How should we approach async writing and scoring?

[Mike Bentley]

Moving this from a discussion in the Geoword thread to its own topic.

As asynchronous quizbowl (e.g. Buzzword and Geoword) becomes more common, it's worth thinking about what makes these formats different than regular, team-based quizbowl. A few factors stand out:

1. Everyone is playing every question and has to make an attempt to answer every question (although some team formats make this a little more complicated).
2. The most common formats offer you a maximum of double the points for getting a tossup correct on the first clue vs. the giveaway.
3. Opponents are not locked out of answering after buzzing later than you (in singles formats) and there are no bonuses.

This changes the game some from regular quizbowl. For #1, it means that you need to be paying attention and trying to answer every question. There are no teammates to bail you out. (Yes, you probably should be doing this on every question in regular quizbowl, but realistically when I'm playing on a team with Eric Mukherjee I'm putting my buzzer down on the biology question.) My sense is this makes everything seem harder because it's on you to answer or sit through the entire question in categories / subdistributions you're not that good at.

For #2 and #3, this has implications on buzzing style and the consequences of overshooting on the difficulty of early clues. In particular, an async question that has two or three lines of unbuzzable clues has a bigger penalty for the specialists in this subject than in regular quizbowl. Yes, there are regular quizbowl questions that come down to buzzer races on cliffs. But I think the more common type of question like this is one that still has a few sentences that distinguish and give the specialist the edge in most cases. This might mean that the specialist's team doesn't get power, but they still get the bonus and deprive the other team of points. But in async quizbowl, if the best the specialist can get is, say, 15 points on the tossup, and the tossup has some easy giveaway that everyone is going to get, this makes the penalty of writing a question like this higher.

One approach, which Will advocated, is to make the questions on the upper edge of difficulty. If the average point value on the tossup is 3.7 because a ton of people can't convert it, then it's not that big of a deal if the specialist is getting 13 rather than 17 points on the tossup. But I do think a set with too many questions like this is going to have a limited audience due to #1. I'm willing to play these but I have to imagine this isn't as fun for most people once you get to the converting less than 50% or 30% of the answers.

Perhaps another approach is changing the scoring. I haven't done the math, but I'm betting that changing the maximum tossup value to something like 30 or 40 rather than 20 would result in different buzz strategies and reduce the penalty for having a "name this capital of France" style giveaway. I suppose another idea is to have a scoring system that kicks in after everyone has played and awards points on a curve rather than absolute values. i.e. the best buzz gets 20 points, even if that would only have been scored 16 points in absolute scoring. Given how large some of these fields can be sometimes, that may not have all that much of a difference in practice (although looking at the sample packet for Geoword, there were several tossups where the best celerity was more than halfway through the question).

Let me conclude by saying I'm not picking on any format / writer here. I like async quizbowl and it would be great if the tools developed that it was easier to self-serve tournaments in this format. But since it's still new, it's worth discussing how to best adapt synchronous quizbowl to this format.

[thedoge]

I don't speak for my fellow geoword writers/editors here, but as a specialist myself, I am very open to changing the format (especially the scoring system) and think these are some really good points.

[Adventure Temple Trail]

Yet more options might include:

• Introducing some point multiplier that is inversely related to a question's conversion rate, i.e. make questions worth more if fewer people get them at the end
• offer players some chance to choose questions that could be worth more, e.g. a limited number of "double or nothing"s to use when they buzz

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

As a hyper-specialized player (in my heyday, I only listened to maybe 6-7 questions on my packet, and shut my brain off for the rest) I actually find the "you're all alone, there's no Ted to save you from literature questions" aspect of asynch quizbowl to be a feature and not a bug. When I'm forced to turn my brain on for a literature or art question for the first time in my life, I'm often surprised to learn that I actually know some of this stuff.

Of course my experience is NAQT Buzzword so these are short questions that fly by quickly. If I had been playin asynch Chicago Open or something, that might be less enjoyable. But I certainly don't feel I need to be saved from asynch quizbowl as it exists now.