Thanks for your feedback about Ghetto Warz. It was genuinely quite fun to put together, despite being my first heading of such a project and some minor last-minute difficulties that we squeezed through. I'd just like to add a few notes, mostly inspired by Jordan's post. First of all, our secret TRASH round was the brainchild of QBer Ben Moise, who feels it is underrepresented at most meets. We ralized it may not have been very balanced, but I chose not to edit it, as it was written by the 5 of us at USC who know the subject. Any further ones will be a bit more evened out, but we felt we should have as much fun as possible this time. Second, we did realize at some point during the final week that the packets might have had erratic levels of difficulty. We basically did as little editing as possible, which may have added to this, but we always feel slighted when our submissions are edited to oblivion. As to the house packets, we perhaps did not allot ourselves enough time to complete them, which added to our faults. As a team, we generally lack a lit anchor, so we reverted to what we know, which may not be the most traditional. Our apologies. Surprisingly, I had no hand in writing the Sci-Fi, which I probably know best on the team. Finally, any divergences from normal history guidelines rests squarely on my shoulders. I'm the token history person, so I judged the difficulty levels of the submitted questions, and perhaps my perceptions of what constitutes "hard" are a bit off. I knew exactly who Hroswitha was. And I defend my Civil War Generals 2 bonus, 'cause I was just name-dropping and you would have gotten the same question either way. Any more thoughts or suggestions would be quite welcome. King Hippo lives. Mik "Master of Reality" Larsen USC Quizbowl "As for the tournament itself, the packets were - for the most part - pretty solid. Nevertheless, there were some uneven points in the tournament. The difficulty went all over the place from the linguist Fodor (I held off as long as I could without negging with Chomsky, but couldn't hold off long enough) to a tossup on just "bacteria." I think much of the editing was just shoring up existing questions; with weaker packets, maybe some work on the answers was also needed. Such as asking for a medieval writer who isn't Anna Comnena, Hildegarde, or Margery Kempe. What was the answer, again? I think that hardly satisfies the condition "60% of a well-balanced team should know the answer by the end of the question" set out by the packet guidelines. For USC's first effort at writing and editing a tournament since Tremor bowl four years ago, I think it was a good effort. The packets were very fun, and I think that the Ghetto spirit of the tournament was well represented. There were some problems, though. I think that not having a playoff packet after the second round robin was a letdown; declaring UCSD the winner determined by head-to-head after a tie in record hardly seems fair. The packet where questions were unsorted was a bad way to start the day, but it was sorta nice to build up a nice lead on the science questions at the start of the packet. :) The packets themselves sometimes diverged a little too far from the traditional canon. One of the house rounds had three of the four lit questions from Sci-Fi: Duke Leto, Canticle for Leibowitz, and Wrinkle in Time. Two of the four history packets were also framed in terms of video games: Civil War Generals and KOEI's Romance of the Three Kingdoms."
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