It generally seems that many GMs and even LGMs (and tourists!) still participate in all rated ranges unofficially (even div4 contests for some reason). It also seems that many div2 hardest problems are way harder than any reasonable "actual div2 participant" should be able to solve (hello 3000+ rated problems in div2).
However there is very little gamification around such unofficial participation:
- Unrated, duh.
- Under your profile, the rank is shown as "—"
- So can't even track your historical best rank and compete with that etc.
- Even in the specific contest standings, there is one checkbox "show unrated". Virtual participants are shown in the same category as official-but-out-of-bounds div1 contestants. So basically if you want to hide that idiot gray virtual participant who submitted somebody else's code for all problems at 00:00 and won first place, you will also hide all div1 participants (including yourself).
- So can't even reliably check what rank you got after some time.
Now yes, even as an unofficial participant, you can still participate and enjoy all the problems for their intrinsic beauty and for the joy of problem solving. And yes, you can still compete, obviously you still see the scoreboard, and it might take some time for that gray virtual participant to appear on the top, so it's actually perfectly valid for quite a while too. And some people keep saying you shouldn't care much about rating anyway.
But that doesn't mean it couldn't be made even more fun. Just curious — how interested is the community in either a separate rating that doesn't care about rating bounds or perhaps that partially rated contests idea?
(In theory I think this could also be a browser extension and not necessarily an official CF feature. But rating is kinda like currency — it feels more desirable the more people care about it. So a third party extension might not feel quite the same. Also not sure how much it would spam the API or how easy it would be to implement reliably.)
Please thumb your opinions (mutually exclusive):
- Please have a separate rating that ignores rating bounds
- Please have partially rated contests as described by TheScrasse here
- Maybe some minor improvements would be cool but don't add/change ratings
- Please don't waste time doing any of the above
- I'll never be Div.1 so I don't care
