Completion Rate statistics

[admin]

Completion rate statistics have always been a little haywire because we've included "Guest" solve data in them, and any page load of the "Play" page would be counted as an attempted puzzle (even if it was just someone poking around the site, or a web crawler, etc.). So I'm reworking them this weekend to consider ONLY registered player data when tabulating completion/solve rates. This means the new solve rates will be much, much higher than before (on average).

The vast majority of puzzles will likely now have completion rates between 80-95%. The data is being recrunched as we speak and will take about a day or so to complete.

Completion rate data currently has no direct bearing on scoring, its just informational data provided at the end of every solve. So this will not affect competition in any way.

I'm also running stats on the new puzzles added last July, so we should have full statistics available now for 99.9% of quotes in the system once this is completed.

[maradnu]

We had a few that previously showed under 10% completion. That always looked a little absurd.

[admin]

The new solve-rate floor for the very hardest puzzles looks like it will be somewhere right around 31-32%. There's one quote that will have a new completion rate of 18% but that's just because its a new one that hasn't come up in the rotation very often yet, I expect it will get into the 30s given a few more months of solving data.

[glassguy]

I wondered why the "solve" rate for the cryptograms suddenly went way up, and now I know. Considering the competitive mode, the new numbers are probably very realistic. I also noted the addition of a list of the top 20 solve times for each puzzle. It's nice to know where you stand with some of the "master cryptographers".

[kahvecowgirl]

Before, I thought it was scary how low some of the success rates were, and now I think it's scary how high some of them are . I appreciate the change. I just wanted to say that since the success rates are called success rates on the results pages, it would be good if the term "success rate" was in this thread in case someone searched for it, like I did. So now it's here.