ACF discussion

edcohn · Tue, 06 Nov 2001 11:54:14 -0800

I've been following this discussion with a
mixture of amusement and distaste, and one thing in
particular has really struck me. There seems to have been
near-unanimous agreement that this weekend's questions were both
well-edited and accessible--right off, I'm not sure if anyone
on this group has publicly disagreed with that
assessment. Nevertheless, I don't think that this message
will have gotten through to the people who most need
to hear it. If you're inclined to think that ACF is
too obscure (or is dominated by dinosaurs, or caters
to list memorizers, or whatever), what you'll
probably remember from this discussion is the
unpleasantness--not the fact that essentially everyone thought the
questions were accessible.

And so, to reiterate what
others have said, I think this weekend's ACF fall
tournament was one of the better tournaments I've been to
since coming to Chicago a year ago--and I speak as
someone who, all else being equal, tends to prefer NAQT
to ACF. The questions were fairly easy, but still
had reasonable opening clues; they avoided stale old
ACF and QB cliches; with the exception of some bonus
parts, they were reasonably concise and fast-paced. One
of my annoyances with ACF in the past is that it
often overemphasizes military and diplomatic history at
the expense of political and social
history--sometimes it seems like the four history tossups in an ACF
round always include a treaty, a battle/war, and a
monarch. That wasn't a problem this weekend. In short,
unless you have a problem with ACF's mostly academic
distribution, you'd probably like this weekend's question
packs.

The questions weren't perfect, of course. Most were
well-structured and written to about the right difficulty level,
but some questions seemed to achieve greater
accessibility the wrong way. Some bonuses began with something
_really_ easy and then had two fairly hard parts--I can
remember one African geography bonus that began by asking
for the Sahara and then had two parts we'd never
heard of. Sure, the first part was "accessible"--but
this question (and others) would have been better if
the first part had been a little harder and the other
two parts somewhat easier. Some tossups seemed to
have a potential giveaway right in the middle of the
question, though I can't think of a good example off the
top of my head. And--maybe this is just one of my own
pet peeves--there were too many questions where a
good player could quickly narrow down the answer to
one of two, but couldn't be sure of what the correct
answer was until the end. (The Pollux and Phobos
questions come to mind.) Even so, these were relatively
small blemishes on an excellent set of
questions.

If anything, what disappointed me most about this
weekend is that relatively few teams attended the various
tournament sites. There was no Mid-Atlantic tournament,
after all; in the Midwest, several ACF regulars didn't
attend (including, off the top of my head, Carleton and
Wisconsin, which both attended ACF Nationals), and many of
the teams that did come were at substantially less
than full strength. I think a lot of teams that have
doubts about ACF would have been pleasantly surprised at
the difficulty and style of the questions.

I'll end, then, with two suggestions. First, I know
I've been turned off by the discussion on this group
recently--whatever you're arguing, people will take you more
seriously if you use a more reasonable tone and exercise a
little discretion before posting. (A word to the wise:
if you're editing a national championship in a
format with a reputation for arrogance, it's not a very
good idea to refer to critical posts as
"retarded"--even if/when they are.) And if you're a team without
much ACF experience, don't let what you've heard in
the past keep you from participating--give the format
a try.

--edc