What ? I suggest to add a “Downgrade league” button somewhere in a challenge that would subtract one league level from your current league (ie : Legend => Gold, and so on).
Why ? Codingame is a platform for competitive programming but also learning, it’s interesting to try several algorithm and to restart from scratch. For exemple you may already have a good heuristic-based AI that ranks Gold. If you want to try a Genetic-based AI you will have to fight Gold players with a brand new (and probably bad yet) AI, which is very difficult and almost impossible if you are still a beginner. Allowing to downgrade would solve this problem by manually decreasing league until you reach a relevant league.
That’s just a suggestion but it’s something I often face.
On a different side, downgrading can be useful as well to play & test with easier rules, notable example being to remove the fog of war when applicable (fog can be a pain when you want to work on something else).
I agree with this because currently there’s no way to experience a previous league, which is useful for cases like showing someone a game (more specifically how easy the game is, so you can reel them into signing up on the site (with referral link)) or competing with friends (which cannot be done if either of you are in a different league).
Recently I decided to start over my code in Tron using C (instead of whichever I was using (JS), which felt limited by the tool), and because I was already out of bronze league, players were quite strong and I couldn’t tell when I made improvements to my algorithm because it would consistently perform very poor (the code isn’t done yet). I think I’m experiencing exactly what’s being detailed and not having the relevant pool of players to fight is indeed a problem.
I also like this proposition. Take the case of streamers or content creators who want to make tutorials using codingame puzzles. Being stuck in the high leagues, makes it impossible to recreate the experience from a beginner’s perspective.
As CodinGame adds more and more support for streamers, being unable to quit a league and start over will only encourage the creation of duplicate accounts. But maybe that’s what CG wants ?!?
A do not promote option on a contest could be an easier fix. Even if there are multiple individuals on the leaderboard above the boss, the ranking algorithm should still enable other submissions to get above the boss and promote as normal. This would still require the use of a multi account to make submissions to a contest you have already promoted through, but I suspect it would make players happy and be relatively harmless.
Alternatively, if there is desire, there could be a specialist league. Before their submission they check “Do not promote to next league”. For example, if someone wants to continue playing at wood. After checking the box and enabling submission, they submit at get higher rank than the boss. Instead of promoting from Wood I to bronze, they could promote to Wood Specialist league. Presumably, unchecking the do not promote box promotes them to bronze. This would place all the individuals obsessed with a particular rule set or those who want to experiment on base mechanics together!
Thank you for reading. I have no expectation this change will happen but it would be cool!
