About ABC-Skyscrapers
First thing is that, as at least some players have guessed, it was a mistake. It was certainly not intentional. (I hope to learn from this mistake, but that is separate).
Anyway, so this mistake was brought to my notice about 12 hours into the test. At that time, I quickly checked all the players (17 in all) timings who have submitted the specific puzzle. I could see the time taken to solve this puzzle in about 15 cases, and all those cases convinced me that "players generally don't solve the puzzles in the IB". Even after 70 submissions as of now, I still stick to that belief. Yes, there might couple of stray cases of players getting benefited from having solved the IB puzzle, but that is extremely few.

So, there was a mistake from the author, and when that happens, there is rarely an option which is fair to everyone. So I decided not to change anything - which I think is the next to fairest option.

Thanks for the note.
In retrospect, I think not having a "D" clue in Easy As ABC - 1 was slightly misleading, even though 1) A-D was clearly marked at the top 2) instructions included "Each row and column contains one blank cell.".
I see lot of submissions for this puzzle as XX, which means players are solving with A-C, not with A-D. I could have swapped the 1st one with 3rd one.

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Kakuro
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Hi ,
I am new here. How do we solve the magic snail puzzles?

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Just right
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Fairly Nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Easy As ABC
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

I'm relatively new here, and I don't think I've ever seen a link that allowed me to rate puzzles individually. Maybe if the link were more prominent I would have seen it...?

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Kropki
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

We never had a separate link for rating the puzzles. There are "stars" next to the puzzle name in the submission page. See this submission page for example (you need to login)

I agree with Deb on this one. Most seasoned players who have are familiar with the puzzle types, usually will not devote time in solving the IB.
I did not know about this issue till reading the discussion after completing the test.

I also missed out on the repeated alphabets thing in the fourth magic snail. I solved for ABC instead of ABBC. Reading the IB more carefully would have definitely helped ;)

Overall it was an awesome test, with difficulty level a bit on the higher side. For me Kropki (3) and Easy as ABC numbers (4) were the standout puzzles.

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Magic Snail
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount
What was your opinion of the booklet formatting and printing?	Just right

Enjoyed the puzzles. Spent too much time on the harder ones and disappointed with not completing the set.
But this was a top-notch set of puzzles, with some wonderful solving paths.


Well, I still guessed :-)
But beautiful Kropki.

Can you point to a particular puzzle? Someone will give the steps for that one so you can understand it better in general.

I missed this too and had to re-solve, among numerous other things I missed (I even got stuck for a good while on two of the Skyscrapers!). In fact, I was really expecting Rohan/you to beat me on this one.

How well did the variants represent the theme of the test ?	variations represented the theme well
What was your opinion of the distribution of easy/hard puzzles?	Too many medium difficult puzzles
What did you think about the puzzle quality of the test?	Very nice
Which set of puzzles did you like the most?	Skyscrapers
Of the puzzles you solved/attempted, how well did the point values reflect the difficulty?	Most puzzles were worth the right amount

Congratulations to Hideaki, Endo & Michael for topping the international chart, and to Prasanna, Amit & Rohan for topping the Indian chart.

It has been voted correctly that the set had too many medium difficulty puzzles, and I agree with that. Few easier ones would have made it more accessible.

Here is the result of voting for puzzle types : Kakuro > Easy As ABC > Magic Snail > Kropki > Skyscrapers (I'm not at all surprised to see the Skyscrapers at the bottom).

Thank you everyone for participating. We have one month break now, we will resume with Sudoku Mahabharat after WSC/WPC.

New players : If there is any specific Puzzle in which you got stuck, feel free to post here and we will guide you through. (Please be specific about a puzzle. Answering questions like how to solve a puzzle type is difficult. But if you ask about a particular puzzle, we will be quick to respond)

Solutions appended to puzzle booklet.

Potentially one way to avoid this issue is to have a different word with repeating alphabets instead of "ABBC", like "LOOP" in the IB.

Possibly yes. But I was under the impression that having a random set of letters is not necessarily good. Everyone is more familiar with ABC. (I couldn't have used LOOP because the O's were confusing with circles).

It never occurred to me that players will start solving it as ABC (didn't we have 2 Bs given in one of the columns?). I had my doubts on Easy As ABC - 1, but not on this one.

I'm unable to sort the results in ascending order of any column after clicking on 'Show All Results' :-(