Today was the first time in a very long time that I thoroughly enjoyed a CodeChef contest.
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Yes, their web server crashed for the first 10 minutes of the contest but after that it ran smoothly for a solid 3 hours with very few bugs, even the ranklist was working well…
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The problems were absolutely beautiful. I usually find problems good when it’s fun solving them even if you don’t get the exact solution. Perhaps there is a general problem with CodeChef not incentivising their contests enough. I’ve done two contests very seriously recently because they were both qualifiers for onsite round (Exun and ICPC) and I enjoyed them much more because I was so vested in them. The laddus system is good but it has one major flaw - gift shop is useless so laddus are useless. The bag is apparently too small so t-shirt and bottle are the only things remaining. There are only so many CodeChef bottles and t-shirts one can buy (although I’m sure @aloo123 disagrees. All other gifts have too high a cost to be a feasible. Maybe CodeChef can start giving amazon gift vouchers or google developer credits or something.
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4000+ participating teams
It was probably because it was ICPC specifically but even CodeForces very rarely sees that level of participation.
There are many more reasons but these are the main ones… Congrats to CodeChef and everyone else involved in this contest! There were a few problems with it (SUMOR test cases, DISCSHOP revision, etc.) but it would be unfair to not appreciate its merits.