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? @_@