2020 FLopen - Thanks and Set General Discussion

[TaylorH]

This thread is for general discussion of FLopen overall. Discussion of specific question should go in the other thread.

Thanks to everyone who played FLopen, I had a blast staffing the main site mirror and I saw lots of fun had and impressive demonstration of knowledge all day. This set was entirely edited by Jonathen Settle (science and some history) and myself (everything else). Two people is probably not enough people to edit a set of this difficulty and scale, but I think we ended up doing an okay job. I personally tried to prioritize interesting content over the usual ultra granular attention to filling gaps in the distribution, and I think this may have been noticeable with the high amount of whimsey in the set. My highest hope for the set was for people to come out feeling rewarded for deep pockets of knowledge and to have added a few items to their lists of things to learn about.

I want to thank all the writers for contributing unique and memorable questions to the set. In order from most to least question written the writers were: Taylor Harvey, Jonathen Settle, Ani Perumalla, Grant Peet, Leo Law, Tracy Mirkin, Mike Bentley, William Grossman, Lalit Maharjan, Anthony Delgado, Khanh Nguyen, Zachary Knecht, Nic Dai, Zach Foster, Shawn Jarrard, Mateo Acosta, and Jason Zappulla. I would especially like to thank Ani, Grant, Mike, and Nic for joining the team late and still producing many very high quality questions. I would also like to single out Ani again for making numerous excellent improvements to others' question in both style and content. I'd also like to give a special thanks to Zach Foster for rewriting several of our history questions and freelancing several more very much at the last minute.

I also want to specifically thank Jonathen, who put many many hours into the science in this set and writing countless amazing questions. This set could not have happened without him.

I'd also like to thank our playtesters: Jonathan Magin, Kai Smith, Geoffrey Chen, and Eric Mukerjee.

Making this set was extremely stressful and time consuming for me, but in the end I am proud of the finished product and I am glad it happened.

[VSCOelasticity]

I hope everyone had a good time playing the set! Thank you for dedicating a (long) day to hearing our questions. Hopefully a few of them sparked joy.

I would like to thank the writers whose questions I edited for writing interesting questions that were easily molded into a final product. Thank you for your hard work: Leo Law, Grant Peet, Lalit Maharjan, Zachary Knecht, Jason Zappulla, Tracy Mirkin, Nicholas Dai, Ani Perumalla, William Grossman, Khanh Nguyen! And all the other writers whose questions I didn't get the chance to work with directly! We had a great team.

I agree with what Taylor said regarding the set production, so I'll stick to the science. I bit off a bit more than I could chew by editing all science categories, given that I do not have "real knowledge" in a decent amount of the topics covered within the 4/4. I think this led to some oversights in answer lines and some non-specific clues, which I apologize for. I didn't really have an overarching philosophy for the science, besides trying to find important, challenging clues. I intended to leave middle clues in power and keep the middle parts of bonuses appropriate, but it seems that a lot of the questions played harder than intended. I hope you still felt rewarded for knowing things despite the difficulty misjudgments (in my defense, I think I toned it down from Fall Open...but maybe I'm wrong) and occasional inaccuracies.

I also want to give an extra shout out to the science playtesters in addition to what Taylor said. Thank you all so much for your time! The science, despite its flaws, is much, much better for their efforts.

• Kai Smith: Provided good feedback to pre-edited drafts of the science, and continued to suggest edits/reign in difficulty throughout production of the set. He's a big reason why Eric and Geoffrey ended up seeing questions that were any good at all.
• Eric Mukherjee: Listened to pretty much the entire set after editing. Helped with everything, but especially with the bio and chem by suggesting good clues and different hard parts.
• Geoffrey Chen: As I said in the writers' Discord, Geoffrey was my savior. On top of reading through the question doc and making lots of comments, they were there to whip my last minute astro questions into shape (including criticisms that led to me throwing out an extremely ill-advised TU on Magellan in astronomy).

I also agree with Taylor that this set was pretty stressful for me, but the work seems to have paid off. I enjoyed reading to everyone! Thanks again.

[Jem Casey]

My recall of set content is too poor these days to give much more specific praise/feedback without having the questions in front of me, but I greatly enjoyed playing this set; thanks your hard work, Taylor, Jonathen, and team!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

This tournament was pretty good and I'm happy the Florida team got a chance to try their hand at a hard set, since they definitely produced what I thought was a pretty distinct experience. I take it this is something of a swan song from their older players - it's definitely a good note to "go out on" in a sense (though you should look forward to more Settle Spice* at CO!)

Compliments:

• I liked how the science and thought questions were unafraid to throw out a bunch of tough but undeniably quite important answers. Tossups on the lifeworld, parasocial relationships, quintessence, and overlap integrals possibly were a bit much for a Nats-minus set, but given that the tournament ended up being harder than previous Nats-minus events overall, they felt reasonably in-place.
• The expanded distribution seemed to work and I appreciated the high amount of Geo/CE/Other - these questions generally seemed to play fairly well from my recollection and many of them were highly enjoyable. I wouldn't mind future 22/22 events at all!
• At least from my notes, the literature questions seemed pretty well-balanced across eras and genres and continued the trend of finding good ways to insert contemporary literature into the distribution without overwhelming it.
• The Bilbo riddles tossup brought much joy.

Critiques:

• Difficulty seemed fairly disjointed across categories. Stylistic variance across categories makes sense - different editors will take different approaches, use different answers, etc. However, the literature, arts, and "Other" questions generally seemed a good bit easier than the science, history, and religion/myth. Placement of powermarks also seemed somewhat inconsistent.
• I'm to understand that the history for this tournament was completed and edited rather last-minute; unfortunately, I think this showed and really inhibited my enjoyment of this event. I won't elaborate too much on specifics as this set won't have many future mirrors, but the most noticeable things to me were many, many cliffs, very hard hard parts, and serious deficits in American political history and Early Modern history.

[heterodyne]

I'm pretty bad at assessing a set without reading it over, but I want to second what Will said about the expanded distribution and the balance of the lit questions. I also felt like the "thought"-type stuff covered a refreshingly broad range of approaches and topics. For the most part, the clues in thought questions were also written so that they could be understood even by someone not buzzing on them -- something which is quite difficult to accomplish, and too often ignored.

My one criticism, which will have to remain vague and evidence-free until I take a look at the set, is that I felt like a number of answerlines (particularly on bonuses) were a bit too punishing in looking for a particular term for something which is regularly discussed in a descriptive manner. I think perhaps throwing some description acceptable tags on these would have eased up the bonus experience slightly while still asking about the wide range of subject matter that you wanted to cover.

[Auroni]

This was a great set -- it consistently felt very academic, providing us with no shortage of cool things to go read about or look up, without ever feeling punishingly difficult even for a fleeting moment. It also exhibited a remarkable amount of polish given that only two people edited, one person each being responsible for almost all of the humanities and the other all of the sciences, a rare feat that deserves praise.

[DavidB256]

I can't really comment on the content of this set because most of it went over my head, but I will say that mirroring FLOpen at UVA was a great experience. Players seemed to enjoy the questions and the set seemed very well-produced overall. I'm not a fan of the 22/22 format and the many "two answers required" questions led to some verbosity, but I want to give a huge thanks to the editors and writers of this set for their hard work.

[touchpack]

There were a couple individual questions that I wasn't a fan of, but I thought overall the science in this set was very successful, especially considering all of the science subcategories were handled by a single editor! I do think it ended up somewhat harder than Fall Open, but I personally enjoyed that because I like hard questions (aldolases and overlap integrals were great tossup ideas, though I'm sad I didn't hear any fructose metabolism clues in the former). I especially appreciated that, unlike past sets with reduced chemistry, the chemistry was not just phoned in "here's some boring functional group tossups with an occasional cookie-cutter p-chem answerline sprinkled in"--the tossups on things like fatty acids, overlap integrals, solid-state, Egypt, etc. were inspired enough that I hardly noticed that the chem was reduced at all! Thank you to Jonathen and the writers for putting this together!

[Abdon Ubidia]

Thanks for writing this set! I thought it did a good job with creative answerlines for the most part, and I was also pleased with the 22/22 distribution. Would it be possible for the packets to be posted so we can look over them?

[Gene Harrogate]

It's hard to comment to much without the set in front of me, but I want to say that the expanded 22/22 felt like it really did its job--the questions felt like they went to a lot of cool places that other tournaments usually don't. I'm not sure what the consensus is on the mixed-knowledge approach to question writing, but I also personally enjoyed the big-tent clue pools for tossups like Saint Bernadette. All in all I think this tournament did a good job rewarding lots of different paths to knowledge and keeping everyone having fun--it was the sort of set that kept you in a good mood during losses.

Maybe some editing happened but I didn't think the history was particularly harder than the literature (at least in the last third of the question, the location of the overwhelming majority of my buzzes). I can't say it stood out to me as a poor category either, though many players other than myself are more qualified to make that call.

A general stylistic comment that I think applies to a lot of tournaments: I'm of the opinion that if a clue has a pertinent qualifier, it should come first in the sentence even if the prose becomes less natural. For instance, one question on "this body of water" dropped a clue along the lines of "La Salle explored a river emptying into this body of water"--which produced a race in my room to neg with the Mississippi after "explored". I think "A river empyting into this body of water was explored by La Salle" is a more empathetic way to phrase this sort of clue for players, even though we all know passive voice=bad.

Thanks Florida!