Due to my dislike of CodeChef discuss, I choose to discuss/rant about this topic here on Codeforces. Although non-Indian participants may not relate to the ICPC situation, I'm sure the CookOffs and Lunchtimes are a common issue.
First of all, why is the difficulty gradient so fucked up every single time? (Contest Link). Be it ICPC, or CookOffs, or LunchTimes, the same thing is seen over and over again.
Scoreboard for reference:
Secondly, why does online ICPC selection have only 5 questions for 3 hours? Not to mention, 3 of them are pretty hard, and the difficulty drop is huge, so it does not help filter out deserving teams from undeserving ones.
Is ICPC selection supposed to be based on a speed typing test? In unbalanced contests like this, it almost always happens that some undeserving teams qualify. Every penalty matters a lot too. For instance, we failed to qualify for one of the regionals — KGP — because of 1 penalty.
So, my question to CodeChef is: How hard is it to set a balanced contest? Codeforces seems to does it every week. CodeChef fails to do it even in its most important yearly contest, along with its monthly short contests, every single time.
I honestly believe that even I can set a better contest than this. Lastly, why was the leaderboard hidden as soon as the contest ended?
