Whenever I take part in a contest, I try not to check the common or friend standings until I’m done with the first 2–3 easier problems. It helps me stay focused and avoid panic. Usually, when I finish those problems, I feel good about my performance. No wrong submissions, solved them faster than before, and it feels like I’ve clearly improved compared to my past attempts.
But then I check the standings, and reality hits. I’m often sitting around rank 1500–2000, which feels very average. It makes me wonder, where are all these people coming from?
The funny part is with the friend standings. That feature is supposed to help, right? It shows you how people around your level are doing. For me, it usually just shows jiangly or some Candidate Master already solving the tough problem. But when I look at the global dashboard, I see 1500 or 2000 solves on that same problem. So on one side, most of my skilled friends are struggling with it, yet the problem has thousands of submissions already. The picture feels inconsistent, and honestly it’s a bit frustrating.
So now I’m left confused. Am I actually improving, but just too slowly compared to the rest of Codeforces? Or has the overall level of participants suddenly gone way up? Or is it simply the effect of LLM-based cheating making the solved counts look inflated?
That’s what’s been bothering me a lot lately. I just wanted to rant and also see if others feel the same.
Looking at the standings (especially the friends one) is useless and unhealthy ig. It will be useful iff you are struggling with multiple problems and you don't know which problem you should try harder on. This case on rounds rarely happens also.
Tbh there are some folks that i know are at my level if they have an ac. It gives kind of an idea that i might be closer to the solution, so it helps me sometimes but i agree with your point. Will try to not focus much on standings for a while
That's right about where I'd expect you to be at 3 slow problems (maybe even worse actually). Your contests haven't been as fast/clean as you think for the first 3 problems (judging by this month's contests). 2 problems I'd expect you to be like 4k or worse. To me 3 problems is like the barely minimum you have to do to maintain cyan/low expert.
Just solve more problems during the contest.
Thanks for a honest and humbling feedback, if you wanna add anything on how can i improve as you have went through the profile, would be appreciated
skill issue tbh more than ai cheating it is our skill issue, just accept it lmfao
Yeah gotta improve
Hi, to be candidate of masters you need solve 4 problems fast or 5 problems(It doesn't matter how fast). But I think people's skill levels have risen in recent years as competitve programming has become more popular + cheaters also. You have good progress for 1,5 years so just keep grinding.
I can also suggest using the friends table, add as many strong people as possible from your acquaintances. I have always in div 1+2 contests the first 20-30 friends are masters and grandmasters, and over the past six months I have started writing better contests because of this (very motivating).
Thanks for motivating words, sure i would add more folks and also you into my friend list
https://mirror.codeforces.com/submissions/Nolirue_Sola/contest/2039
I consider CodeTon Round 9 to be one of my better contests (probably top 10 perf all time) solely on the basis that I actually solved 5 problems but I ended up going -12 delta. Point is that standings/rank/rating aren't what define improvement exactly.
Damn man i can relate to this, recently a div2 contest got unrated regardless of getting no delta i was so happy for solving 5 problems for the first time in divison 2