Thanks for a great contest with great puzzles. This time, I looked a bit more into the scoring system. First, I could not find any description how it works.

Let's just ignore all the "Early Bird" stuff. For me it doesn't make sense in this sort of contest (big number of very easy puzzle with sub minute solve for a lot of people), but why not.

If we start at the "Leaderboards" page, there is a column "B" in the table with my personal points. I have no idea how these values are derived beside the vague description below the table. But these numbers suspiciously add up to 1600. If we really look into the details, the puzzle where I got the most points in this table (more than twice the amount of any other puzzle) is the one where I had the worst performance in the contest by far: Puzzle No. 16 (had to restart because of a mistake. And then at the end there was a "Something is wrong" message, which turned out to be not about the puzzle solution, but about my dropped internet connection, which I found out after looking for a mistake for 5 minutes. That's another topic where some change in the error message might be good.)

If I look at the "Statistics" page, there are various values I don't understand. I can't find the values in the "50th player" and "100th player" column anywhere else, especially not in the detailed ranking of the corresponding puzzle. (Also the marking HH:MM for these columns is probably wrong.). In the "Puzzles - 2" tab, I can again see my "B" ratings without any idea how it is calculated.

With that sum being 1600, it's save to assume that the main contributor to the ranking (beside solving all puzzles) are the "Type A" points. The contest started with 350 puzzlers and as expected, there is a slow decline. There were a stable 200-250 successful solvers per puzzle. Of these, up to 60% got nothing. That's just not a good idea in my opinion. Of course it doesn't matter if you can constantly get Top100 results, but a lot of people (even experienced puzzlers) can not. So for all but the maybe 50 people who can constantly get Top100 results, the ranking correlates very badly with the performance.

Edited by Realshaggy 2022-03-14 4:23 PM