Well, here's the name that people have been asking for... If people only wrote in their area of expertise, or even just topics that they really knew well, then there would be no way for a four- player team to submit a packet, especially if the players are majoring in x field that does not even show up in y distribution, and not everyone knows everything about something they write about anyway, even within their major. I guess question writing is no longer a valid method to simply get better at quizbowl; basically, people have been saying that if someone doesn't know how to derive the Gibbs-Duhem equation, then one shouldn't write a tossup on it, and if someone hasn't read War and Peace, then War and Peace is out as an answer. Also, many people learn a whole lot of stuff specifically for quizbowl, *especially* if they write questions on such topics. Thus, I don't think that it is a bad thing for people to be powering many tossups; I think that it speaks to the circuit getting smarter and the players getting smarter. Are we going to let difficulty get so far out of hand that we're writing tossups on George Washington's uncle's sister's second cousin? It seems that people think that any clue in which more than one person knows the answer is a poor lead-in. Especially if it's in their field; in which case, any clue in which anyone besides themselves knows it is a poor lead-in. Chill out.
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