A (Scathing?) Review of the 2013 Hunt

[asterroc]

Firstly: Thank you to the Manic Sages for running the 2013 Hunt. It is crazy difficult to do, and this was your first year doing it. You made an impressive number of puzzles. You struggled through technical difficulties and the most critical nerds in the world, you survived, and you've passed the torch on. No matter what criticisms I add below, you deserve mad props for doing what you did. I have no clue the effort you put into it, and there's no way my team could replicate what you did.

Second: I speak only for myself, not my team (Grand Unified Theory of Love, or GUTOL).

Third: I'm going to say some really harsh critical things below, and people may react poorly to them. However, (in case you are coming from elsewhere and do not already know this) I have a rule on my journal that I do not allow expressions of anger. Quoting from my userpage:

I have one rule: no expressions of anger. Anger is triggery for me, if you know what "triggers" are. I encourage you to disagree politely and express rational arguments. While I agree that anger can be a very useful tool, it is not one that you are permitted to use in my space. Curses and profanities used emotionally are not allowed. Insults at other commenters or people whom I know in real life are not allowed. Violations may result in a mild public rebuke, freezing the thread, unfriending, and/or banning, depending upon the severity of the violation and the level of warnings beforehand.

This is my space, and I am the final and only arbiter of what counts as triggery expressions of anger.

And here's my criticisms of the 2013 Hunt.

I have been involved in the Hunt since 2005, with Lake Effect Snow (LES), and on my current team GUTOL since it formed in 2008. While GUTOL is a non-competitive team, we're squarely in the middle of the pack for how we do. Last year was a record for us, with something like 36 individual puzzles solved, and 5 or 6 metas. I really hope the Sages kept track of us cashing in answers, because even though our records show we submitted a total of 41 correct answers, I think we actually "solved" around half of those. I have never felt more stupid and inept and unable to solve puzzles than this year, not even in my first Hunt (Normalville I think, which must've been 2005, written by Setec Astronomy). I was involved in exactly 3 solves this year: one a "legitimate solve", and two backsolves where the solutions were already given to us, I just had to random guess which belonged to which puzzle.

Here's a start on some specific criticisms and/or stories of the related puzzles. I may come up with more as time passes.

1. I'm calling the Enigma Valley puzzle round "Round 0". We solved three puzzles in Round 0 on Friday evening, and then solved the meta. As soon as we solved the meta and opened coinheist.com, that page revealed the answers to the other three Round 0 puzzles. Frustrated, we just dropped all those puzzles and didn't bother to call in their answers. At some point someone solved another one of the Round 0 puzzles and called it in. Finally on late Saturday or early Sunday I just random called in the other two answers (they were both 11 digits, and we'd lost the work for the meta, so I just picked one randomly for the first one, and happened to be right).
   
   The immediate reveal of the solutions to the other Round 0 puzzles stole that victory from us and made me bitter when we were still so close to the start of the Hunt. It was not a good choice to reveal the solutions to the other puzzles/rounds immediately (rather than us seeing them through a timed unlock of the rounds).


2. Good puzzles have confirmations or checksums built into them so you know you're on the right track, or so you know when you're on the wrong track. Of the many puzzles I touched, I only saw this in one puzzle.
   
   Every Fall GUTOL does a round of 10 or so practice puzzles. Around 2010 a few of us decided to write our own puzzles over the Summer and use those. It was damned hard. I wrote a word search where the clues weren't given (though the flavor text clued the theme). Once the word search was done, a string of numbers told you which of the remaining letters to take to spell out a sentence that clued the answer. The first people to try it found the puzzle horribly flawed and rewrote the entire thing, and the most important part that they added was a checksum that told the puzzler how to use the numbers to count into the remaining letter. Without this, my puzzle was essentially unsolvable.
   
   From this tiny little experience of mine, I know that writing puzzles is a really difficult thing to do, and no matter how flawed I may think this year's Hunt was, I still give mad props to Sages anyway.


3. As a non-competitive mid-level team, one of our team goals is to have fun. One thing that helps with this is knowing that the team running the Hunt (I'll call them HQ) cares if we're having fun. In previous years the way the HQ expressed this was by visiting our team HQ maybe three times a day and checking in on us. Upon doing so, they would sometimes also give us hints, tell us they couldn't give us hints, appreciate the food we offered them, admire our team T-shirts, and the like. They would often ask us point-blank if we were having fun, and if one person wailed "no", they and we could then figure out why not and fix that. It was really more of a morale booster than a hint factory.
   
   This year the Sages did not visit us once. (We had a tupperware returned on Sunday afternoon, and the Sage fled w/o speaking to anyone.) From speaking to people on a couple other teams, it sounds like some Sages visited people they knew personally, but there were no official visits from Sages HQ to check how teams were doing. Instead there was an online hint system, where once an hour each team would be allowed a single yes-no question. The constraints on these questions were ridiculously narrow, to the extent that I think we only used the hints twice, and each time it only confirmed what we thought we knew, so was of limited use.
   
   The hint system this year retained the worst parts of the previous HQ check-ins while removing the best parts.

Edited to fix year, thanks to dr_whom.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth. comments there. Comment here or there.

Comments

[ayashi.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting! I was looking forward to learning more about how it went. I talked to a friend who was on another team about it yesterday too, and he had presented this puzzle that was just a bundle of MP3s as something he felt accurately summed up the Hunt. Looking over the answer page I'm not sure how anyone would have managed to solve it within a reasonable amount of time? @_@

[devjoe.livejournal.com]

On Better Luck This Time we had some issues with hints not being useful as well, but we did probe them quite extensively on the remaining metas. We had gotten information on both Indy and the Enigma that I now feel would have allowed us to finish solving them before the coin was found, perhaps after one or two more hints on each one, but we were worn out from this hunt, and closed up shop after the "a team is on the runaround" email.

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't really notice the lack of visits until someone pointed it out to me, but after that it became one of several little things that made it seem like they didn't have all their ducks in a row. Another would be the way the person running the Thomas Crown event wasn't prepared for a lot of the questions people asked about the rules. I know they had some technical difficulties to deal with, though; that may have been consuming a lot of time they would otherwise have devoted to other things.

To be fair, I think I frightened off the Sage who brought the dish back by commenting on his MBTA t-shirt.

- Will

[leech.livejournal.com]

It was not a good choice to reveal the solutions to the other puzzles/rounds immediately (rather than us seeing them through a timed unlock of the rounds).

If you had solved the metapuzzle without DANNY OCEAN, how could you have begun the next round without spoiling it?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Most Hunts were arranged so that the solutions to Round 0 puzzles were not the names of the next rounds. The Sages made an editorial decision that they would be this year. They could have decided otherwise this year as well, for example having the Round 0 puzzle solutions be words related to something else, or even having them be the titles of films that the characters were in or achievements of the real people.

Basically the Sages made an editorial decision to do it this way, and I feel there were weaknesses to this decision which detracted from my enjoyment of the Hunt.

[dr_whom]

(Normalville was 2005, and written by Setec; 2006 was SPIES, written by Plant.)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Thanks, corrected. :)

[dr4b]

Hey, I was down the hall from you on team Up Late. And I remember even pointing that Sages member to your room (I was standing outside our door of 1-134 and they were like "Are you the Grand Unified Theory of Love?" and being 4am or whatever and not entirely parsing the question, I said "Gosh, I sure hope not," then realized it was a team name and said, just as randomly but semantically correctly, "I'm Up Late. They're down the hallway. You can't miss the signs.")

This will sound weird, but Left Out, who were across the hall from us (and who I know some team members), came over a few times to ask "Is this hunt retardedly difficult or is it just us?" and somehow, commisserating with them made me feel a lot better. It's weird, walking by your team room many times when I went to the restroom, I never got the sense that you guys were also having such a tough time of it. So... I hope you guys are down the hall from us again next year and that we all have a much better time :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

You can't miss the signs.

Heh, yeah.

We've been in the same room nearly every year, so if Up Late and Left Out have as well, we should know each other by now. We saw people going back and forth between your rooms and thought you were two rooms for one team. :-P Feel free to introduce yourselves before next year, especially before Round 0 opens or in the bathroom or something.

FWIW I don't know if everyone on GUTOL was as frustrated as I was. I feel like each individual critique I've mentioned above is something that others agreed with, but I'm not convinced the others had as bad a time overall. (Not that I had a *bad* time, just not as good as I was expecting and was used to.)

Not mentioned in my above review: showing up to set up at 10am and discovering that our room was in the process of being painted. Kudos to the facilities staff who finished up as quickly as they could and then showed us how to open the window to air it out. And it's our "fault" if anyone on your team was complaining about the hallway being at 40ºF for most of Friday - we had a window wide open and fans in our doors.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Also, FWIW most of our team are friends IRL, so even when a Hunt is shitty, we're still hanging out with friends. I hugged everyone when I saw them (since I moved away from Boston last summer), which is probably why I'm getting over a cold now. I guess my asking everyone if they were sick before I hugged them wasn't enough. :-P

And speaking of bathroom, I was pleasantly surprised that we didn't run out of TP in the women's room this year, and that the janitorial staff was actually working on the weekend this time.