TL;DR: Participants who registered while yellow but who dropped to purple must be official participants.
Dear CF community,
Today was supposed to be a great day. After resting from an hour-long leisurely walk around the city, I went to Codeforces to compete in Codeforces Round 931 (Div. 2). Problems A and B went smoothly, as expected. Then, an "Accepted" submission problem C followed suit. As I glanced at the right side panel of the "Problems" page, the minuscule number of solves accompanied by a two-digit count of C-solvers pushed me to continue this winning streak. To my surprise, I got D1. Then D2.
I was convinced that it would be a good day. After a brief saunter for snacks, I returned to my desk and checked the standings, expecting a top 50 finish, which would be my new personal best for a Div. 2 round.
Ranks 1 to 20 loaded onto my screen. "Hmm, was I in the top 20?" I questioned. Nope, not in the first ten nor the first fifteen. My username was nowhere to be found in the official standings. Puzzled, I checked the full standings. There, I found my username pwned, beautifully purple as it had been for existence until a transient blip of yellow, with one small detail that would change the trajectory of my day -- a tiny asterisk (*), signifying that I was joining out-of-contest.
There, it dawned on me: I registered for the competition as a yellow-rated coder before falling back to purple in the contest merely 24 hours ago (Codeforces Round 930 (Div. 1)). Was my happiness dampened for today? Certainly. Today's round would've been my best performance by a magnitude, nearing a top-20 finish among official participants.
Now, don't you think that Codeforces needs to more adequately verify who exactly are the official participants in a round? Consider the inverse of my scenario -- a purple turning red in a recent round and joining a Div. 2 as an official participant. The community would echo with complaints on injustice. And I believe the community would resonate with me, an eligible participant who just happened to have registered for the Div. 2 round a few hours early.
Consider your fellow competitive programmer who trains hard every day. He enjoys learning new algorithms and building his skills on existing ones, just as you do. He was excited to put his hard work to the test and performed superbly. But his codes were nowhere to be found, lost in the sea of unofficial red participants.
To MikeMirzayanov and the Codeforces developers, I trust that you would intervene in this discrimination against color-shifting participants. I have absolute trust in your leadership, as in this community, fairness always simmers to the surface, regardless of how long it takes, showing its radiance.
To you, voicing your support would push Codeforces toward a fairer future. Change comes from social pressure. It begins with a single blog post and spreads with your constructive comments.
pwned orz
I imagine the system works like this because if ratings rollback before a contest, a bunch of people would be out of competition when they shouldnt and vice versa. The way it works at the very least guarantees that if you registered thinking you were in/out of competition, you would stay that way.
Ah, that's interesting. I feel following the blog post ("The round will be rated for participants with rating lower than 2100") is fairer, as participants must be grouped according to rating and not by whether one has registered earlier or later.
That's a bug of Codeforces systems existed for a long time, and it won't be fixed.
I added an image for clarity. As you can see, I was purple at participation yet unrated!
Such a nice blog.
In my opinion this the the right way to address an issue rather than being emotional and saying things which are not supposed to be said.
U have been pwned
This is a wonderful blog. I believe it presents the correct approach to discussing a problem.
This is a nice initiative, it should matter about your rating at the point the contest starts, I mean if anyone doesn't want the contest to be rated for them, they can just forget about writing it
I think an easy way to adress this is the following: Only allow being registered for one round at a time , also , if you participated in a round and the rating change didnt arhive yet you cant register for a round.