Talk:Regular difficulty

FYI, when I coined the term "regular difficulty" in 2008, it was designed to incorporate the sort of average tournaments that teams simply played in the 2000s without thinking too hard about their difficulty. At that time everything that was not explicitly designated as a "novice" event or a "hard" event was of the same general character, though I think there were two much more important factors: There just weren't that many "hard" events, especially during the academic year, and most tournaments were not intended as grand ideological statements. Nowadays pretty much every single college quizbowl set comes with a manifesto about what it is trying to prove regarding some sort of difficulty level, answer selection process, or editorial strategy, but in 2005 it was much more likely that, e.g., Yale would just put together a packet-submission tournament because there was an open month on the calendar in their region, and certain assumptions about the playability of that set by a wide range of college teams were always made. A lot has changed in the past 13 years. This year (2021), only two tournaments were announced in the "regular" zone of the dot difficulty scale, and as expected neither of them attracted more than a small fraction of the top players nationwide, who no longer play "regular" tournaments as they once did.

So, people are understandably confused by the descriptive aspect of the term "regular difficulty" since it is based on a "regular" state of affairs which has been out of date in college quizbowl for quite some time. "Regionals" difficulty is a non-helpful term for the difficulty intended to be evoked by the term "regular," since Regionals is obviously too hard and the threads discussing it are full of people justifying why it should continue to be too hard. Perhaps something even more normative such as "the difficulty that most college quizbowl tournaments would be if college quizbowl was not trapped in an endless cycle of catering to the best 20 players and then overreacting by running six novice tournaments" is a better alternative, though I doubt that will get much traction. As a more serious suggestion: maybe "broad-based" or "inclusive" difficulty, or a term along those lines emphasizing that neither novice nor elite players are intended to be excluded from having meaningful games on the set. Matt Weiner (talk) 10:18, 21 January 2021 (CST)