Please. Only toss up famous/easy/widely used keys at regular difficulty.

Packet 6 Bonus 6: After googling “bending magnets particle accelerator” It seems that dipole magnets should be acceptable here. This bonus also has two easy parts.

Packet 7 Bonus 12: Having black hole and white hole as answers in the same bonus seems not ideal.

Packet 7 Bonus 13: One of two things needs to happen to this bonus to get it a real easy part. Either the LaGuardia clue needs to get “airport” somewhere or the “TVA” clue needs “New Deal.”

Packet 7 Bonus 16: I’m admittedly bad at doubly eponymous things, but I think Kastle-Meyer is a bit hard for a middle part.

Packet 8 TU 3: Jakob, this is not tossupable at Regs. Why would you inflict this on people?

Packet 8 TU 10: Even though I haven’t read all of the other commentary and I’m sure someone else has mentioned this, but don’t clue barkhausen in the first line of a ferromagnetism tossup. This is true all the way down to like IS sets forget about regs.

Packet 8 TU 19: Wouldn’t mind the pre powermarked clue to say “Gerry Mulligan’s namesake song” or something to that effect.

Packet 8 Bonus 5: Middle part needs a prompt on remote sensing. Especially given that the next part says “LIDAR is a type of [remote sensing]”

Packet 9 Bonus 6: Could probably use a “Do not accept or prompt on Contract from America” the related document from the 2010 midterms since some readers might assume the preposition isn’t important or isn’t a significant part of the name.

Packet 9 bonus 10: motherboard and overclocking are easy parts for computer owners IMHO.

Packet 10 TU 3: This needs a clue about “common glassware cleaner in orgo labs” and I have no idea why Jones Oxidation is pre-FTP here.

Packet 10 TU 8: This is probably me just being tired at the point in the day when we played this question, but I assumed the clue describing McBurney’s sign had to be on the back because it was related to the spine.

Packet 10 TU 16: “Celebrities are narcissists” should be moved later in the question. Also the dark triad thing is relatively famous.

Packet 10 TU 17: As someone who knows some things about GR but doesn’t know GR theory that well, “Einsteins equation can be derived from this quantity” seems fraudable but maybe I’m just lucky.

Packet 10 Bonus 5: I’m having a tough time parsing that clue to make the answerline not need to also accept “regression” and/or “least squares”

Packet 11 TU 4: *Did not play this packet live because it was our bye* Cutting off the high priest’s servant’s ear seems like it should be out of power. But then again I did go to catholic school and learned this stuff.

Packet 11 TU 5: *Did not play this packet live because it was our bye* Smallpox blankets
are incredibly famous. This shouldn’t be one clue after power.

Packet 11 Bonus 9: *Did not play this packet live because it was our bye* Third part seems guessable, but then again I really like hard parts that are derived from actual lab techniques that people use so probably good.

Packet 12 Bonus 2: I’d recommend to either accept or prompt on “creation and annihilation operators” as well as something indicating that the “raising and lowering” mentioned in the first part of the clue are an alternative name for the operators. This bonus is also not hard.

Packet 12 Bonus 6: Third part needs something in the question saying “This term is similar to but not identical to features that result from erosion of limestone” otherwise everyone is going to say karst, not get prompted, and be mad.

Packet 13 TU 1: I really don’t like "this structure" as the pronoun here. Not sure what to recommend in its place though.

Packet 13 TU 13: Having reconnection in the first line of a plasma tossup seems to be too easy to me. Kai Smith’s unbeatable knowledge of doubly eponymous things did not let me see any more clues after “Sweet Parker”

Packet 13 TU 19: I don’t think the first clue distinguishes between sand and any other type of sediment (silt, clay, etc). Also you need an explicit prompt on sediment in the answerline.

Packet 13 bonus 10: I’m assuming you want butterfly effect to be your easy part for non-physicists. Probably needs a “namesake insect” or something like that to accomplish this effect. No this is definitely not me being salty for not converting this part.

Packet 13 Bonus 18: The two parts that aren’t placenta are very hard. I assume this isn’t just me being bad at bio/anatomy but that could be the case.

*I don’t think I’ve seen packet 14 yet so I’m holding off on reading it*

Packet 15 TU 1: Again, something that is not tossupable at regular difficulty in the history.

Packet 15 TU 6, Bonuses 5 and 6(damn some admin is salty about the use of a certain alternate plural of bonus): Having two particle physics questions in the same packet as well as two consecutive bonuses where the third part is a number which is 8 is an offense to the gods of packet feng shui

Packet 15 TU 11: A thing that I’ve noticed throughout the set but only commented on now, You should really order answerlines in terms of likelihood for people to give them as answers. If I had to guess how many people said “Lut” instead of “Lot” it would be either one or zero.

Packet 15 bonus 14: For non-scientist moderators if I ask for spelling I usually indicate the important letter(s) so here that would be “ene” I don’t really care if they can say but not spell “cyclo” That sort of instruction also helps moderators to know what they are listening for.

Packet 16 TU 1: As a prolific card game and board game player who read the forums discussion before being able to play this tossup, just imagine me dunking on you.

Packet 16 TU 18: Good idea, but cluing it so that the tossup basically becomes “Name a compact object that is either a black hole or neutron star” before power ends is suboptimal.

[Santa Claus]

Having read through James’ assessment of the first 10 packets, which is what I’ve played, I’d like to echo his complaints on the science, as seemingly none of the things he has mentioned have been fixed. I will compile some additional, separate feedback and append it.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

I apologize for having nothing more specific right now but I'll say, independently of the question quality, I thought the addition of more world history was nice. I played the discord mirror which probably lends itself to some field strength based bias but it did not seem that the extra world history made history too difficult. I enjoyed this change alot!

[Ciorwrong]

I apologize for having nothing more specific right now but I'll say, independently of the question quality, I thought the addition of more world history was nice. I played the discord mirror which probably lends itself to some field strength based bias but it did not seem that the extra world history made history too difficult. I enjoyed this change alot!

Thanks for the feedback Emmett. I'd like to ask about the distribution changes more broadly: what worked and what didn't work? I know we had more geography and math than normal as well and .5/.5 mythology.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

I hope the General Discussion is the place for this, but: I enjoyed the history overall but I found that some of the writing style made some stuff a bit boring. I'll try and narrow this feeling down a bit more later on but I think that with the bonuses this was a result of a specific feature: the "name a thing about [semibroad topic]" bonus.

I found there to be a relatively high number of these bonuses (3/4 history bonuses in packet 1, 1-3 (depending on how broadly I define this kind of bonus)/4 in packet 2, etc.). This style of bonus makes a subject matter more boring than it should be. I'll try and illustrate this with the Packet 1 bonus on the enclosure movement that reads as the following:

Answer the following about agriculture in 18th century England for 10 points each.
[10] Traditions of communal village property ownership were severely weakened by this movement in which grazing commons were claimed by private landowners and fenced off.
ANSWER: enclosure movement
[10] This agriculturist and author criticized the enclosure movement as fiscally wasteful in his A Six Months Tour Through the North of England. This author later toured France, where he wrote a travelogue that is now a key source on the conditions that created the French Revolution.
ANSWER: Arthur Young
[10] This process further weakened English village economies as peasants moved to cities to staff the textile mills it created. Key events in the beginning of this historical movement include John Kay's invention of the water frame and James Hargreaves' invention of the spinning jenny
ANSWER: Industrial Revolution

I don't see a reason this bonus can't start with something interesting about the enclosure movement. The other two parts of the bonus make it clear how they're broadly related to the enclosure movement so there is no need for a "name some things about" leadin to inform the player of the thematic connection. I think there is value is having a leadin in clue the player into the connection/topic when it isn't otherwise clear but this kind of leadin in isn't necessary here; no one will be confused by how Young or the Industrial Revolution are related to the enclosure movement with the parts written as they are.

In general, even when this is not the case, I think "name some things about [semibroad topic]" makes the player (or maybe just me) think the bonus is just going to be an easy, medium, and hard thing on a semibroad topic the editing team decided it wanted to touch on, regardless of whether they were interested in the subject or thought it was actually worth asking about for importance or interest based reasons. Its analogue in literature might be a bonus that begins "name some novels by Jane Austen" and follows with three Austen novels—one easy, one medium, and one hard—as the answerlines. When I play that I don't feel interested in Austen, I just think the editors wanted a bonus on Austen and this was the path of least resistance. Even when this isn't the case (as it feels like it often wasn't in SHW) it primes me for that feeling. I'm a fan, generally speaking, of the idea that questions should hook the player into the subject matter whether it be by demonstrating why it's important, interesting, or worth checking out later. Leadins can serve as a great tool for that.

I noticed this a bit elsewhere but history being the thing I'm most qualified to discuss I'm honing in on it here. I hope it's clear I don't think the bonuses in SHW were lazy attempts to hit certain topics, but rather that writing a bonus in this style makes it feel like that and as such the bonus becomes a bit boring.

[ErikC]

I really, really liked the history in this tournament (which was not a surprise knowing Mr. Myers was on board) and it's my favourite from at least the current season. The extra world history was used extremely well, and I think the main reason why was the overall philosophy behind the writing. The answerlines used were often fresh but straight-forward - I don't think I've ever heard "horses" tossed up as a commodity but it's great idea. All the questions I didn't know much or anything about were very interesting and succeeded in communicating why this thing was important- I haven't read much about the Bligh Mutiny but the tossup made me want to. I also liked the integration of clues regarding scholarship surrounding history (the Annales tossup, the Mali-New World theories).

Two quite subjective points:
I think the history rewarded a curious reader who likes all sorts of topics and place just as much as people who take deep dives into textbooks or books about a specific time period. Some tournaments I think tend to favour the later approach a bit too much and are too conservative with the geographical places they will clue history from.

I also liked the reduction in questions that focused on rulers, events, and individual people, which I think tend to end up cluing minutia or anecdotes. The Mali tossup notably did NOT clue the whole "crazy Mansa Khalifa shooting arrows at people" clue. Instead, it rewarded knowledge about learning about how the Mali Empire was governed and the theories surrounding their afformentioned naval expeditions. While some historical figures are often best remembered for these kinds of clues and there's nothing wrong about them, it was nice not hearing so many of them.

I don't feel too strongly about the other subjects besides generally liking them. I get the impression that the set had been improved a lot by the time we played it late last month. The philosophy had some contemporary thinkers as hard parts which seemed like a good place to clue them. The non-econ social science mostly avoided the pratfalls of asking for dodgy answerlines like the jobs question from Regionals.

It's unfortunate that attendance at the Ontario site of this tournament was marred by its scheduling during a break, but I still had a great time playing this tournament as an open player.

[Ciorwrong]

I really, really liked the history in this tournament (which was not a surprise knowing Mr. Myers was on board) and it's my favourite from at least the current season. The extra world history was used extremely well, and I think the main reason why was the overall philosophy behind the writing. The answerlines used were often fresh but straight-forward - I don't think I've ever heard "horses" tossed up as a commodity but it's great idea. All the questions I didn't know much or anything about were very interesting and succeeded in communicating why this thing was important- I haven't read much about the Bligh Mutiny but the tossup made me want to. I also liked the integration of clues regarding scholarship surrounding history (the Annales tossup, the Mali-New World theories).

Two quite subjective points:
I think the history rewarded a curious reader who likes all sorts of topics and place just as much as people who take deep dives into textbooks or books about a specific time period. Some tournaments I think tend to favour the later approach a bit too much and are too conservative with the geographical places they will clue history from.

I also liked the reduction in questions that focused on rulers, events, and individual people, which I think tend to end up cluing minutia or anecdotes. The Mali tossup notably did NOT clue the whole "crazy Mansa Khalifa shooting arrows at people" clue. Instead, it rewarded knowledge about learning about how the Mali Empire was governed and the theories surrounding their afformentioned naval expeditions. While some historical figures are often best remembered for these kinds of clues and there's nothing wrong about them, it was nice not hearing so many of them.

I don't feel too strongly about the other subjects besides generally liking them. I get the impression that the set had been improved a lot by the time we played it late last month. The philosophy had some contemporary thinkers as hard parts which seemed like a good place to clue them. The non-econ social science mostly avoided the pratfalls of asking for dodgy answerlines like the jobs question from Regionals.

It's unfortunate that attendance at the Ontario site of this tournament was marred by its scheduling during a break, but I still had a great time playing this tournament as an open player.

Thanks for the feedback Erik. I wrote the Annales tossup and it was in the philosophy distribution fwiw. There did happen to be a lot of contemporary or more recent philosophers and social scientists as hard parts. This is done to reward "outside quizbowl knowledge." My bonus part on Raj Chetty--an incredibly important, award-winning economist who comes up a lot less than say Greg Mankiw--being a good example of this goal. I also tried to avoid convoluted Social Science answerlines which I am glad you appreciated.

[ErikC]

I actually think the Annales tossup would have been better as a historiography tossup within a history distro but I don't think it's too big a deal.

Something I forgot to mention - pack 6 seemed much harder than the 5 packets that came before it. I think a bunch of the more challenging answerlines this tournament used all showed up in one pack, though I can't be certain without seeing the current version of the packets. It made for a fairly low scoring game against one of the better teams at our mirror.

[cwasims]

I generally enjoyed this set, although the technical issues in the online mirror were quite frustrating. A few comments in the topics I am more familiar with:

History
I thought this set was more than sufficient evidence that a greatly expanded world history distribution can be interesting and accessible. While 1/1 probably isn't quite enough to cover European history as a general rule (and 2/2 is certainly too much), I was glad that this tournament tried to explore a lot of interesting eras of world history. I will say that there seemed to be more battle/military clues than previous tournaments, but this isn't necessarily a huge problem.

Classical Music
Generally quite solid if more difficult than the rest of the set in my opinion. I think the melody clues were maybe a bit overdone and could be replaced by a few more evocative clues at times although I realize this is difficult. The A flat major tossup seemed extremely hard given how few core works are in A flat major (and the obvious Beethoven sonatas were hardly clued). It was nice to see a good amount of core opera even though I'm terrible at opera, as well as good three Bs+Mozart content. There probably could've been more Russian content.

Philosophy
I was annoyed that there weren't any tossups on ethics or political philosophy (from what I could tell) in at least the first 10 packets. There were also quite a lot of history of philosophy questions, which do not exactly conform well to a writing philosophy of "back to the classroom" that was alluded to in various posts. Out of the various philosophy classes I've taken, almost none have discussed history of philosophy much if they aren't explicitly about the history of philosophy, and even then the content rarely goes pre-modern.

Visual Art
Not too much to say here since I'm not that good at visual art, but there did seem to be a lot of difficult medium parts.

[a bird]

I have some general thoughts on the science, which was a bit of a mixed bag, but had plenty of good ideas. I'll start by answering Harris's question about the chemistry distribution: I didn't really notice a lack of chemistry questions. Were the materials science questions you mentioned categorized as other science or chemistry? (Either seems fine to me.) What was the breakdown for other science?

I agree with basically all the science comments in James's post. In particular, I found the variable difficulty somewhat frustrating.

My thoughts on the physics distribution were very similar to what Jonathan posted earlier. There was a lot of particle and high energy physics. There was also quite a bit of astrophysics, including GR content in at least three tossups. These are all appropriate topics, but they seemed to come at the expense of topics from core courses (e.g. E&M and quantum mechanics). The _Hamiltonian_ toss up was basically the only question on a core quantum topic that I heard. Was there a planned distribution within the physics category or did the writers just pick the topics?

I don't want to be overly negative about this set; there were a lot of cool topics and good clues in the science.