That's exactly it, tak. I'm a little distressed by the general feeling that Penn did the best job it could have done since the questions they received were so awful. In the end, it is the TD and editor's responsibility to produce a quality final product, and, if that doesn't happen, the blame rests solely on them. Every tournament editor gets awful questions. It has to be expected. There's only so much you can do in terms of editing submitted questions; a significant amount of new question writing by the editor is also usually necessary. There's no rule that you can't begin writing filler questions before you actually receive packets. However, it's a lot harder to put in the time and effort necessary to produce quality packets than to just make excuses (see message 3728). If people are not being given sufficient time to edit questions, then that's a problem in the editing process. Penn should have enough experience running tournaments to know how to set appropriate deadlines and delegate tasks correctly. My personal feeling was that the questions were so-so, and, as tak said, given the larger number of submitted packets Penn had at their disposal, it's disappointing to see how average their final product was. But, as Dave Goodman so astutely pointed out, there seems to be little motivation for Penn to change, since most teams will come back no matter how bad it is. Even though the questions were markedly better than, say, Penn Bowl I, they're basically the same once you adjust for inflation (i.e., Penn Bowl X was leaps and bounds better than almost any 1992 tournament). It would be nice to see some real gains next year.
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