Dear codeforces community. Lately, I have started participating in some division 1 rounds, and I experience a weird issue. Suppose some Div1's problems are >= 2100 in difficulty. Then most purples after reading the problems choose to quit and not do the round. The purples that do choose to do the round, might not even solve the first problem, but the main issue is that a round is only rated for you if you submit. The latest codeforces div1 round (round #707) had about 1300 registered participants, but only ~700 submitted something, and only ~620 solved a problem. So solving problem A with bad timing causes you to be last place, despite doing better than half of the participants.

I suggest that a round should be rated for a user if he views one of the problems of the round as a registered participants. Was this suggested before? I think atcoder had some contests that worked that way but I am not sure.. Any way, the current system causes low div1's to simply quit, causing the people that do submit and succeed to lose massive amounts of rating.

I would appreciate discussing the issue in the blog's comment section.

Thanks, lior5654