--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "R. Robert Hentzel" <topquark_at_s...> wrote: > Your message goes on to generally criticize NAQT's carelessness, > however, and that I can speak to authoritatively. You've made valid > complaints about NAQT in the past which, I would have thought, had > been brought to satisfactory resolution. Among other things, we > haven't shipped an incorrect set since your complaint of a year ago, > and we took the time to arrange the 2003 ICT questions so that if > questions were used in both Division I and Division II they were used > in the same packet. Both changes, while clearly the right thing to > do, took effort that was performed without raising prices in > compensation. Perhaps I may be a bit thick-headed, but I would have thought that "doing the right thing" was supposed to be an ethical duty on the part of a corporation, not an excuse to raise prices. I mean, just imagine someone on the circuit trying to make the following announcement: "Fees for the first team at this tournament are $80, unless we edit the packets to remove repeats and correct errors and create an equitable schedule for all teams, in which case the fee will be $100." Doesn't sound like the kind of tourney you'd want to spend your hard-earned (or maybe not-so-hard-earned) dollars on, does it? The fact that NAQT is a for-profit corporation does not excuse it from obeying principles that are both fair and common sense--or trying to fleece the community by suggesting that the cost of correcting your own errors should be passed on to the QB community. Moreover, I don't think claiming "we haven't screwed up, so we should raise fees" is an argument that will endear NAQT to its consumer market. Ensuring that questions are not heard at different times in the same tournament is simply common sense, and should have been a given from the very outset of the two-division tournament; correcting this mistake by raising fees would be an insult to the QB community. Don't get me wrong--if NAQT delivers a quality product that people are interested in purchasing and turns a profit by doing so, good for them. However, reducing essential elements of quizbowl to mere dollars and cents (as you hint at above) suggests that profits are of greater import to NAQT than the quality of the product that they create. Which is it? --AEI
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