The one thing that continually bothers me about NAQT's distribution is the whole "tournament-level" subject distribution. I may be wrong, but my understanding (and experience) is that there are no hard and fast NAQT rules that there must be at least X tossups on history, lit, science, etc. in the first 22 tossups. If the format of all NAQT events involved equally talented teams playing a simple round robin, this would not pose too much of a problem. But it's not. Players aren't competing against the questions (ala Academic Decathlon), but rather against another team in defined rounds. Varying moderator/game speed can cut off a good number of tossups per packet, and we've seen instances of subject clumping in NAQT packets of the past. Packets that widely vary in subject content from one round to another and the apparent burial of certain subjects (fine arts and mythology come to mind) tend to create an imbalance. Upsets will occur more readily, and otherwise evenly matched teams may find themselves in blowouts. I guess this (and the increasingly annoying "nacuties" ... Lionel "Little Man" Tate, anyone?) is largely the reason I've begun to favor ACF style over the past year or so. Specific topics aside, you at least know that you're going to hear a few fine arts questions over the course of the packet. NAQT could go a long way, IMHO, by crafting (and publicizing) some minimal guarantees (15 questions?) for the first 20 tossups per packet. Just speaking for myself, -- eps
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