anpaio's blog

Participating unofficialy no matter your rating
By anpaio, history, 9 months ago, In English

Hello, codeforces! I am writing this blog as a new idea to improve the website, sorry if it has appeared before. Sometimes, you're not in the mood to participate in a contest and fully focus, but you would like to "casually" participate without rating change, or maybe you want to participate but you are a bit late, etc. Currently, you don't have a very good solution in any of those cases, because you either don't participate, or you participate with a high chance of losing rating points. A very simple solution would be to be able to register unoficially for the contest, no matter your rating. What do you think?

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9 months ago, # |
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Highly appreciated

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9 months ago, # |
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it will also prevent people from alting

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    9 months ago, # ^ |
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    I thought that the type of alt that made the most people salty was div1 people alting to flex on lower divs. It seems I was wrong huh.

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      9 months ago, # ^ |
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      Two reasons for which people alt are also: 1. Participating without rating change. 2. Your result not to be seen by other people.

      1. Would be solved by the option suggested, and it would probably be a major step against alting, because it is one of the most common reasons for using another account.
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9 months ago, # |
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It's a very impressive idea but the number of participants each contest will increase and the servers may down

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    9 months ago, # ^ |
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    No, this way people wouldn't participate from their alts but from their real accounts so the number of participants would stay pretty much same.

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9 months ago, # |
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Sounds great. Atcoder also implements this :)

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9 months ago, # |
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I think this is an good idea, and I would like to see it implemented in one way or another. However, I think there are both upsides and downsides of doing this. Since the blog didn't mention any downside, I'll mention some:

  • If a significant amount of people who do a contest are unofficial participants, it can slow the judging queue down a lot for official participants. This already happens somewhat with edu round, div 2, 3, 4, but I don't think unrated participants make up a significant amount in these cases.
  • It can also be frustrating to register unofficially, then did better than expected and lose some rating.
  • It doesn't really reflect your performance in actual contest that well. The mentality is different between official and unofficial participation. For example, in official participations, I'm way more willing to try until the bitter end, but in unofficial one, if I don't feel like it, I just leave and come back later.

I think it would have a positive impact overall, but some other system like allowing simultaneous virtual participation, or allowing unofficial submission (maybe with some delay) can also works (some extra work will be required to only judge them on pretest when the contest is still running).

For now, I think if you want to do still solve problem when a contest is running, just do something else on other online judges, or do some virtual, for most people, you will never run out of virtual to solve.

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    9 months ago, # ^ |
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    I want to add my 1 point here :(

    What if Person A has 2 Account and he chooses rated from 1 and unrated from 2

    does it not make an advantage here as they will judge their solution from the unrated one and submit the code from the rated one?

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      9 months ago, # ^ |
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      I guess for this the plag check should be enough.

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        9 months ago, # ^ |
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        Plag checker certainly make it harder. But making it impossible is also just impossible.

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      9 months ago, # ^ |
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      This is already a possibility now, just have 2 rated accounts anyway. You don't have to care about the rating of the fake account.

      There is the limit of not having access to contest with the fake account: fake account is div 2, real account is div 1, so you can't use the div 2 account for last problems of div 1. Granted anyone who is able to solve div 1 only problem (or even reach div 1 at all) wouldn't cheat, at least I hope so.

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      9 months ago, # ^ |
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      Are you lost girls. Coz you must be in kitchen

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    9 months ago, # ^ |
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    Isn't like point 2. and 3. already a problem by people employing alts :))? Like, if you start a contest on an alt and get some super high performance, it cannot be replicated on your main account (because of plagcheck/penalty). An alts rating also doesn't reflect actual performance of the individual because of (nearly) identical mentality issues as you have described. Adding an unnoficial register button just cuts the middleman and makes it more convenient for everyone (Although point 1 might br a problem but I highly doubt it will slow down the servers ever so significantly)

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      9 months ago, # ^ |
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      First and foremost, my view on alts is that, it's against the rule and unfair to other people. If someone choose to do it, it's their responsibility to deal with the problems. In other words, if someone alts, I don't think they have the right to say they wasted good performance and such.

      The only "legit" reason for alts (in contest) is that you can solve the problems at the same time the contest happen, but you don't have to worry about rating, and I think that adding unofficial participation would solve or mitigate that problem. I personally don't think it's worth it to break the rule (and make things worse for actual participants) just to be able to solve the problem at the same time as the contest. You could still do other problems, or even just read and implement anyway, submit after the contest is over.

      If there is a button to register unofficially, which is better than using alts, then I feel like people have more right to feel bad, but the responsibility is still with the participant because they choose to not be rated. The only difference here is that, because it's actually a feature, people who didn't break the rule sometime get frustrated because they didn't choose to do a contest rated.

      For the third point, it's more about how much you are willing to perform for the contest. If someone use this feature too much, maybe they will get accustomed to just giving up early?

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    9 months ago, # ^ |
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    It seems like apart from the 1st point, the other 2 points are more about why some people in specific may not want to do unofficial rounds. However, i dont think it is a downside to allowing unofficial participants overall.

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9 months ago, # |
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This might be a slippery slope, but I think that this would send the wrong message especially to those new to the system. If everyone registering for a contest is shown this option, which is primarily for preventing negative delta, people will be more likely to start to think early in their cp journey that the most important part of cp is rating (whereas it should be solving problems, gaining experience, and having fun) seeing that people obsess over it so much that they literally change the system to prevent negative delta.

Many proponents have argued that this will reduce the number of alts, but ultimately the underlying causes of alting (the same rating obsession I mentioned) won’t be resolved — it would probably become more widespread and normalized — and this may come with some other downsides like long queues.

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