Currently it's like 3AM in my chair timezone, so I'm not that alert. Do take this with a grain of salt.
Also, yes this is a wall of text, so everyone who goes "I won't read allat", fuck off.
Hello!
2025 is almost wrapped huh. Next year is the year of the horse, Uma as some people say, so I would share some random thoughts on my own.
A lot of things in life, my fucked up schedule mostly (duh), did change my motivation for Competitive Programming in particular, so everything certainly isn't as good as like 3-4 years ago. Every contest is like I have a surge of "hey, I want to do a contest!" thingy, and do it for like 2-3 times before taking a break, again. I did a grand total of 7 contests this year, which is, well, not good. At least I ended this year kinda on a high though. Next year I do hope things will be better.
I'm happy with my career in Competitive Programming so far. If anything, I think I overachieved.
That was 2024, this year it was way calmer from my side. Everyday I still visit this site and read some problems, like head-solving them, since I don't have that much time to do it. But it's my routine since long. So I do know a thing or two about what's going on recently, I guess?
Therefore I will give my grain of salt on some of the things that I find it different between when I started this journey as well as getting progress, and now.
Problemset
So there is a stat that I would give here for the rest of this blog. Out of more than 80 rated contests between Goodbye 2024 and Goodbye 2025, there had been a total of 9 with a negative vote amount. This is a common metric, though not accurate, to define if people love it or not.
It isn't that bad when you do consider the toxicity and changes around the community recently. One mistake and your round gets, mostly overly, hated. A problem that existed, cheaters, wrong test cases, long queues, bad problem statements, or hell even if ChatGPT gets stupid and those NPC's who uses it got a bad performance. So 9/80 at worst? I think contest setters did a really good job this year.
A lot of contests were in fact very positively received. Goodbye 2025 in particular. I did participate too, and I love it. 10/10.
Problemset wise, the demand can't be higher. There are a lot, like A LOT of criterias that could be mentioned to be considered a good problem, and it cannot satisfy everyone nowadays. Mate, even eliminating cheaters off. And most problems this year are really good! I really enjoyed solving a lot of them, some even fuel my motivation to continue doing this. Kudos!
And I think I did say this a long time ago, but I'll say it again, you shouldn't blame the authors if you have a bad contest. They tried their absolute best, over a very long time period (years even), to produce a problemset that could satisfy you. So before blaming them, try if you can blame yourself first. Get better.
Fairness
It's one of the reason of many contests hate recently. Yeah those AI cheaters. We all know they will come, and here they are.
It's been a problem for a while. Everyone demands, everyone confesses that "Hey, A should be banned!", or "B did this in the code, it's AI generated!". I mean, it's everywhere. You might reported one as well.
Let's be honest, you can't make a system to even decently eliminate it.
Try this. Get into a random AI, tell it to find all primes from 1 to 1e6. What do you get?
A perfectly formatted, beautifully explained, very elegant-looking code. And it's AI generated. It's the standard of coding when you go to companies. You NEED to do this in order for everyone to easily read and understand your code, and even see you as a great coder.
So if someone from that environment could do that by his/her own and decides to try Codeforces and do exactly that, can you tell? There are a lot of other problems as well.
So let's trust the admin and organizers that they will try their best to eliminate this. Find some common places (I know there is quite a few databases, you can mention in comments) to report someone cheating.
(Wow I'm writing this and macaquedev's blog came up. Yeah something like that, big shoutout)
And there is actually a positive thing to get from, for us who competes within rules.
Since cheaters will be always there, new and higher ranks and colors would be harder to get, right? Well don't cry about it, practice and be better, and when you eventually get there, it would be way more prestigious, and you can be proud of yourself! You got your goal, with way harder circumstances, and you can share your happiness with everyone!
Every contest will have someone who try to cheat on it. It always is. So the best advice I can say is adapt mate. If you can't, just find happiness solving problems. Trust Mike and the organizers of this platform, they are and will try their best. Don't tag them, please. It won't work most of the case.
...
Wow I only found 2 things. I'm washed. Maybe I can find more in the future.
Anyways I do think that our community is and will still be a great community, with great problems and healthy discussions. Of course there would be some errors in that estimate, but it isn't much, and it won't stop us. So for 2026, I hope everyone will have a great year ahead, get a new rating personal best and completing the goals you want to achieve!
Stay well, and Happy New Year!
