2021 High Scores oversight?

[Guru]

Always like to see if I've "improved" during any given month, so I usually check the High Scores results.
Clicked January 2021 and immediately noticed 'something wrong with this picture'. Only 2 categories were displayed - what happened to the Success Rate Challenge?

[admin]

Thanks for catching that - the January 2021 results should now be displaying properly under "Past Results".

We have, however, disabled the "Percent Completed" competition starting on February 1st 2021 across all sites. No more trophies will be awarded for that category going forward.

[PatienceCrabstick]

Getting rid of the "% completed" competition makes sense, as it was pretty much a recapitulation of the high score competition anyway. In its place, might I suggest an average points per puzzle competition? Those players who play all puzzles - not just the sub-300 second ones - are shut out of the fastest solver competition. A new competition like this would also incentivize players to take on the longer puzzles; I have a strong feeling that these are infrequently played.

[Guru]

While I always play whatever puzzle appears 'at the click of the "Start an Acrostic" button, I'm not naive. I think your suggestion is an excellent one and hope the PTB give it the serious (and favorable) consideration it deserves.

[admin]

might I suggest an average points per puzzle competition?

I like this idea. I still feel like I'm still dialing in the scoring system right now, but once I have it well-tuned I will definitely consider implementing something like this. I agree that "Fastest Solver" contests incentivize players to attempt only the shortest puzzles, and that's not ideal.

[PatienceCrabstick]

Thanks. I'll keep my fingers crossed!

[suekelso]

Sorry, but I think no puzzles should count for anything if they are not solved. Isn't that point of a puzzle - to solve it? Really disappointed that you took off the solving challenge.

[suekelso]

I always took a great deal of pride in having a 100% solving rate each month. In fact, I have stopped coming on the site because technical errors that were not rectified ruined by 100% rating for that month. Just came back a couple of months ago; may leave again.

[sionnach57]

I think, during my very first week on the site, I abandoned one puzzle. But since then, I have stuck with each one until I solved it. Occasionally, through some technical glitch I have gotten logged out for a long enough interval that a particular puzzle was registered as "unsolved". The first couple of times this happened I was mildly annoyed. But it actually makes no sense to be annoyed about it -- glitches happen, and why should it be of any importance to me that the site logs my solve rate for a particular month as 99.5% rather than 100%. The reality is that you can have a 100% solving rate and it may not be reflected as such in the site statistics. So what? Everybody understands this possible discrepancy. And if you know yourself that you had a 100% solving rate, isn't that enough reason to be proud. Why does external validation by an inherently error-prone system matter?

I like the idea of tracking the average score per puzzle metric. This has been what I follow myself as a rough measure of whether the time I have spent on solving puzzles so far has resulted in any improvement in my skill in solving. The problem with judging myself according to this metric is that I am immediately tempted to game the system by choosing to solve only those puzzles which afford me some kind of decent chance at scoring highly (I have a secondary goal, which is to beat the current record, if possible: this generally nets you a decent score, though not always).

One result is that a fairly high proportion of the puzzles I tackle tend to be longer quotes (loosely defined as 18 clues or more). There's a lot of moonlight shining on an enormous variety of bodies of water. Not to mention the "chinchilla clouds" zipping around the sky like a passel of crazed lemmings. While the foliage rummages through the entire Sherwin-Williams color wheel to grab our attention.

But I digress..

[sewaneesue]

Where's the laugh emoticon, sionnach57?

[suekelso]

Wow!! Sorry I said anything!!

[sewaneesue]

Why are you apologizing, suckelso? I don't think anyone gets points for not solving a puzzle. I don't see why the solving rate couldn't be reinstated, since it is important to you. Have no idea why it was removed, but Admin had a reason.

[genevoise]

Just a thought, but you could score an unfinished puzzle as zero which is then factored into your 'average score per puzzle'. This would give an incentive to finish all the puzzles you start.
I know some will argue that their are sometimes glitches, or the doorbell rings, or your wifi goes down, but it is after all only a game.

[christmasbow]

I'm really new here. Just started in December. Didn't even realize at first that we were being scored by percentage completed. Lol! I didn't finish them all, until I realized. That's probably my fault for just jumping in and trying them. To be fair, I only did my first acrostic ever in December in the NYT and loved the process so much that I wanted to do them more often. Since then, I've really worked on completing them. That's my goal so I am extremely disappointed to hear that we won't be recognized for that.