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.