As far as I know, the round duration of 2 hours has been a standard since the very beginning of the Codeforces, therefore all the changes to it may appear to be inconvenient for experienced Codeforces users. But the idea of making rounds a bit longer has come to me many times, so I thought I should share my opinion on the topic.
I guess that it is usually true that if a person is not way ahead of his current division, he doesn't have enough time to even read the last 1-2 problems during the round (if we take an average round with 6-7 problems). But those are the hardest and the most interesting problems of the round, so it is sad to skip them. And this is even sadder to understand, that if you have solved your normal amount of problems and have only 20-30 minutes till the end of the round, it is pretty much impossible to come up with the correct solution for at least one of the following problems and implement it. On the other hand, the slight change of giving the additional 30 minutes could have helped the situation and significantly increased chances to submit it. Also, it gives people who are not so successful in "speedforces" a chance to achieve their potential and gain more rating.
P.S. This was intended to be not a complaint on the format of the rounds, but a suggestion for the improvement. Feel free to criticize it. I appreciate all the feedback on the topic.
I feel pretty good solving the first 3 problems in less than one hour and reading the last 2 to decide which one to make a real try of solving.
Div1 starts at 1900 and your rating is 2800
Just start from the last. Also it wont really affect the rating.
It will screw your rating, have a look at his profile then decide for yourself
rainboy
I just dont get what is with this community. No reason to downvote previous comment
It does not screw your rating if you don't do any submissions. He makes submissions on purpose. But there really not much point in it
Not really. The reason his graph is like that is because he chose to do so. In a lot of contests, he just makes one submission to lose a lot of rating. He's just a geniosity tbh.
This seems like a good idea for longer rounds. Otherwise, ties may not be broken evenly (and careless mistakes would be punished more severely). More problems with more time seems good to me (like Codeforces Global Round 11 but with 9-problems).
This round lasted 3 hours lol
Yeah, but it only contains 8 problems. If it contained 1 more problem somewhere in the 1400(Problem B) -2000 (Problem C) range, then it would've been better. Then the length of the round (i.e., 3 hours) and the problems(9) are enough to judge more accurately.
If you add more easy problems, make it Div 2. only please. Global rounds are hell already.
Instead of adding an extra problem, making the distribution more spread out is also fine. The global round was just an example. This type of round maybe better suited for Edu rounds or similar.
I agree, this is the reason why most of them hit a plateau, even if you are able to solve D or E in your respective divisions, you should really have the time to solve it, this is generally why at times we have a very easy C and a difficult D, and then people complain about unbalanced rounds. Extending the round by 30 min may help it,but people may then complain about longer rounds. I think it is better to follow atcoder's approach by making Div 1 rated for everybody.
In codeforces, speed is given supreme importance, there are CM's who have not solved a single 1900 rated probem, yet have managed to go to Div1 just by speedsolving.Though solving a problem fast is important, IMO solving a difficult problem is a greater feat, and should be rewarded with higher rating.
I don't think longer rounds are in principle bad, but they don't really solve the problem unless you plan to make week-long contests. You look at a contest and see that if you had X more minutes you would solve 1 more problem. If the contest would be 1 hour longer, then you would have solved 1 more problem and noticed that if you had Y more minutes you could have solved even more problems. And then we'd have to add more problems as well: if too many people solve all problems, then the contest is really not good ("speedforces").
Judging by number of solves of Div2D and Div1D, I think it would be nice to have longer duration for Div1. But maybe Div1D is the barrier for red, so maybe it's supposed to be too hard to solve it during contest.
I have a certain suggestion — extend rounds by 30 minutes with very severe time penalties for the last 30 minutes. For example, a problem that is worth 2000, for the first 2 hours will be the usual — 8 per minute, and for the last 30 minutes, take off 32 per minute (or even more — whatever makes it pretty close to 0 at the end of the round).
Why? First of all, this makes people that were usually 1-2 minutes away from solving (that's usually so sad!), able to solve with high score, but if people are 20-30 minutes away from solving — it almost becomes pointless to solve (but not completely pointless).
That's just a suggestion, I'm not a 100% for it, as 2.5 hours is a little too long for my taste.
It could also be an extension of 10-15 minutes, with a penalty of 5x-10x the usual.
I surely prefer longer rounds like global rounds for example
It would be great if standard duration was extended by half an hour
Or it can be left to problem setters to decide the duration of the round within some bounds
I never thought codeforces is "speedforces". Harder problems yield more points, so sometimes I skim B or C and decide to skip. That's how I got to cm (and then dropping back). Another suggestion is to increase the points of the last two problems and reward more for solving harder problems.