Hello guys,
I want to expose a "problem" that I think a good part of the members feels the same way. Why a member that successfully registered in a contest, read all problems and did nothing during the contest have his rating unchanged, however a "better" competitior decreases his rating doing a single problem?
I think it works similar to TopCoder system, you can register and not take part of the contest, however in topcoder you do not have a "unregister" option and if you open a problem, you are already participating.
A very simple solution: If you register, you are already participating.
Another approach would be insert a participate button or include the people who opened some problem.
Sorry for my English, but you got what I mean.
Nope your solution is very bad
there were many times that i had registered but i didn't know if i would participate that's why i haven't missed a single round otherwise i would've missed many rounds
i know this is a problem but there are better solutions. You have registered OK, After that when the contest starts you would see a button "Participate" you can see the problems only if you press that button after that the contest will be rated for you
If you register, you have the unregister option.
And it is another reason to use the "register button" with wisdom.
if not, what's the point of registering?
The point of registering is to allow the system to perform room assignments.
I think that while the current system isn't perfect, it has a few important advantages. First, it minimizes the chance of anyone forgetting to register and being unable to compete, which is a terrible feeling. (Or forgetting to unregister and losing rating, which is even worse.)
Second, the ability to leave the contest without penalty mitigates contest anxiety somewhat. Codeforces might have fewer regular users without this 'feature'.
I like Reyna's idea if it were applied to Div1 contests. It's easy to get around this feature using multiple accounts, but not if there is a rating requirement to see the problems.
Well it would be pretty good if it is applied in div1 contests
as for multiple accounts, for every person there would be one or more accounts that participate so that wouldn't be much of a problem
True, but suppose a blue-rated coder uses his gray account to look over the problems first. If he decides not to participate, only the gray account ends up in the standings, and you get less rating for beating a gray account than for beating a blue account.
well that's right
Same problem (using another account to see the problemset first) can be brought up on TopCoder. But it goes well. Coders of this kind is minority I think.So just forget it.:D
The idea was already discussed earlier, a nice trick to patch it was making the participate button be worth a number of points that decreases with time (so if you use multiple accounts you're wasting precious points).
well that's a pretty nice idea! :D
Instead make a paricipation button, would be enough to see if the person openned the problems?
it has a flaw though... that is if someone comes late to the contest it would be bad for him but it can be resolved with something like AutoParticipation which clicks the button when the contest starts
You can register five minutes before the contest. There's no need to register if you don't know whether you'll be able to participate.
Two points:
How 'fair' is the rating
How comfortable is the system for participants
You're proposing to make rating 'more fair' by making the system less comfortable. I don't care that much about rating fairness to create additional problems for those who forgot or didn't have time to register/unregister for the contest. The fact that someone's rating is a bit overestimated won't bother me at all, anyway rating system is very approximate, so forget about fine tuning it.
For someone who sends 3+ problems, it really makes no difference. But for someone who sends only 1 problem, it's really unfair.
IMO, you should be counted as participant from the moment when you enter Competitor's Interface (or however it's called in English) during round, because if you register, but suddenly became unable to attend round, you will have your rating changed anyway, which is not fair, but if you enter Competitor's Interface, you confirm that you were able to solve problems in that time.
I can see biggest problem, many people will just make multiple accounts.
So Div. 2 participants, can make unrated account to "scan" problems first.
Div. 1 participants, will make lots of fake accounts (which is already very big problem), get first place in Div. 2 contest, which makes the account becomes Div. 1, and then use it to "scan" problems for Div. 1 contest.
So I think, it will cause more problems.