I am concerned about the number of Indian participants in puzzle Ramayan, over the rounds.
From 90 odd in Classics, we are down to 10 in Shading. Do we need to do anything differently?

My hypothesis is still difficulty. It discourages people.
You spend 90mins, and score 30-40 points, while others are 100+, its unlikely you will come back. The 90mins feels wasted.

Does it make sense to target the difficulty level based on 'average' performance rather than 'Prasanna's finish time' ?
Like say, Avg score of Indians participants should be 70?

In terms of publicity, I think it has been consistent for all rounds... the posts and updates, so I don't think that is a major factor.

Maybe we should personally ask regulars like Jaipal why are they not participating, maybe they will give a reason we haven't thought of.

Yes, I do agree with Rohan. As PR is target for Indian audience we should focus on Indian participants and make tests easier so that more and more people come closer to finishing a test. Target of difficulty performance by average of Indian participants score is good idea. However this make discourse International participants in long run.
May be once in few months we can have tough Puzzle test which is LMI rated but not part of PR to keep the interest of International participants going!

As someone who is a regular and who intentionally skips puzzle tests on occasions,I strongly feel that I have something valuable to offer to this discussion.Other than the difficulty part,another important aspect that I would like to stress upon is the concept of familiarity with the puzzle genre.This issue never happens in sudoku related tests because the base rule for all remains the same.However,for puzzles each type has its own set of rules,own set of strategies and intricacies with little or no overlap between puzzle genres.I skipped snake PR round because I was unfamiliar with it and knew in my case that it would just be a waste of time just as Rohan pointed out .I hardly could have solved 4-5 puzzles.Of course,the intuition concept present in Snakes is totally another thing that repels me from it.To this end,the walkthroughs by Prasanna after the test were of a great help and helped me to an extent to believe in snake puzzles.

SO,to address this familiarity issue , we can think of opening a dedicated forum wherein just before a PR contest starts ,the associated puzzles and its strategies may be discussed .The specific contents may be subject to change.It may be a puzzle where somebody is stuck.Basically,we are letting know people before a contest that such and such puzzles exist .In this way,we may hook guys who are more keen to know a lot about the type.We may continue with this for let's say 2 PR rounds and see whether it has any impact on the participation strength which I definitely believe will see a good improvement .

The problem with discussing strategies and any relevant plans like that, is it is difficult to know at what point to reach the people. For instance, I chat with Sai Karthik Burra (carburra) and some of the things he doesn't understand are things I would never think of as difficult, so there is a big communication gap there. So if I start a forum and discuss strategies I'm always afraid that the strategies themselves will go over peoples' heads. The best way to do this if its someone like you, Kishore, or Karthik, who starts the forum and asks relevant questions. It is then much easier for us to answer the questions, because we know the "reaching point" for us to explain from. The thing is, the "active" Indians are almost always the better solvers, so we rarely know what exactly it is that beginners face issues with. So "active" people who are also weak at puzzles will have to be the ones to initiate this with top solvers playing a supporter role.

I have concern here regarding points. I think the score differences will remain same irrespective of what ever difficulty. I mean if we made easy, then top solvers will be 200+, and average solvers will be around 80-90s. So gap will exist. But of course other factors will be good, like he will have satisfaction of completing the round. But the rank or score gap wont change much i believe.

I am not much in favor of simplifying Puzzle rounds more than this. At some point we need to ask what we are getting these people in for. Is it just to finish contests for their satisfaction or is it to cultivate an interest in puzzles? I think it is the latter. We have already simplified a large amount from the Monthly tests, and the participation hasn't shown a remarkable enough increase (I think factors like TSC, SM, etc. are bigger reasons for the minimal increase). I can get behind the idea of putting in a few steps and tips at the start in the IB, and also Kishore's forum idea as long as my function is mainly answering questions. Making contests simpler and simpler is just not the solution, because that means, the moment it comes to stuff like National levels and picking teams, we have nothing. It also means we will never reach a stage where we're pleasing everyone, because if we simplify it enough for say Kishore to finish, then a Swagatam can say "simplify more so I can finish" and then a Karthik can say the same thing. Eventually we'll end up with a contest with one 6x6 Paint By Numbers :P

The final numbers for Shading is much more respectable (it seems players wanted to celebrate Republic Day before participating).
26 players participated (after the test was open for 106 hours, which is still lesser than Snakes.



Now replies to some of the comments / suggestions above.

1)


Does not make sense to me. You make puzzles easier. Prasanna will finish in 30 minutes. The difference in scores will still exist.
If "others-are-getting-high-scores, i'm-getting-low-scores" is the problem, we have to stop others from participating. Keep the Puzzle Ramayan series open only for Indians, also exclude the likes of Prasanna, Rohan, and who ever is likely to get a high score.

2
I'm not a big fan of spoon-feeding. I didn't learn to solve puzzles (and other things in life) that way. So I can't completely agree with this idea.
Just an example here : We decided to post steps of all snakes puzzles after the contest. Prasanna made around 120 images (6-7 images per puzzle) and sent it over to me. I posted steps for some puzzles, but not all. I didn't see anyone even taking half interest in these steps. I stopped posting.

My point is that you don't feed ideas/steps to people. If someone is having doubts, they should ask. Kishore's stuck in this sudoku thread is a perfect example of how it should be.

However, we will take few leafs from Kishore's post. We will try to add some more information in the IB itself for each puzzle type, not just rules and example/s.

About the familiarity part : I guess everyone has their own take. If I'm not familiar, I will not be interested. But if Prasanna is not familiar, he will make sure that he participates and improves his skills.
Snakes in particular was not a great choice as a round. But in other rounds we have been trying to put either familiar puzzles or easy-to-understand-not-much-tricks puzzles. We could have easily included Nurikabe in Shading, but we included Lakes which has 2 less rules and much lesser tricks. Crazy Pavement is a rather unknown type, but look at the rules... it is just one line.


Very sensible thoughts here. How much easy do we make? I don't think we should make easier than Shading. Even in other episodes, we have had enough easy puzzles for everyone to get interested. We have been having easy puzzles in IPC, without significant benefit.

Think about other countries. Take US for example. They have one USPC per year, which has a difficulty such that an average Joe can solve 2-3 puzzles. However, they are able to attract so many players. Some times I think we should go that route. Have extremely hard, but interesting puzzles. We will get players who are genuinely interested, and we will not chase after headcount.

The USPC's entire promotion is based on the fact that these are difficult puzzles you will see nowhere else and that they are a huge challenge to get through. It works with the USA because their intellectual population likes challenges. e.g., in Nikoli, the next biggest number of subscriptions after Japan is the USA, and they make sure to solve all the hard puzzles no matter how far back in the rankings they are. Even when I was actively updating my blog I noticed that whenever I posted a really crazy/complex new idea, the US numbers were easily the largest. They have the MIT Puzzle Hunt regularly getting numbers, which is a contest with very unclear/abstract instructions, whereas we put one instruction-less puzzle and we have to be very careful and think a lot for it to work. LMI too has many beginner level US solvers who attempt everything. At the WPC, there are always US solvers sitting around and breaking their heads on the Toketa puzzles, and complimenting the harder/newer stuff that makes them think more.

All of this is not just true for the US, but in smaller doses is also true for countries and Europe and so on. I feel a big part of the difference here is factors we cannot influence like the education system, general mindset, higher competitiveness in careers which give lower capacity to pursue tougher challenges, etc. I don't think we have the promotion levels to really know either way whether this will work in India, but I think the monthly tests having lower Indian numbers (is this true?) will show that it probably won't.

Whoa! And here I was thinking that puzzle solving is only a hobby. A fun hobby, but a hobby nevertheless.That apart, I think we have a healthy number of people participating in the Puzzle Ramayan. Many more than I expected, honestly. There is no real cause for alarm.

Which is exactly my point. A lot of regular solvers do not consider it a fun hobby, or at least, their concept of a fun hobby seems to be very different. The approach I described for the USA players is exactly how I'd expect someone to react to a fun hobby as compared to not trying out some part of it because its difficult/unfamiliar and their score will be low. And I just noted that certain external factors influence that difference.

I can completely understand reasons like time constraints or even trying out a contest and not having fun on it (not every author will make great puzzles on every contest which resonate with every participant) but the part I can't agree with, which is not just exclusive to Puzzle Ramayan but also regularly happens in TSC and other events (I'm generally speaking to a crowd in TSC rounds), is that people come for a hobby expecting to score high and stop the hobby when they don't. So many times I've talked to a person who comes in saying they have fun solving Sudoku and wanted to see if there is more to it, and then they see the top solvers finishing early and then the same person says it is not for them. How did the fun stop because they didn't win on the very first try? That's a general mindset difference.

Similarly I have spoken to some solvers who say they like the puzzles but are scoring low so don't see a point in it, which is weird in two ways because these solvers are higher in the PR rankings than the SM ones, and have devoted far lesser time to preparing for PR rounds. And I agree this isn't an alarming issue but from the organizational side we should always strive for more reach and more participation so its worth discussing.