I did particularly bad in today’s contest (considering my goal of achieving Master). Then I took a look at the scoreboard and noticed a guy a bit above me didn’t pass problem B on system testing. I got curious and took a look at his submission for B:

https://mirror.codeforces.com/contest/2084/submission/314079938

Losing a bunch of rating because you did bad is frustrating, but nothing tops being behind the “cheater’s wall”. What exactly is the “cheater’s wall”? Suppose some LLM can solve A-D. Then all the cheaters are going to solve A-D super fast. For example, consider the edu contest just before this one. I solved A-E and got 97th place. Had I not passed E I would have placed close to 1000th, which is a huge difference in performance (basically around 1850 to around 2350). Also if you look at the scoreboard, a bunch of guys did A-D super fast (like 20 min) but were still unable to solve E in 1hr 40 min. To become master I must consistently beat this cheater’s wall. One bad contest and I get -100 delta for being behind it. I can’t even imagine how frustrating it must be for people below CM to be competing in 2025: you can improve a lot and see little rating improvement because the cheaters consistently beat you. Also the amount of new accounts cheating may cause rating deflation, as cheaters will start with 1500 hidden rating and perform like 1900. That said, what is even the point of doing codeforces if you are below CM nowadays. You can’t beat the cheaters wall so you might as well compete anywhere else, train on other sites, etc, instead of fighting a lost battle.