During the Vietnamese team's participation in APIO 2021, we had a large submission queue during our last 2 or so hours, which made it impossible to get the verdict of our submissions.
For me in particular, and for many people in my team, this directly resulted in a big loss of points. For me, I lost 23 points in problem 2 due to an array bounds bug and 31 points in problem 3 due to a bug in subtask 2 (my code for 3 and 4 was correct, but I put it after subtask 2.) These bugs would probably have been fixable had I been able to see the results of my submissions.
The organizers did give us 30 more minutes, but during that time the queue was still blocked anyway.
I am aware that very little can be done at this point on the part of the APIO organizers, but I am still posting this to make people aware of this issue that we encountered. Hopefully there will be something that the organizers can do so that we could have a better experience.
The same thing happened to Chinese team.
I can prove this. As a chinese participant, I needed to wait for 10 minutes after each submission. I thought that the delay was normal and just sat and waited. But strange things happened after 12:00 pm, 3 hours after we started the contest. We cannot get result anymore, and our submission led to endless "compiling" sign. After 1 am, 4 hours after the contest, I tried to submit my A and C, but the system threw the error "submission storage error". I had typed the B=0 solution of A, which can get 30+ points of A. But all these codes became useless. After the contest had ended, I just got 25 points from problem B, but I think I can get greater than 100 points if I could submit A and C. By the way, we didn't get time extention.
APIO 2021 Committee member here. While we worked hard to ensure a smooth contest, we have no one else other than ourselves to blame regarding this issue. We hope you are taking our apology for the inconvenience.
The appeal session is now open and instructions to appeal have been sent to team leaders earlier today. Your concern is exactly why we have appeal session in the first place. While we cannot guarantee anything, please reach to your team leader if you would like to appeal and have the committee looked into more detail of your particular case.
Thank you.
Our amazing organisers already prepared us for situations like this by having 90-minute queues in our TST!