I was stuck for a couple of months at just below 1600 and then for about a month at 1700-1800. Pretty much the only thing i did was to solve harder problems (+100 -> +200 above my rating; the TLE discord bot was handy). I very rarely participated in virtual contests though. This was my strategy for the most part.

Now i am stuck at 1900 :p. Maybe i'll need to start practicing harder.

Ok ive seen your plot. And you solved 6 problems upper that 2000 rating. If you want to reach CM you have to be very fast(solving a to d in div2 under 1:30) or be strong (solve a to e in regular time) but you solve so much easy problem. So my advice is this to make a mashup contest and add last 30 1900 rating problem on cf and solve them with timer and without checking editorial(just try it. Ive done it and it works) and try to solve them under the 2 hours (after 2 hour go and look the editorial) and after solving all of the 30 problems do this for 2000 rating problems. This help you to improve your speed and also helps you to solve the hard problems like e/d div2 which makes you improve a lot. And there are some other things that could help like doing vc and upsolve all of your contest up to e problem. I hope this help you

I've been in your place too, I am one of those person who have a slow progress despite having many problems solved. I think what made me to purple was just really solving problems outside my comfort zone. Ever since I grinded problems rated 1800-2000, I felt a significant change (you can go to problemset in CF and adjust it to 1800-2000 then sort it by most solved, this is what I did). So I think you should try that too, and I think the most important thing is to just keep going on practicing, because you'll always be better eventually.

Oh common, you're going well. Learn some patience from ruban and PAG.

I am exactly kinda same situation with you. I can't even retrieve my max rating in 2+ months(looks like I am going to do this now). Sometimes, it's bad problem orders, sometimes overcomplicating B/C or sometimes big WA's just screwing me. And it looks like if I am under pressure, I get WAs.

Hello,

Firstly, I would advise to make sure that you can solve the first two problems in most of the Div.2 contests, this would make you feel sure that you will be able to solve at least two problems. These problems are usually simple greedy/ad-hoc problems that don't require a lot of observation. And since you mentioned that ad-hoc/greedy problems are your weak spot, this will be opportunity to practice these techniques.

Secondly, when you fail to solve a problem at a contest that requires another technique or trick unknown for you, try studying more different variations of that technique. For example, if you fail to solve DP problems, try to make a list of DP problem variations, something like: coin problem, 0-1 knapsack, digit DP, bitmask DP, DP on graphs, DP with optimizations... Once you have such list, try to honestly mark yourself how much you are comfortable with each of these, and practice each of these to make your marks better. This will give you broad view of problems, and it is very likely that some future contests will have the same idea as the ones you have already studied and solved.

On the end, I wrote a short guide on how to feel more confident and motivated as a competitive programmer, here is a link to it, in case you would like to read more.

I am in the exact same situation. Its almost a month with no progress, every time I perform good in a contest, I fuck up in the next one dragging me down to the same place. I am in no position to give you advice, all I can say is just don't give up.

When you read the editorial and you realize that you have missed an observation, or when you get an observation after too much time, ask yourself why you've missed that observation. Generally, the greedy observations can be noticed by generating some sample tests (example 2), and there are also some "classical" / recurring ways to let greedy work (example 3). Maybe the examples I'm providing are quite specific, but I think they helped me a lot. Examples (spoiler alert):

You can see my graph i directly descended from expert to pupil in last to last contest but I have solve around 1100 problems on codeforces, but it doesn't mean I should always solve first 3 questions and 1 hard question between 1800-2000, there are lot of factors to consider. I ended up solving zero questions while first question had 13,000 submissions and i could not solve first question even.

Me too, I am currently hopelessly stuck beneath the 1600 line.

Solve a lot of Div2C.

The biggest bottleneck of increasing rating in this range is Div2D. And a lot of times it is based on some simple trick. Solving D2C will help you recognise these tricks quickly during a contest.

I want to make it clear that most of the problems below D2D rarely require advanced Algo or DS and can be solved easily with just some maths and thinking, which obviously can be improved with experience!

TLDR: Solving a lot of D2C in practice -> Solving D2D in the contest.

My impression of this is that the gap between 1500 and 1700 is not necessarily the same as the gap between 1700 and 1900. As your rating goes up, it gets harder for your rating to go up further. I think ``plateauing'' is natural if you think about what the prerequisites are for each color. To be consistently Purple demands mastery of a lot more things than being consistently Cyan.