Bender 4 is an interesting puzzle, and it seems not easy to write a working solution, even ignoring the optimization part: “656 CodinGamers have started the puzzle” (I think that means have opened it in the IDE), 107 have made a submission, and only 22 have a 100% score. I also think that it has seen way less attention than it deserves.
For both these reasons, I’m proposing to add achievements for it, for instance for getting 50% and 100% scores (Silver and Gold, or Gold and Legend?).
I’d like to turn this into a more general discussion:
my personal impression is, that the official CodinGame puzzles have a higher quality than the average community contribution. But there are some juwels hiding.
Merging all puzzles together, just splitting by difficulty doesn’t help to guide new users towards interesting problems. Why does the overview page even say “CLASSIC PUZZLE”, when everything is in the classic section?
I’d like a puzzle page that promotes the more interesting puzzles (official ones and some good community contributions).
Did you know that there are some community puzzles with a viewer? Check out Forest Fire, 11-puzzle or Find the winning strategy.
(not saying that a viewer is what makes a good puzzle, just as an example how hard it is to keep overview).
The recent contest is another example on that case.
Bender 4 is somewhat special here, as it’s not even a normal puzzle. Not sure how it fits into the achievements.
Marslander 2 exists twice, once in the medium puzzles, once as an optimization game.
To drift off completely now, I also don’t consider it fair to reward the creating of a complex puzzle with a referee and an appealing viewer the same way as writing a clash of code (250XP in both cases).
I don’t even care about the XP itself, it’s more the message saying that a CoC is worth the same.
Call me an oldschool one, but since community puzzles rewards almost nothing (compared to official puzzles), you’ll never have many players on a community puzzle.
Yes i know we are not supposed to resolve a puzzle for the reward. Nice. Now tell thats to every codingamers who don’t start/resolve a puzzle because there’s no reward. Because saying it here is useless.
But if all community puzzle gives the same rewards as official puzzles, we’ll have a big issue anyway. Too many puzzles will gives big rewards for almost no effort.
I personnaly agree with dbdr. Codingame (or the community) should select the bests communities puzzles and give them the “official puzzle” status, with the according rewards (more xp, achievements and coding points for optim puzzles). Starting with Pikaptcha.