A couple of things: 1. I think that the "dinosaurs" that some people complain about on the circuit are not only graduate students (as edcohn assumes), but players who have long since graduated. It seems that more and more regular school-year academic tournaments have been allowing non-students to buy their way in, although they are usually barred from playoffs. Even ACF allows non-students to participate in this way at its official tournaments: http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~paik/acf/eligibility.html This is a disturbing trend. But financial greed is not the tournament director's only motivation: as others have noted, the "masters" do tend to be good at writing playable packets. Some other incentives may be needed to get these people to contribute questions without spoiling college students' fun by playing against them. 2. What were the question-writing guidelines that were sent out for BRRR? The Web link cited in messages 9999 and 10055 is broken. In message 10436, funkyorangebuzz216 writes: "Team A's members were writing for the first time, and their packet was full of non-standard-format tossups and bonuses because they hadn't really played at all, for the most part. A representative was very nice, even apologetic about its packet. The team went to work and got it back to me in better shape, and had it come earlier, I probably would have used it with a few tweaks. At least they know what's expected of them in the future." I don't know who Team A are, but the biggest problem here seems to be that they were unclear on the format from the beginning. If you receive a bad packet, it's simpler for both the critic and the writers if you can point out just where the packet violates your guidelines. At least then the writers might pay more attention to your guidelines. Perhaps that's what you did in this case, but anyway it's worth mentioning. Things like difficulty level are obviously harder to criticize in the same objective way, but other problems, like the COTKU bonuses that tgallows complained were "WAY WAY WAY too long" are easy to codify (especially if the guidelines put a limit on the number of lines or characters, not on the number of sentences). Michigan's website has some guideline documents at: http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/rules.html
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