The whole point of and source of fun from the game is the chance to compete with knowledgeable players who knows the most. Like you said, when everybody can buzz in correctly on the first clause, that defeats the point, so there needs to be some sort of challenge to separate who knows more answers, or really who knows the answers earlier (hence pyramidality). Competition of any sort is an inherently elitist practice, and when added to the fact that the average academic player has a much broader knowledge base than the average person, there really isn't any way to fulfill the point of academic competition without the game having a learning curve. How is this different from every other competitive college activity? Do you think, for example, that anyone should be able to come in and place highly at a debate tournament (even in extemp) without doing any background research? However, acknowledging that the game is not for everyone does not translate into a deliberate effort towards total exclusivity. In contrast to all the misinformation being spread, ACF's members and the ACF supporters like Weiner, Sorice, and myself are all pretty much on the record as supporting a decrease in difficulty for the sake of accessibility. As Jerry alluded to in his post, Zeke publicly apologized for what was mostly considered excessive difficulty at ACF Regionals, and toned down the prelims of Nationals accordingly (he even posted the original submissions online to show the editing changes, which were consistently made to root out overly obscure answers). Weiner, Sorice, and myself, have all made posts on the HSQB board in criticism of too-difficult questions, and all of us have publicly expressed intent to keep the questions accessible and less difficult in the tournaments we are editing this fall. I'll probably be posting Buzzerfest 2004 packets publicly after Chicago Open, so people can judge for themselves whether I'm really involved in promoting some sort of difficulty arms race. While (as said before) there is no way to make it so any person off the street can win without compromising the competitive purpose of the game, there has been a very earnest public effort to make the questions recognizable to any college level student who has a general sense of cultural literacy. Though you completely dismissed Weiner's comments about working to become better, they are key to the debate about accessibility. While any layman may not be able to put up a high PPG right off the bat, any layman can become a high PPG player at ACF by reading books and doing general research, thus fulfilling another main benefit of the game: to learn more and become a more knowledgeable person. ACF-style features like packet submission, strict academic questions with a clear distribution, and long, gradually pyramidal tossups make the format very transparent to anyone who wants to put the effort in to improve, and thus score more points and have more fun. It's not as easy for someone to exhibit the same improvement in NAQT, where even someone who knows the academic material well can be stifled by buzzer races on impromptu giveaway clues, puzzle-formatted questions, and unpredictable GK and trash topics. The fun for me, at least, comes when I've read a book or researched a subject and can recognize what I've studied. It's far more rewarding to be able to do that than to get points by winning a buzzer race when a list memory clue is suddenly dropped or by being able to decipher the cryptic wording and figure out which pronoun or verb part of "to be" Matt Bruce is asking about this time. Now I'm not saying that you have to write entire tournaments or devote a large amount of time studying QB to enjoy ACF, but that a) those who put the effort in will enjoy playing more, and b) those who put the effort in will perform better than those who do not. If you want to beat good teams, put the effort in. If you don't want to put the effort in, you don't have to, but then you shouldn't complain if you can't beat good teams. The good teams got there through practice and experience, and thus have earned their place above teams who have not yet done so or chose not to do so (like any other competitive activity). To complain about this arrangement is ignorant; to try to reshape the whole game in order to wipe out their efforts under a guise of egalitarianism is childish and spiteful at best, and far more damaging to the game than a few less-than-polite posts to the message board. I don't know about you, but if I had to choose, I'd much rather retain someone who cares about the spirit of the game and contributes his time and effort to it than someone who expects that he should have the circuit bend to his will when he doesn't even want to invest his effort into it. Nobody here is acting out the strawman that only people who write entire tournaments and do constant studying for QB should be allowed to play. Nobody is advocating that people who don't devote extensive time to QB studying should be banned. If you want to play QB but aren't happy with your performance, there are 3 options, all of which are up to you entirely: a) make an effort to get better (people will be glad to encourage you), b) play casually and accept that you won't be a top player if you don't work at it, or c) decide the game is not for you and move on with your life. It's really that simple. P.S. Just for an anecdotal note, I should add that our freshmen last year seemed to be pretty turned off by NAQT SCT sets in practice while both enjoying and doing well on ACF Fall packets. I should also note that one of Princeton's best all time players, Lenny Kostovetsky, who has never played in high school and yet managed to turn into a 40-60 PPG player as an upperclassman simply by going to many tournaments and showing up to every practice, finds ACF-style questions a lot more friendly and accessible than NAQT/CBI-style ones. All it takes is effort, not complaints.
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