All I’m seeing is a huge number of people saying “I solved 4-5 problems first time and codechef made this unrated. Make cookoff unrated too” . The mere fact that you didn’t complain in cookoff is cause the problems were harder there. Why is everyone here concerned more about the rating than learning ? Yes, I understand ratings are important and that’s one reason why we do CP but it should be fair game for all too.
As @ashishgup already mentioned in his post here , the reason was the long queue at the end and not the server error. Cookoff was working fine for the last 1.5hours.
The mere fact that you didn’t complain in cookoff is cause the problems were harder there
That’s a huge assumption and not true for a lot of people. Hard is hard for all, easy is easy for all. Ranks are relative.
that’s one reason why we do CP but it should be fair game for all too.
Exactly why people are asking for Cookoff to be unrated as well. It’s not fair when some people are able to submit, some get server error for 1 hour, some even give up because the website is dead for an hour, and randomly at 10:45 PM a notification comes saying it will remain rated with extended time. The admin reserves the right to subjectively determine what is fair in their eyes, but they have failed if over 80% of the community is unhappy with their decision.
Disclaimer
I don’t want to start a personal debate. I myself got positive delta rating in Cookoff and would get even in Lunchtime, but I would still be happy to see if both Cookoff and Lunchtime were unrated rather than only one lunchtime unrated if we are talking fairness to everyone. The only contest that is truly fair is one without issues, not where some who open problems and solve them for an hour get an advantage over those who cant even open problems and are checking the forum for one hour to find out if the contest is still rated or not.
I completely agree with you that both should be unrated for complete fairness. Just saying that there wasn’t this huge of a backlash when cookoff was announced rated. This just shows that people are more angry when they are not getting positive delta that they would’ve got, than being angry at getting -ve delta. Hence my statement about people more concerned for good ratings.
This just shows that people are more angry when they are not getting positive delta that they would’ve got, than being angry at getting -ve delta. Hence my statement about people more concerned for good rating
Whenever any contest becomes rated or unrated, approximately half people get positive delta and half get negative delta.
If people are more angry during a particular contest, it does not mean that more people will get more positive delta or negative delta in that contest
In my understanding/opinion, people are not angry only because of delta (of course that is there too for some people), but because of how Codechef has handled these issues over the past few month. Most of the comments point out to the single thing that whatever happened here was more fair than Cookoff, so it’s the accumulated anger over the entire sequence of contests that’s showing up now, and not just one bad experience at Lunchtime.
It would be wonderful if the admins can publish a clear objective policy on the conditions that would make a contest rated or unrated, coupled with automation on their platform to notify users about these decisions.
For example if a solution runs in queue for greater than K minutes, the contest becomes unrated.
Somewhere deep inside, the admins are still using these heuristics to decide what makes it rated or unrated, but objectifying this can solve most of the problems.
Yes I agree to that. Anyways I do feel the decision of postponing the short contests is good. A good step towards regaining the trust of the frustrated CP community
It’s not an official rule.
It’s just something that was decided subjectively after the contest by the admins.
An objective rule would work like this:
It’s clearly mentioned on website that a content will be unrated if and only if a solution goes in queue for 30 or more minutes (and possibly some other conditions)
As soon as the condition is satisfied, an automated notification goes out to all users that the contest has become unrated.
Objectivity is fairness, subjectivity involves personal bias.
