The City of Heroes Search the words, save the world Contest - March 1st, 2010

I think it was someone proclaiming that this was too easy and that it should be made harder that started sending this game into a downward spiral. While your suggestion isn't a bad idea, I don't think they'd go for it because it would make it too easy in some's opinion.

I'd have to agree with this assessment. To be honest, I think that the winner has historically been a matter of random chance more than skill at finding words.

Each week, a puzzle typically has ten legitimate answers, along with three to five answers that happen to end up in the puzzle due to chance. There's a significant chance that you will end up guessing one of the incorrect answers, and if you do, you are irrevocably disqualified from trying again. If you point out that there are more than ten correct answers in the puzzle, again, you are irrevocably disqualified. The thing is, in both cases, you have done nothing wrong. You have followed the rules to a tee, demonstrating that you have indeed found ten words that are being sought.

What I think is being misunderstood is the scale of just how daunting task that really is. Mathematically, if there are only eleven legitimate answers in the puzzle, the odds that you happen to pick the right one are 1 in 11C10, or 9.09%. If twelve legitimate answers are in the puzzle, then the odds of you picking the correct one shrink to 12C10, or just 1.52%.

Just to be clear, I can certainly write a generator that can forcibly avoid duplicates in the puzzle. However, there will still be the problem of answers that are legitimate, but that were unplanned.

I could include a second list of words to not put into the puzzle. Of course, this means that if a puzzle is wanted of, for example, badge names, then someone would have to input a complete list of badge names, then transfer ten of them out of the "do not include" column and put them into the "do include" column. I'm not sure if they'd want to go through that much trouble.

I rather agree with Zombie Man on this one, that a minimum word length of five or six could virtually eliminate legitimate words finding their way into the puzzle by chance. If a puzzle generator is being used, what is the difference between putting "Ge" in the puzzle and "ChoGe"? Not much.

I think that there definitely needs to be rules changes to be more community-friendly. Here is what I would suggest:

• All correct answers will be at least five letters long.
• The first puzzle submitted that contains ten correct answers--any ten correct answers, not just the ten that the puzzle author happened to pick--will be considered the winner.
• Duplicate words are only considered one correct answer. So, for example, if "ChoGe" is a correct answer and you found it, but not in the place where the puzzle author placed it, it counts. If you point out that it's in the puzzle twice, it still counts, but the two duplicates count only as one legitimate answer.

I know that it's a bit deflating for you to post a puzzle just to have it solved five minutes later. But believe me, it's even more soul-sucking to us to post a correct answer and get excited because we think we've won something, just to be told that it's wrong, we can't submit a re-entry, and on top of that, we've just given away ten correct answers for everyone else to use to try to post a "correct" submission. As Zombie Man said, it's not fun, it's frustrating as hell.

Here's Tony's take on things. Costume codes are cheap. It costs you guys nothing to churn out more. If it takes people only five minutes to solve a puzzle, then so be it. They're barred from entering again anyway, so it's not like that same person will win week after week. Really, it's so easy to generate these puzzles that I might consider posting as many as one every weekday. The people who are cheating will get their costume codes in the first few weeks, be barred from entering again, and that will leave a fun little puzzle for everyone else. Yes, that means that over 200 costume codes will be given out each year. So what? It's not like it's impacting your revenue, it's still a small enough percentage of the player base to make it something special, and it will make us feel like it's not so impossible for us to get right that we don't even bother trying.

Who invited Negative Nancy to the fun side of the party...

Out of curiosity (and having a lot of free time right now), I decided to check if Sapper was somewhere in the puzzle. I tried looking around for double Ps, since that would probably be easiest way to identify the word. I can say without a doubt that there is no properly spelled Sapper in that puzzle. The closest I could find was Sap.

TY for the detailed review. I see now the angst has much cause. I hope it gets better.