OK. I admit--I'll do my fair share of kvetching about tournaments, too, but things are getting a little bit out of hand here. A few random observations: 1. The notion of logistics affecting editing should not be overlooked. When one considers that every other tournament of comparable size (NAQT, ACF, TRASHionals) divorces the task of editing from hosting, it makes Penn's challenge even greater. 2. Frankly, there weren't *that* many repeats. I can only recall about five, and many of the repeats that did occur seemed to be between the round robin portion and the playoff portion, not within the two segments. I think that this might be explicable if the swap happened relatively late in the editing process. 3. There are errors. Nobody writes perfect packets. It happens. There were thankfully only a few that caused hoses ("Culloden" comes to mind). It doesn't mean that the errors are okay, but it's to be expected. Were there more than usual? I don't think so--I've moderated the tournament a number of times, and I remember many more problems than occurred this weekend. 4. Delays in announcing the playoffs: well, I'm not sure what you can do, short of saying "playoffs will be announced 30 minutes after the end of the round robin, unless we have circles of death." The fact that there were two brackets that had circles of death made life enormously complicated. If people want to be productive, instead of simply griping, perhaps having a suggesting for a simple, yet fair, means of resolving 3- and 5-way circles of death would help everyone out. 5. Rudeness. Yes, there was some of that--I was guilty of some of it, and probably so were many other people. The atmosphere of competition sometimes gets the best of me; it's why I prefer sitting on the other side of the buzzers. 6. Moderators. There were some excellent moderators (particularly guests from other schools); there were some good moderators, and some not-so-good moderators. Again, try fielding 30-40 good moderators, and you'll see how hard it can be. [Even NAQT doesn't get a uniformly outstanding crop.] It's part of the reason the tournament has been untimed the last year--too many "green" moderators. 7. Criticisms/Appreciation. While Subash is right that not running a Penn Bowl-type tournament is not required to criticize Penn Bowl errors, I do think that Chris also has a point. If you don't have experience running an event of this magnitude, you can't completely understand how difficult it is to pull off. MLK may be a great tournament, but is it a great tournament for everyone? [I don't know the answer to that; I haven't seen the questions to judge.] Subash's comment "there is no reason that the principle [of good editing] does not hold" for more teams isn't entirely true. The larger tournament, the more difficult each and every task becomes. Packet editing and assembly is not an O(1) or O(N) operation; every additional packet causes additional complications. This does not excuse poor editing, but it should also be obvious to anyone that editing 45 packets for a 15-round tournament will require more than three times as much work as editing 15 for a 10-round invitational. But to conclude, I'd recommend that if people want to gripe, go ahead. However, if you'd like to see things get better, why not post constructive criticism as well? Suggest how to get around problem X or problem Y. The problems aren't specific to Penn Bowl or any other tournament; they just tend to get magnified at Penn Bowls (and NAQT's and ACF's, etc.) because many people are there, and have shared/varied experiences. What helps Penn Bowl next year may help another tournament elsewhere. --AEI
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