IHNN - 2022-01-14 8:50 AM

I've voiced my thoughts in a couple of other places, and think that the scoring method is the biggest flaw. I'll go into a bit more shortly, but I want to highlight the things I really liked about this series. Having replays, even if I didn't watch many, is a phenomenal addition that I'd love to see expanded- perhaps the solver could annotate certain moves or the actual times of inputs could also be logged to see where thinking times were? The puzzles themselves were generally very nice across the board showing a lot of variety in the genre, though I think there could have been another easy puzzle and another hard puzzle- there were a lot of middle difficulty ones (and to keep 16, two of these could have been saved for elsewhere). The comments area probably didn't need emoji as it made most of the comments a single emoji- dividing this into "reacts" and "comments" may work better for actually capturing comments? The system being in place is a huge plus though, and most of these are minor opinion based things. As an aside, I would definitely appreciate if there were 2 puzzles open at once instead of just 1, giving a longer period- even for 1 puzzle it's not always easy to fit it in.

What I think is less of an opinion is the scoring system. I do not like going purely by placement but acknowledge it's the simplest way to aggregate results with different amounts of finishers. Expanding the scoring to more solvers, or perhaps having 51st and 52nd get 50 points, 53rd and 54th 49 and so on (or a similar adjustment) may help include more solvers who may have finished near the bottom on most solves. For a first run, top 100 makes sense as I expect the volume of people participating far exceeded what was expected- a great problem to be having!
Even more egregious though is inconsistent penalties. A flat rate just doesn't work with this format, as 2 minutes on smaller or shorter puzzles could easily be 100 placements, while on the larger ones a penalty cost maybe a dozen placements or less. This ends up putting a much greater weight on the smaller and easier puzzles, which is backwards from what's typical. I firmly believe that going forwards, penalties should be based on either a percentage of your own time being added to it (perhaps plus a small flat amount to discourage guessing further) or based on the performance of others- as an arbitrary example, 25% of the 25th fastest error free time on a puzzle.

Scoring is, of course, only relevant to the competitive aspects. The community aspects, the general format, the technical side of getting this to work and the puzzles themselves are all on point already I think. Looking forward to the future of these for sure.

Realshaggy - 2022-01-14 4:57 PM

Great contest with great puzzles! I can't say much about the scoring system since I didn't thought about it since it was pretty clear that I will probably never get any points.

Just two small remarks:
1.) Forcing feedback is always bad in my opinion. Especially in the exact moment after you finished the puzzle and want to see the results you get forced to press some emoji or whatever. You can bypass it, but for me it still feels annoying and the quality of feedback you get that way is questionable at best.
2.) The star system for quality feedback is also not good in my opinion, since a lot of popular sites use a 1-5 stars rating for difficulty (e.g. GMpuzzles and the LMG portal).

Oh and I'd love to see replay in real-time added.

ropeko - 2022-01-16 6:18 PMThat was a great contest with beautiful Tapas! Thank you!And the contest was very well doable just with the mobile phone, even the 20x20 puzzle.In future it would be great, if there is more time to solve the puzzles, i.e. every 30h a new puzzle but the puzzle counts during the next 5 days, since not everybody has time to solve them on a daily basis.As IHNN already mentioned, the scoring A for 1-100 rank is in my opinion suboptimal, because, luckily, of the high number of participants. It would motivate more if each participant get some points and not only the best solvers.The replay button is a great feature to learn from the top solvers or just to see the different approaches.I‘m looking forward for the next puzzle types :)!

Nizz - 2022-05-07 11:25 AM

I know the contest is long over, but I am getting "Wrong solution" for several of my correct solutions. It seems this happens whenever I submit a wrong solution first - all subsequent submissions are then deemed wrong. This is still the case even if restarting from scratch ("delete all").

Administrator - 2022-05-10 1:18 AM

We are still trying to debug this issue and have not found anything missing at our end.

Lets take one specific puzzle for example : Tapa 13
Can you submit the puzzle again and after you get the "Wrong Solution" message, can you please share a screenshot of your solved grid?