For all the years that I have played at ICT, I have never been able to understand why they have these problems. Why are there so many useless questions on snowflakes or rainbows or rock-paper-scissors or eskimo words for snow or crunk or other non-academic questions at a tournament where we are competing on academic knowledge. Many of the matches this year were literally decided on these NAcuties which I thought was unfortunate. One every other round is fine but some packs had way too many of these. Why were the powers so often undeserved in the ICT? There were way too many buzzer races off the first clue. I won't repeat the excellent summary of this by Subash and naqtrauma. Interestingly, I don't remember this problem in previous ICTs. (or at least not to such an extent as this year) If this was intentionally done to raise the # of powers, a better idea would be to write pyramidal questions (with difficult clues before power) and put the power mark later in the question. This would at least ensure that the best players would get the questions. What was up with the difficulty level this year? I saw very little step up in difficulty from this year's sectionals. The disparity in difficulty was in fact the really big problem. I kept asking myself, what are tossups on Ozymandias, Hyksos, Tess, Appalachian Spring, etc. doing in the same tournament as tossups on Durrenmatt, Angelika Kaufmann, and some Yoruba? text (don't remember the name). With such disparity, one never knows if it's a hose (like the one where everyone buzzed on Olduvai) or if it's just THAT OBVIOUS like Appalachian Spring starting with Pennsylvania. So to sum up: Fewer miscellaneous questions, fewer ridiculously easy leadins, and a more consistent level of difficulty is something I would hope from NAQT in the future since they have only two college sets to write in a whole year. I will try to contribute questions to NAQT in the future, and hope that all good question writers who are not playing would do the same so we can remedy these problems. -Lenny Kostovetsky
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