--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "Matt Weiner" <darwins_bulldog1138_at_y...> wrote: > >I can't > > tell you how frustrating it is as someone who has run a club to see > > people walk away from these tournaments completely discouraged and > > turned off with quizbowl, since they had only heard of a handful of > > answers the whole day--something I don't see after tournaments that > > aren't either ACF or ACF-style > > There you go again. It has been shown, with objective numbers, that this > happens in all formats. In fact, 33 teams scored under 100 ppg in NAQT > Sectionals last year. The only word for what you are doing here is lying. > You can hem and haw all day about how nobody cares about this board, which > is likely true, but the fact is that you are telling lies about a format, > for no apparent reason other than spite towards the people who enjoy it. Which objective numbers showed that I haven't seen people leave ACF and ACF-style tournaments utterly dejected? Seriously, I'd be curious to see how someone quantifies what I see with numbers. If you really think I'm lying then it just shows how astoundingly out of touch you are with the average quizbowl player. This is a real problem, Matt, and it has nothing to do with you or anyone else liking the format; it has to do with people being turned off from the game unnecessarily left and right, and people like you being so arrogant and stubborn to even acknowledge that it's happening let alone actually try to solve the problem. ACF has tried to help the problem with ACF Fall, trying to make the answers more accessible (although it hasn't always worked; how many times has Kelly posted to this board pleading with people to submit easier questions only to be ignored?), but the majority of independent tournaments that use the ACF style (which unfortunately ACF tends to get blamed for) have not, and these tournaments tend to frustrate players and make them not want to play anymore. Actually, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, Matt. You see, you're very fortunate in that you're amazingly good at this game, so it's understandable that you wouldn't understand why people who aren't wouldn't want to play anymore. We can list off all of the scores that we want and and argue about who would score 50 ppg, but it really doesn't matter. Here's the secret: people aren't turned off by quizbowl because they lose; they are turned off from quizbowl because they never had a chance to win. In an ACF-style tournament, it is not unusual for a team with average, young players to not hear of more than a few answers in the entire packet. In other formats, they are much more likely to have heard of a lot more of the answers. Even if they are beatten to the questions by a more experienced team and lose by 300 points, at least they can feel like they could have done better if they practiced more and gained more experience. That's not the case in ACF-style tournaments, where people only wonder why the questions have any relevance to their life. And let me tell you, when people feel like they have a chance to win, they are more likely to try to get better than they are if they think that the competition is completely irrelevant, even if in both cases they only average 50 points. So, Matt, if you think I'm lying, feel free to go ahead and believe that; I just hope that the more rational people who read this board realize that I'm not. I don't really understand why it bothers you so much that people might not like something that you do like; maybe it's some insercurity issue, but let me assure you that there is nothing wrong with liking ACF even though a lot of other people don't. Maybe you'd understand other people's opinions better if you actually had teammates (but then again, I think the only reason that you know what a team is is that you wrote a question about one a couple of years ago), but until that happens, feel free to go on believing what you want and ignoring what other people say; just be prepared to have this issue come up again and again, because unless you manage to drive everyone who doesn't agree with you in quizbowl off, there are going to continue to be dissatisfied people.
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