It has been announced you can refer to contest page of January Lunchtime
There was no discussion with the community about the formal criteria of when the contest gets unrated and when it does not. I find it to be much more unfair than the queue issues, which are the same for all users, and therefore more-or-less fair.
Well I don’t know any site in which decision about letting the contest rated or making unrated happens .The thing is that I believe long queue is unfair but though I got a good +ve in last contest(which doesn’t really matter to me in this account) I believe the last few contest should also be made unrated with this one
2 Likes
See? When there are no formal criteria, everyone feels unfair about one or another contest where they either performed badly because of the queue but it got rated, or they performed well despite the queue but it got unrated. It would be better to at least have some sort of stability.
2 Likes
Yess in this thing I totally agree to you
By that logic, no contest should ever be unrated, no matter how long the queue was?
The issue is:
- First 1 hour was plagued by constant 503 server errors, which was obviously very frustrating and inconvenient for a lot of the participants.
- Some users were not able to submit their solutions due to a server-side issue, and while this number might be at around 5% of the participation, that is still relatively large
- The queue issue happened at end, where the solutions were actually getting judged, but the verdict was not shown and these submissions kept running for 30+ minutes towards the very end.
I agree that the unrating is obviously sad for people who had +ve delta, but that should never a factor for deciding whether a contest is rated or not, because in every unrated contest, approximately half the participants will always satisfy that criteria.
For me, the thing is: Was the contest fair to the participants? In the end, I don’t think it was.
For people comparing it to CookOff: CookOff only had loading issues (503s) at the beginning, for the last 2 hour - 2 hour 15 minutes, site functioned perfectly and there was no queue during the contest.
For LTIME, the 30 minute queue was the breaking point - I mean, it’s still all well and good if your solution is AC and you move on to solve a different problem, but what about WA/TLE/RTE? You waited 30 minutes, kept checking in between, tried to solve some other problem in the meantime, but when you come back - you won’t even have time to fix this - how is it fair?
Overall, I don’t like making it unrated either - mostly because of the setter’s efforts that went into the contest, but it’s something that just unfortunately had to happen ):
12 Likes
Till when can we expect editorial?
@ashishgup I hope they make a comeback within 1-2 months as long challenges are plagiarised. So many people only give short contests.
1 Like
Yes hopefully. I prefer short contests as well.
1 Like
@ashishgup In no way it is right to upload video editorial for each probelm before written editorials.
1 Like
That’s honestly upto the editorialists - the video and text editorialists are both given the problems, but since 1 person has to make 1 video editorial (there are a lot of video editorialists) as opposed to one text editorialist per contest, I think it may happen that the text editorials come a bit late…
2 Likes
Well then sorry to say it looks like Codechef is tilting towards video editorial then some brilliant written editorials , I am not saying that video editorial are bad its just like written editorials have a different place .
2 Likes
I agree, we will try to have the text editorials released at the same time.
2 Likes
This was my first contest to get rated . I had lots of expectation from codechef . I have voted on recent poll to get rated this contest . Please consider our more than 80% poll of coders .
I think that people knew what they are signing for, at least I definitely expected something like that, even tho I hoped for the best. Several more specific comments:
-
It took me only 10 refreshes on average to get past 503 and ‘nginx not allowed’ (or smth like that), or around 1 minute, which does not sound significant to me. I also felt frustrated a bit and didn’t find it particularly convenient, but with some persistence, it was not a problem.
-
Are you sure that these users faced different kinds of issues and didn’t just give up after the first problem? Because I experienced no other difficulties, and some mysterious server-side issues that only happen to some specific users sound strange to me.
-
If you write code that gets WA/TLE/RE in the last 30 minutes of a contest – there are high chances that you won’t fix it. In the end, it is your own problem that you wrote the wrong code,
-
Speaking of rating, I didn’t do CC for some time, so I think that I am somewhat underrated, and will get a positive delta in at least the nearest two or three rated rounds that I participate in. Hence I don’t care all that much, but it is still disappointing to see my hard work fighting with servers just gone.
6 Likes
But it’s a 3 hr contest… And some high rated users said that the problems aren’t that hard for a 3hr contest… And i also felt same…
So my main ques is… The contest was going perfect for 2.5 hr ( acc to you )… So can’t you judge everyone for this interval of time only?
As I see it things were bad right from the beginning of the contest, so why was the contest continued without any action taken right then at that time, as it was done in Codeforces #697 just a few days back. All this is, is mishandling of an issue for which thousands of participants suffer.
1 Like
Video editorials for 8 problems have been uploaded here. And the editorials will be published soon.
2 Likes
Admin don’t do things like this , don’t delayi written editorial this much compared to video editorial.
We don’t know if they are under some kind of corporate pressure, Sometimes even the good guys can’t help because the decisions you want them to take may not be under their power. Try to tackle them in their own interests , like say “release the video editorials sooner”, then both will be released quick.
1 Like