It’s striking that best players submit solutions for any problem in less than 20 seconds.
This is kinda frustrating to watch them submitting so fast what normally takes you a couple of minutes (think of a problem you see for the first time). I think this doesn’t necessarily reflect a possible difference in coding skills.
It has been mentioned before (and some agree this is a problem). There was a hope of limiting this by adding more problems to the pool – but after a few months this doesn’t seem to work. Getting to know many of CoC problems still presents an undesirable – or at least overweighted – advantage.
To avoid this, we could simply restrict the number of clashes allowed to play weekly. The actual limit may depend on the size of the pool and the renewal ratio, but my guess is something between 30 or 50 would do.
Force people to go away is clearly a very bad solution for everyone … People will just make multiple accounts. Or they will go on other website (and that’s the worse of all).
If people want to farm/try hard clashes, i don’t think we can stop them. The copy/paste is also the same kind of problem. If you really want to test your coding skills against other gamers, focus on contests or multiplayer puzzles. Clashes are fun, but it’s not revelant of anything except the “farm skill”.
I didn’t name it but of course it’s all about copy-pasting.
You can even imagine a very simple Evernote-based solution, whatever.
This is why it’s not necessarily reflecting skills.
A weekly limit is by no means forcing to go away, just to slow down to the human level.
But agree that multiple accounts is a problem here.
I don’t agree with the limit, because as @Magus said, it will only push people away, and that’s not good. But I agree that fastest code is ridiculous, because you just show how fast you can retrieve your solution from earlier to paste it on.
One way to improve that could be to add some random to the subject. For example, one subject is that way:
print 1 character every 2 characters, then 1 character every 2 characters backward.
To prevent copy-pasting (which I consider cheating tbh), I would be nice if the subject was:
print 1 character every X characters, then 1 character every X characters backward.
With X changing every time, it will be really difficult for cheaters to just copy-paste. At the very least, they will need to change some numbers in their code, which will help balance the whole thing.
Just an idea. To me CoC is really unfair comparatively with the other modes here, and there is a lot we(the community) can do to improve it.
I feel much fear here. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to…
Still cant’t help but notice that everyone here implicitly agrees that there is kinda problem of unfairness with this copy-pasting (and maybe some other issues).
So what is more pissing off: a little “slow-down” limit (that would put everyone on more equal footing) or an unfair game of copy-paste itself?
My guess is the latter one, since a limit of 50 clashes a week would be hardly restrictive (or even noticeable) for most players: e.g. only about 50 of them have played more than 500 clashes. And only a small handful would be really hurt. Maybe they should and would adjust?
And virtually anyone playing CoC would sooner or later notice the 20 seconds problem – and they would be somewhat pissed-off by unfairness (note that both of you say that other playgrounds are “better”… Who wants a competition that is biased by a somewhat “mechanical” solution?).
My take on CoC is more positive: I think it is quite fun and could improved (and the proposed time-limit is just an idea…).
And on a more positive note, I’d welcome some randomisation as proposed by CvxFous (but I’m afraid it’d prove limited to some more 20 seconds, say).
Hope is, with some more time and more problems in the pool, farming and copy-pasting will be increasingly hard to maintain.
