Very fair feedback on moving the deadline. We'd debated doing it or not, and ended up moving it in the spirit of distributed systems education. A lot of people in the chat appreciated it, but that's obviously a selected segment.
So we know for next time, how strong are other people's feelings on this?
Personally, I would have been happier if the deadline sat -- if only because I needed to get back to regular life, and it's hard to resist the temptation to squeeze out those last few points.
But I might have felt differently if I hadn't finished...
I'm glad you did (but I wouldn't have finished if you hadn't).
More people learning & having fun is better. IMO people only complain about the extended deadline because of its effect on the rankings.
The scoring system was an interesting addition over CTF2, but it also created these complaints and silliness like people submitting the same code repeatedly to get the best score possible.
It may have been better to only tell players what broad percentile group they're in. There would still be an incentive to write faster code, without the frustration of being edged out of position #20 because someone else's submission was (arbitrarily) scored a few points higher.
I actually think there is a middle ground; just bump the deadline, allow people to still solve it and get a T-shirt but freeze the scores and everybody's happy.
Btw, I agree that the scoring needs to be consistent or less coarse grained (percentiles) so that people don't submit thousands of attempts to get the max out of their solution...
I think the write up is pretty good at stating the problems (along with the deadline). If none of the other problems existed there wouldn't be a reason to extend the deadline. I agree with the choice to extend the deadline due to load/bugs but a fixed revised deadline would have been nice. Also, maybe limiting the number of successful trials a person could perform in total would have helped with scoring.
That being said, I think you guys picked a hard CTF concept this time but I LOVED PLAYING. Thank you Greg and everyone else at Stripe that contributed!
So we know for next time, how strong are other people's feelings on this?