While there is indeed not much to compare between to players who solved a certain puzzle (it is either solved or not, and percentage of success does not change that much), the overall progress through all the puzzles together can be viewed as competitive, in my opinion. Not all codingamers are capable to solve all puzzles in ‘very hard’ section.
I would suggest to still have them included in calculation of ranking in some way. They indeed had too much weight with previous system though.
It might be feasible to add them as if they were another multiplayer competition (with similar maximum limit of points), with points calculated from the overall progress through all the puzzles. I doubt there are many people who’ve solved them all. And those who have, they also can be differentiated by the amount of votes that their published solutions have.
In terms of leaderboard, today I’ve lost pretty many achievement points (like 13K).
Hours of work and so on.
And my multiplayer AIs and other “competitive” programs generally suck.
Yet, I’m quite positive about new system and totally agree with @Aveuh
Ranking is all about competition, and the right way to make it, is to use a competitive framework.
It just have happend.
The solo puzzles are not discriminating enough for a reasonable ranking.
Moreover, having done many of them, I feel that they are kinda way anyone can follow to explore the coding universe. And It’s pretty cool like this.
Separating exploration and competition is the right thing to do.
BTW, the competition here is a real fun.
And you can learn and achieve a whole lot more, I can assure you first hand.
By the way, the way titles (Master, Grand Master and so on) are worded refer to the experience of a coder, whilst they are actually only based on its ranking. Thus you can be a Rookie with more XP than a master. That’s just not consistent and adds confusion to the whole thing.
I agree with most of the people in this thread, Why give us something if you are planning on taking it away? What about the people that can’t compete in your contest, I started the last one with 2 days remaining, this next one I am going away 2-3 days after it starts, bad timing but I can’t let a web site run my life. With the puzzles It gave me something to do that would help prepare me for when I finally get a good run at a contest, but you also gave me a small incentive to continue. Now if I miss a competition I fall permanently behind the fun just fell out.
If you really want to prioritise your competitions why not just award them more points, so the actual competition gets triple points, the multi player games get double, that way you would be giving people something rather than stealing, either way it costs you the same, it just feels different for the people on the receiving end.
By competition in the previous post, it is implied not only the contests but also the previous challenges. Every contest is uploaded on the website a few weeks after its end and becomes an AI battle (or a solo optimisation problem). These still count in the ranking and leaderboard. So you can prepare for contests, and it will still count as points in the leaderboard
In the experience/level system you have things that you can’t really compare between player. Doing a solo puzzle can take a few minutes for a coder and an entire week for another coder. You can’t really say “this one is good because he solved X puzzles”. If you need 6 month to finish a solo puzzle, you are not really a good coder. I know it may be rude to hear that, but solo puzzles are not competitive. It’s just training.
And in the points system you have all the ranked puzzles (multiplayer, clashes, contests, optimizations …). In this puzzles you can compare players.
The only downside is that clashes of code still reward too much points for farming. It should be in a different ladder.
Yes, there is a REAL competition in solving puzzles. Because they show how good you are at solving them. If you can’t solve any medium puzzle - you definitely should be ranked much lower compared to those who solved hard puzzles etc.
The old system was good. You could gain points and improve your rank by any coding activity you like: clashes, contests, multiplayer games, optimization, golf, and single player puzzles.
It was really motivating to try and participate in all kinds of these.
Now single player is wasted.
Please return single player puzzles back to ranking system
Imo this is actually an argument towards the side that solving solo puzzles is competitive. As long as new puzzles keep appearing at a steady rate, getting an edge on the scoreboard means being able to solve puzzles reasonably fast.
I think the main problem here is not to know if puzzles are or are not competitive (personnaly, I really think it is).
No, the real problem is changing the rules of ranking.
It will always implies a lot of frustration for a lot of people. There is a lot of ways to enjoy codingame : some people love to compete in contests, or build AI. Some others just love to solve problems. It is very different parts, and I think puzzles and contests requiere both coding skills, but not necessarily the same.
We don’t have contests based on graph theory, or image processing, etc…
We don’t have puzzles needing genetic algorithms for example.
The new system is saying to puzzle enthousiastics “Ok this part is just training,you don’t need real skills to do it. If you only are good at it, you will be consider here as a rookie, because the only thing we care about is the dev of AI and associated techniques”.
Many codingamers will feel it as frustating, and maybe even insulting. Many codingamers enjoy codingame by increasing their rank via puzzles. And now, all these people are feeling that it was just a waste of time.
I find you a bit hard on the intentions here.
This is not the first time Codingame changes its ranking system. When the optimisation puzzles came online everything changed, we had two different big ranking changes at that moment that completely modified the leaderboard. Then the clash came and the same happened again.
The thing is, there are contests based on graph theory (There is no Spoon was one of them). Some challenges can use GA (lots of GA used in Smash the Code, Coders Strike Back and in the solo section in Mars Lander).
Nobody is calling you a rookie if you solve lots of problems. Solving puzzles is NOT a waste of time.
Now there is no way of rating the competitivity on the puzzle. The only way to do this is during solo contests (which happen, sometimes) where everyone starts at the same time and you have a fixed amount of time to solve the puzzle. Otherwise than that, Magus is right, you have no way to track how much time you spend on a single puzzle.
I understand that there are lots of different ways of considering the problem. Once again I can relate to the loss of ranking (I lost ~50 places, I was top 50, I’m not anymore). But as I was saying on the chat, I’m glad to see people like recar or pb4608 being propelled in the leaderboard that deserve their ranking way more than I do, because I have to admit that winning the AI battle, meaning a problem without a clear solution, is harder than solving a puzzle.
I spent many many hours getting up to 60th on the leaderboard. I cared about my rank.
Now I have been dropped to 207th. And lost my Guru status also.
I felt the puzzles were competitive. If I can code a solution to a puzzle and Player X cannot, then I deserve some points for it.
This is very disappointing and discouraging. I feel Codingame does not care about the puzzles any more, even though it was a strength of the website. There have been no new puzzles in many months either. Now it will be a multiplayer website?
Everything is now CP focused. Why is there no leaderboard for XP?
Also I think the puzzles are much better for beginners learning to code, especially by viewing other solutions. Recent multiplayer games have been too tough for beginners.
If you want to have more and more people to compete with in multiplayer, you should have more and more people in the community in the first place.
I spent numerous hours solving puzzles in the few days after i discovered this site because:
It was fun & challenging
I could see the practical consequence of solving these puzzles by ascending the ranking ladder
Ascending a XP ladder has NO value, at all, for a new joiner: this ladder has no intuitive meaning nor reference point.
Making a puzzle-based ranking bears no conceptual difficulty.
By not doing it you are not only slapping a part of the community in the face, you are also putting the growth of this community at risk whereas it had a huge potential so far.
People like myself who are not interested in multiplayer simultaneous games will leave or won’t come.
Thank you all for your feedback. Changing a system is never easy. I’ll try to address the different points:
Goal of the change
Some feel that CodinGame does not care anymore about the solo puzzles and CodinGamers who do only that. No, this is not our intention. Even if we want to develop more the multiplayer part of the site, we really don’t want to throw away the other parts. We believe in this new system and we have made him thinking about both types of CodinGamers.
Loss of title and ranking (and time)
Even if you lost rank and title, there has been no waste of time. I mean you still have resolved all of these puzzles and probably learned a lot. Your level is now representative of these long efforts.
However we clearly underestimated the frustration this loss of title and ranking will create.
I personally like the proposed idea of giving titles for different achieved levels. And maybe changing the other titles in the ranking system.
Also to replace the competition, I would gladly see some indication on how many other CodinGamers have reached the same level as me. It would maybe make the XP ladder more meaningful for some CodinGamers. For example: level 8 (34523 CodinGamers have reached this level)
Multiplayer games
I feel that some people think it is reserved to an elite who spend all of their time on the site. It is accessible, more easily than you would think.
You can check my real account from before I joined CodinGame: 2StepsFr0mHell profile. I’m far from being a good developer. You can see that I don’t have crazy results in contests, still I’m a “Master”, ranked 1620, and honestly I never spent more than 5 hours on a contest. Come and join, it’s a lot of fun.
In any case we’ll for sure discuss this topic with the team on Monday, I’m sure we can find some compromises to make everyone happy.
Also, If you do only single player puzzles, you are not only a “rookie”, but the most important - your rank will be something like 430,000 out of 430,000, instead of 900 of 430,000 (top 0.3%)
