It's annoying when people make outright false accusations about tournaments, whether it be plagiarized questions (but it is of course, appropriate to make true accusations), difficulty of ACF, or common subject matter in trash tournaments. It's also annoying when people write lengthy posts, like I am about to embark on. I'm going to list out a few hypotheses about quizbowl people: 1) Most people who play quizbowl don't read this mailing list regularly. Some schools have one or two people whose job it is to monitor this. For better or worse, their experience of ACF consists of what older players say, any actual ACF tournaments attended or used in practice, and the people associated with ACF, either officially or as partisans, and the questions those people write for tournaments that are not officially-ACF. 2) I think it is the latter case where ACF partisans have gone wrong. I've noticed what appears to be a trend of some teams possibly blowing their budget on traveling far to a few select tournaments and skipping tournaments that in all honestly probably suck within a reasonable day trip and possibly within the same city. I think that ACFers have to attend at least some of these tournaments for several reasons: by showing up in person and submitting a theoretically non-difficult packet you put a friendly face to your perspective and erase the ACF boogeyman; while you may miss out on good tournaments in the short run, in the long run you help preserve the quizbowl community, preventing nearby teams from withering on the vine; you put out good questions as an example at a tournament that you know non-ACF oriented teams are attending; you have moral standing to request reciprocity--since you went to their not-so-ACF tournament, they should come to your more-ACF-like tournament. (By the same token, people who complain about ACF being too hard, well, your team possibly may have written easier than average packets, but you abandoned the format, helping difficulty increase, so you are partly to blame.) 3) While there are some schools which have depth of several teams- worth of ACF supporters, other schools seem to have one or two ACF- centric members and teammates for whom ACF isn't necessarily their favorite format, but who will attend an ACF tournament and get 5-10 PPG and be satisfied in part due to respect and friendship for their better teammate. There are other people (think players who have publicly expressed interest in ACF while their teammates have publicly expressed revulsion toward the first player) who are sufficiently distasteful that no one wants to play with them. ACF partisans should strive to be more like the former than the latter (although, of course, just because someone plays solo doesn't necessarily mean he's a horrible person). And don't do things that feed the (false) stereotype that ACF players are misanthropes who hate anyone who can't score a measly 40 PPG by their junior year. I agree with Jerry that ACF is more about question style than a particular difficulty, so I am going to throw out some challenges. 1) Rather than toss out another ACF Regionals-level tournament (as fun as those may be), someone write or edit an introductory ACF-style tournament aimed at novices whose intended difficulty level is much closer to NAQT SCT D2 than ACF Fall or NAQT SCT D1. Just make it some good ACF technique which would be fun for the target audience even if the questions would result in rampant buzzer races and thirtied bonuses if used for a game between two top teams. 2) Writing questions is a generally acknowledged way to get better at quizbowl. Take some of your questions and send them out to fill requests for freelance packets as advertising for what good ACF is all about (in your view). 3) Almost every time someone brings up an example of a question that was too hard, it seems like it's a lit question. Perhaps I exaggerate, perhaps not. I don't think people should stop being interested in canon expansion, but maybe if you're focused on expanding the lit canon, you should give it a rest and focus on some other subject. For non-national tournaments, maybe there even needs to be a little bit of lit canon implosion. 4) In general, don't segregate yourself into some ACF ghetto where you complain to each other about how others are horrible wrong and how you are some martyr suffering as you are beset on every front by those who would take your ACF away from you and hold your questions in bondage. (The same advice goes for partisans of any other format or style of quizbowl.) --Anthony de Jesus
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