<<Bad teams tend to do poorly whether the questions are hard or easy, and questions that are very, very easy can insult good teams and players. When I write for HS (this can be applied to college, too, though there are fewer _bad_ teams in college, just young ones), I write for the good teams; I don't really care about the bad ones--they'll always suck unless they put effort into it. Most are content to suck, so why should I change anything? The ones that aren't happy about their current situation tend to try to get better. Hard work and overall good play should be rewarded, not slothfulness and ignorance.>> I am getting really tired of the attitude that lower percentile teams don't matter, and quite honestly, if I knew which teams got to a HS tournament that you write, I'd tell all the "bad" teams to not go since you obviously don't care about them and deprive you of their money. I've found that players will often be interested in improving, given encouragement, and it's just a matter of showing them the way and not treating them like crap. I bother to talk to "bad" teams and young B teamers and the like. Often, it's a matter of lacking in resources such as coaching, good practice questions, ability to go to tournaments, or decent tournaments within driving range. But I've seen teams work at it and go from bad to mediocre, or mediocre to average, or average to above average, and those are reasonable goals and should be encouraged. The main problem is that most of you out there are a bunch of hack writers with no idea of aesthetics. Your definition of what is important and worth knowing seems to be "it comes up in quizbowl." Instead of using stock clues and cliches and list knowledge and stuff that only people who study for quizbowl seem to really care about. You know what, my questions tend to be harder than average, I admit. They also tend to be giant "fuck yous" to teams which rely extensively on memorizing lists. On the other hand, at HS tournaments, I actually talk to the "bad" teams and ask them what they think. I am pleased that they tell me that, unlike other tournaments, the stuff that they don't know is presented in a way that sounds like they should want to know about it, and I think that that desire for knowledge extends outside the bounds of quizbowl. I'm tired of those people who think that a litany of boring facts, no matter how relevant, automatically makes it a good question. All it makes for is a question as mediocre as a CBS sitcom, which doesn't do anything particularly badly, but doesn't do anything particularly well either. Quizbowl isn't a circus, and I'm not saying you have to write questions that think they're more clever than Ogden Nash. On the other hand, you don't want to write heavy, slow, long, boring questions which put you to sleep like Hungarian cinema. It is possible to produce well-written easy questions. It's just a bunch of egos who believe they can never do wrong and blame anyone but themselves when they neg or lose a game. And the first thing they blame is the questions, and somehow being easy at the end is the fault of the question. Well, if you know so goddamn much, then you can answer the easy questions as well as the hard ones and you can tell that the answer is Picasso or El Greco or Dali or Velazquez before any clue even gives you a hint of their nationality, and you know that it's not Murillo or Zurbaran. Assuming that a tossup is factually correct and not misleading and you buzz and neg with an answer which is much more obscure than what the answer turned out to be, then the truth is you just didn't really know what the question was asking about and you should take your neg and like it, you bunch of jackasses.
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