I really didn't like this hunt. I'd class it alongside the Sages' unsolvable-except-by-the-Sages-themselves 2013 hunt. Some specifics:
1. As you mention, the King Arthur round was not pleasant for teams that have problems with runarounds - e.g. if they are heavy on remote solvers and only have 2 current MIT undergrads.
2. Too many crosswords. Like you, I liked Crimes Against Cruciverbalism and Triptychs. The problem is that a hunt with like 12 crosswords isn't going to be able to have 12 interesting crosswords. Despite usually liking crosswords in past hunts, this time I skipped most of them because they got repetitive.
3. We didn't get to see the whole hunt. We got the Endymion round when everyone else did, at 6:30 pm on Sunday, 2.5 hours before HQ closed, and never got to see the Limbo puzzles. We're a second tier team, but we're a good second tier team - we ended up ranking either #11 or #13, depending on how you count. I don't think the must-solve-every-round-meta-to-unlock-runaround structure is good.
4. Some extractions were incredibly underclued. For example, the Quantum Minesweeper - we did all the hard work of figuring out entanglements, but the final extraction was just weird. Also, we did at the end get the answer to this, but I still don't understand why, and apparently there was a wrong answer a lot of teams submitted.
5. Identify, Sort, Index, Solve deserves an entry of its own. You're supposed to order various very large numbers... but with two of them, BB(100) and A(BB(99), BB(99)), the ordering is not known, and the authors just made an educated guess.
6. I understand that they had technical problems at the last moment, and we were mostly spared because we have an internal system for answer tracking, but releasing puzzles in large bunches is problematic, for two reasons. First, there's no sense of progress as we wait for hours for the next unlock. And second, we're less likely to look at 10 new puzzles than at 1 new puzzle. The point system of last year was far better, even though the get-1-puzzle-for-each-puzzle-solved unlock rate was too low.
1. As you mention, the King Arthur round was not pleasant for teams that have problems with runarounds - e.g. if they are heavy on remote solvers and only have 2 current MIT undergrads.
2. Too many crosswords. Like you, I liked Crimes Against Cruciverbalism and Triptychs. The problem is that a hunt with like 12 crosswords isn't going to be able to have 12 interesting crosswords. Despite usually liking crosswords in past hunts, this time I skipped most of them because they got repetitive.
3. We didn't get to see the whole hunt. We got the Endymion round when everyone else did, at 6:30 pm on Sunday, 2.5 hours before HQ closed, and never got to see the Limbo puzzles. We're a second tier team, but we're a good second tier team - we ended up ranking either #11 or #13, depending on how you count. I don't think the must-solve-every-round-meta-to-unlock-runaround structure is good.
4. Some extractions were incredibly underclued. For example, the Quantum Minesweeper - we did all the hard work of figuring out entanglements, but the final extraction was just weird. Also, we did at the end get the answer to this, but I still don't understand why, and apparently there was a wrong answer a lot of teams submitted.
5. Identify, Sort, Index, Solve deserves an entry of its own. You're supposed to order various very large numbers... but with two of them, BB(100) and A(BB(99), BB(99)), the ordering is not known, and the authors just made an educated guess.
6. I understand that they had technical problems at the last moment, and we were mostly spared because we have an internal system for answer tracking, but releasing puzzles in large bunches is problematic, for two reasons. First, there's no sense of progress as we wait for hours for the next unlock. And second, we're less likely to look at 10 new puzzles than at 1 new puzzle. The point system of last year was far better, even though the get-1-puzzle-for-each-puzzle-solved unlock rate was too low.
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