This has been a major beef with many people and
understandably so in some instances. Let me give you an editor's
perspective on this. The abundance of difficulty at ACF
tournaments is primarily due to one thing - the level of
question submissions received. Many of the teams who
submit packets fall into the trap that "hey this is ACF,
that means we have to make the questions harder," or
"hey this is ACF, let me show everyone what kickass
hard questions I can write." When faced with the level
of difficulty that is often submitted, an editor can
only do so much, and I realize that I am guilty of
excess difficulty in many cases as well. I just want to
say that you should look at this situation from a new
angle. ACF doesn't set out a goal of creating question
sets of unreasonable difficulty, but many times teams,
for whatever reasons, submit unreasonably difficult
packets and the editor can only do so much. So I say to
all those who criticize the "difficulty" of ACF be
part of the solution by writing packets that
correspond to set out guidelines and don't fall into this
trap of obscurity.