The Lockout Championship recently ended and it was a lot of fun watching the best of Codeforces compete with each other 1v1 and that got me thinking, Why not have a feature here on Codeforces where people can create a 1v1 challenge (or duel) and compete whenever they want (as opposed to contests)?
People can create a challenge, which would consist of problems from past Codeforces rounds. They can set the number of problems, the time control (total or per problem), the difficulty range, the order (random or sorted) of problems by difficulty, rating range of acceptors, etc. and others can simply check out the lobby and accept the challenge that best suits them. Those who play chess on sites like chess.com or lichess.org would know all about how these work.
We could have a separate "duel rating" for the handles so that the duels don't mess with people's contest ratings.
I am sure it would be a great alternative to the regular format of div1/div2 contests that we all know and love. Since there are editorials for the contest problems and people can use them to cheat in the duels, we could hide the problem details pertaining to the contest to which they belong and only show the problem statement, I/O, and sample cases in duel mode.
So...what do you think? Any Ideas?
Cheers!
Since there are editorials for the contest problems and people can use them to cheat in the duels, we could hide the problem details pertaining to the contest to which they belong and only show the problem statement, I/O, and sample cases in duel mode
People know how to make a new account or use the already exists one, so there's no meaning of implementing this until you allow tab switching or a new window or log out and that seems impossible.
I think if the concept of rating is removed, then the people who will participate will do so only to practice(ie. for their own benefit). If they cheat they won't improve. So, I think this won't be a problem.
Addition: You have the option to make some duels unrated like on lichess where the challenge that you send out doesn't affect your actual chess rating.
That is actually better as it would incentivize people to not cheat and just have a practice duel with their friends or for fun!
no, just make it all unrated, possibility of cheating would be way too high.
people will catch the cheater easily by seeing the difference between the main rating and duel rating. If someone cheats on both, then what's the point of not having that?
have you ever played a sandbagger in chess? that is the equivalent of the user who cheats 1/X of his duels, which you can't catch by just looking at the rating
This features is already supported at few of the discord servers. For eg : Errichto's discord server has the exact same thing you are asking for, so you might want to look into that
Since there are editorials for the contest problems and people can use them to cheat in the duels, we could hide the problem details pertaining to the contest to which they belong and only show the problem statement, I/O, and sample cases in duel mode
People can just google the problem statement, and open the problem / editorial / other contestants solutions and cheat. I don't think there is a way to make these duels rated.
I agree. There's isn't a good way to make rated challenges for problems that have already been solved and covered extensively. But it can still be a great way to practice and have fun for people who want to do so in a competitive manner.
Hackerearth already does have this feature naming codearena.I did almost 35 duels there and it sounded pretty good to me.But their arena has bugs.Even after getting accepted earlier sometimes the judge does not declare me winner.But the thing surprised me that there are a lot of people fighting there and the problem chosing criteria is very good.They always chose Such problems that can be solved within 10 minutes by almost every blue(expert).It helps to improve speed to.Will be very glad if codeforces has also something like this.
Most of the opponents you play are bots in CodeArena.
owww.....I see... I was also thinking why I am so unbeatable there....
They are not really bots, but they are noobs. The reason that they are not bots because when I play with my friends in that duel, we start the matchmaking at the same time so it results that we are versus each other usually.
That's why I said "most". If there are people available, then it would obviously try to match them. Otherwise it matches with bots. More discussion on this.