Thanks for the contest !!!
The puzzle were very interesting. It should be possible to finish them in 2 hours.
The negative point is the IDE. It was impossible to run tests (a little better after 1 hour)
About the contest, I like this way. I don’t have a lot of time. So it’s perfect for me, we have to be efficient in a short time.
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Not that I know of; I see mihei mentioned discord (which by the way, why is it only advertised in the help section of the website? no wonder I never knew about it until now), so maybe there is something over there.
But yeah, that leaderboard is taking a while to be published now.
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By the way, wasn’t one of the point of the new IDE that you can review the timelapse of your code? Because if so I have no idea where to access that now.
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To start, thank you for this challenge, it was nice to have something original and not always a bot contest.
Like many I suffered from latency and bugs, I lost time on the 2nd puzzle before seeing that 2, 3 and 5 had to be avoided.
When I saw on the challenge discord that these puzzles were playable if we avoided the “run all tests”, I immediately repeated it on the Fr discord so that we were all equal.
The lag times caused me to lose my code at the last moment on puzzle 5 (I imagine that by dint of clicking, I must have selected some text without realizing it, and I erased the code already present (main function) … when I realized it was too late to recover it with Ctrl + Z. When I changed language to return to mine, it gave me the starting code, but my copied code was lost because of another copy-paste on the discord… too bad, it’s the game ^^).
I hope there will be more puzzle type contests, with less latency. It would be really very interesting (even if I find it unfortunate that the 2 hour limit necessarily imposes a bad schedule somewhere).
I also wasted time looking for a solution to reduce the execution time of puzzle 6, my trick used on another CG puzzle didn’t work here. I can’t wait for the puzzles to come back to figure out what I could do.
In the end, I did puzzles 1 to 4, 5 which was lost (but the replay will probably have kept the code ^^) then 6 (tests 1 to 8).
Will it be possible to copy and paste code thanks to the replay?
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It was my first time trying a community contest like this one. It was an awful experience.
While the text, images and exercises sounded nice, I couldn’t get the tests to run after the first exercise, and could only get the tests to run for the second and third exercise after 1h30.
I tried the forums to see if I was doing something wrong, but they were down too, server errors everywhere. This led me to just leave it and come back in the last 15 minutes to continue, but then after the time ended the tests just hung, refreshing the page did nothing, and all the website was still unresponsive.
This was completely unexpected for me, since I have tried some of the multiplayer/bot competitions before and never seen any similar issues. It would have been nice to leave it open for a whole day or two, even if it did not count for any leaderboards, to allow it to be played without all of the issues that come from having too many people trying to access it at the same time.
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Hey there,
The 2 hour time limit was a problem because of real life/family time.
The IDE issues where very problematic and a deal breaker.
The theme was great so I really enjoyed that part.
All in all, it could have been great but it really wasn’t.
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Agree with overall theme here. Fun idea and problems, but execution was severely lacking making the “competition” aspect unfair and unreliable.
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Does anyone know when will the leader board be published? I know the soon after the end of the contest message, but I was wondering if soon is going to be today 
@bohuss Normally the leaderboard will be revealed today :
Today 11:53 : We are still working on fixing issues caused by the games failing to play during the event, once it is resolved we will be able to display the leaderboard
The problems should also be available later.
All the communication was made on the Discord.
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Normal contest are bots constest, a litlle more participant but expanded over a week or multiple week, so the peak load of 7k participants over 1-4 week is quite low compared to 3k during 2h.
I think you have missed the fact that this constest was using an other part of the platform with a brand new IDE so everything u are used to like langage and I/O is different and it’s the first event on this part of the platform.
Unluckily for them they wanted deliver some problem with visual in the codingame spirit and that was the thing who created the major problem for 2, 3, 5.
Thanks for linking, if Dicsord is CodinGame primary comms platform then I’m out of luck because for reasons unknown to me Discord does not like me, they keep flagging my account as “something is wrong, click here to regain access” which they never respond when I ask them to “unflag” it…
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I think this was very clearly communicated upfront - the contest was said to take place from 8-10 p.m. CET.
This is admitting my own stupid mistake but saying it anyways in case you want to make it more “idiot proof” next time.
I got an email saying it starts at 8pm CET
And my time zone is CT, so I just assumed that the email generator saw my location and told me when it would be my local time.
(Because CT and CET is surely the same)
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“off-by-1” errors are fairly common in coding.
It seems that “off-by-6h” errors can sometimes also occur…
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I thought it would be a 2h from the time you start. Like it was for coding escape room challenge. With 2 separate ladders for people that finished in 2 hours from release and whenever after. Or even only 1 ladder for former, but so that people can still join later and just casually try.
I’ve joined with 15 minutes left and did like 2-3 problems and was extremely frustrated when time run out and I couldn’t submit after. I thought may be I will be able to solve these problems later but it’s still not available. So I don’t understand, so much effort to do great puzzles to just let a handful of people solve them for 2h. Strange
They announced that the puzzles would be made available outside of the contest.
Well, the leaderboards is now available! I did better than I expected but not sure what it means when a majority of people was impaired by the lag.
And uh, apparently the coderpad screen is available as well when I click on the detailed view?
I don’t think this is intentional, right?
Hmmm yeah no I’m pretty sure this dashboard shouldn’t be accessible.
Winter Challenge 2023 sucked big hairy donkey balls. There was no updates posted about the problems people were having. I never did get 2,3, and 6 to work. No matter what they were saying on Discord, every thing was not fine. That was a waste of time, and I’m glad I didn’t invite anyone I know to the contest. If that is the quality we can expect for future challenges there is no way I could ever recommend this platform to my employer.
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I’m confident that the future challenges won’t have the same technical issues. It was a new platform, they will make the corrections. You can try the languages certifications which use the same platform if you want to see what it’s like without the server problems. Also the last challenges on the main platform worked very well.
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Pour ma part, c’était une expérience intéressante. Plusieurs points à souligner.
Points négatifs 
_ Impossible transmettre mes commentaires à la fin du challenge.
_ Problèmes de connexion au début et à la fin du challenge. J’ai terminé l’exercice 3, j’ai lancé la série de tests qui réussissaient. J’ai cliqué sur submit avant 22h. Pas sûr que l’exercice sera validé 
.
_ Temps 
d’attente dépassé lors des tests de l’exercice 2 et de l’exercice 3.
_ Deux heures c’est un peu court pour faire tous les exercices. On pouvait laisser 3h ou 4h et départager les meilleurs par le temps .
_ L’IDE n’est pas très pratique, l’assistance Java était lente, auto-complétion pas très efficace. Je n’ai trouvé l’option pour afficher le code en plein écran.
_ Pas de version Française 
de l’énoncé.
_ Plus de 24h après la fin, samedi 18 Mars à 8h18, on attend toujours les résultats. C’est quand même un gros cafouillage ! Ils devaient arriver peu après la fin.
Points positifs 
_ Un challenge avec des puzzles à résoudre 
.
_ Un scénario original.
_ Une belle IDE sur le plan esthétique.
_ Je me suis bien amusé.
Conclusion :
Une expérience intéressante avec pas mal d’améliorations à effectuer. Le format me plaît et je serais heureux de participer à nouveau à ce type de challenge .