Too Big to Solve?

[motris]

Not my tagline, but a good description for the Mystery Hunt that just happened. One line of dialogue after last year's Hunt that I led with in my wrap-up was a question of when is too soon for a Hunt to end. I said, in this era of a few competitive teams trying to grow to get over the winning hurdle, constructors aiming bigger was a mistake. The

Comments

[anonymous]

I certainly have some sympathy for what you must have gone through. We obviously failed spectacularly at estimating difficulty/length. We also had an initial plan to keep the number of open puzzles reasonable, to try to avoid favoring large teams; you probably noticed that on Friday. But by Saturday, *everyone* was behind the time curve (we simply had to release puzzles at a certain rate so they would all be out by Sunday), and with 30+ puzzles open, large teams had an obvious advantage. My impression was that the less serious teams loved having a vast array of puzzles to pick and choose from. But it just wasn't a good competitive Hunt, given the crazy amount of hints and "options" (free puzzles) we had to give out in a desperate (failed) attempt to end the Hunt by Monday morning

[motris]

There are many valid interpretations of the flavor including don't cut out. The meta clearly presented snakes with the letters in the answer words and the concept of knotting and just seemed to obfuscate snake identity to be mean. One can imagine a single ouroboros assembled in one loop so that going head to tail around it all the letters can be crossed off in order uniquely in the answer words leaving the leftovers. That would have a nice word and logic component to match the other parts. It was a much more fun idea that almost was fully constrained. One can imagine knitting a head to tail snake group like a potholder to spell out all answer words with overs and unders and edge leftovers read cw or ccw for extract. Certainly one can even with sleep read not cut out to mean not cut out because those are the words in a row.

I will hate all Hunt construction teams that have any contingency that needs to unlock a round of 20(+6) puzzles all at once to a competive team of any size as happened to my team at midnight to 4 AM with Rubik.

[anonymous]

Wait, how can you make a giant Ouroboros loop without cutting anything out? (And where would the "1/2" markers fit in, or were you just ignoring them?) I don't understand your "pot holder" description at all. I was the author, btw, so I probably shouldn't try to defend this universally hated puzzle. I just thought disassembling one set of snakes to form another set of snakes was neat. Sigh.

Incidentally, I just read Eric Berlin's writeup ( http://ericberlin.com/?p=5228 ). Palindrome also considered themselves "stuck" on the three supermetas, which is interesting because I think they were by far the fastest to get them (relative to when they'd solved enough metas to have a chance). They really caught fire once they got serious on Sunday. They were the only ones to solve Rubik, and [Atlas Shrugged] were the only ones to solve Indiana Jones.

If you want some cheering up, Luck was the first to solve a meta in the last three rounds (the Snake logic puzzle).

- Derek

[ericberlin]

I'm pretty sure our experience with those three supermetas was the very definition of "stuck," regardless of whether or not we got ourselves unstuck faster than other teams.

[motris]

Yes. I solved that Snake logic puzzle (5/8 answers) which felt early. It was the energy that kept me from going to bed at 8 AM, and instead choosing shower and Thomas Crowne. Which led to me picking with consultation the 3 answers I wanted across Indy 1 and 3. I felt there was still much momentum to be had at 48 hours. Alas....

[rpipuzzleguy]

As long as we're criticizing team demeanors, I'd advise future Hunt GCs not to respond to a Monday morning plea for confirmation of intermediate data with "You don't know what you're doing" and gales of laughter. It's bad for, you know, morale.

[dalryaug]

This was a incident that made me very, very unhappy and really soured my impression of the event.

That terrible phone call

[sin_vraal]

If I recall Derek's visit, it wasn't too long after this phone call. I have been debating contacting Manic Sages directly about it, but since it is now out in the open, I am choosing to express my feelings here

Re: That terrible phone call

[lunchboy]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the obstacles and heist puzzles will be posted online in some sort of home-solvable version. I only saw the guard puzzle, but that one is certainly doable on paper. Don't know about the rest, obviously.

Re: That terrible phone call

[cmouse]

We're trying and I'd really like to. Tech manpower is an issue as it was through the development process.

Re: That terrible phone call

[cananian]

Yeah, you really need to insist that these things are finished and complete before the hunt, or they typically don't get done at all. Everyone is done with the hunt when the hunt is over.

Re: That terrible phone call

[cmouse]

Oh man, tell me about it. ;) Except for pictures and contacts and stories. Work has certainly ceased.

Re: That terrible phone call

[brokenwndw]

...tell me about it.

I am, right now, looking at parts of the 2012 hunt site that need to be corrected, updated, and fixed.

Needless to say I did not plan to be doing this in 2013!

Re: That terrible phone call

[lunchboy]

I definitely had people asking if the show videos from 2012 were going to get posted to the Hunt archive. I forget, is there an easy way for people to get their own team's videos, at least?

Re: That terrible phone call

[brokenwndw]

Not to my knowledge. It's one of the things I definitely have on the TODO list, but I was a bad panda and didn't download the big archive file when it was available, so I'll be depending on the generosity and meticulousness of our teammates.

Re: That terrible phone call

[affpuzz]

I believe that all of the videos that were on my computer made their way to youtube (that is, if the team gave permission). I think the user name was MysteryHunt2012. I'm not sure if anybody else did any uploading; I seem to recall marking the spreadsheet of what we had permission to post, but didn't have all of the videos locally.