Mystery Hunt Con Report
Jan. 21st, 2023 08:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitA con report! Which is the only one I've had since last year's Mystery Hunt report. Depending on COVID numbers I may get myself a really good mask for Readercon and make sure I step outside every time I take it off, whether for breaks or to eat or drink, because oh how I miss conventions.
Mystery Hunt was in person this year, although only something like a quarter of the participants chose to attend in person. One consequence of the pandemic is much better support for remote teams, and much better support on our team for having a lot of remote solvers even when there's a core on campus.
This was also my first Mystery Hunt where I had neither Friday nor the following Tuesday off (usually I have both), which I will remedy next year because I want to be there for the beginning and also Hunt is exhausting-- though normally I have more time to recover because normally the coin is found on Sunday, HQ closes, and continued solving becomes somewhat more desultory and I start paying a lot less attention. Then again, if I had to miss the beginning, this was probably one of the better years for it. (More on that later.)
On a personal level, this was one of my less active hunts. I went into it already fairly drained and most of the early puzzles did not match my skills and background knowledge, although I did contribute words gained from a list of cluephrases. I very much wish Zamboni had been unlocked earlier when I still had brain-- having encyclopedic knowledge of the Zoombinis on which the puzzle was based, I had very solid ideas of where to start just at a glance; I just didn't have enough ability to think to follow through. But since the team skipped solving it altogether as low priority for progress, Mathfriend and I will have fun solving it together once the Hunt archive for the year goes live.
Which brings me to something I had been vaguely aware of but have now had brought home to me: only puzzlehunting once a year and not having a lot of familiarity with the basic forms of puzzlehunts limits my ability to contribute unless something crashes into my subject knowledge. There are a lot of basic forms puzzles can take and I don't know most of them-- but I was able to get a lot from Zamboni just by glancing at it, because I know every inch of that game. If I want to get better I need to practice more frequently, to at least learn the general forms. (Would I have gotten stuck on extraction if I'd had enough brain to do the puzzle? Absolutely, 100%. But I could have gotten much farther on it than I generally can on my own.)
Which brings me to the Hunt itself. I have... issues with this year's structure, which judging by the comments on Puzzlvaria were shared by a lot of the participants. The first and most glaring is that nothing seems to have been learned from last year, when the gating of a huge swath of the Hunt behind the Fruitaround resulted in quite a lot of time with nothing else open for many teams, leaving everyone staring at a puzzle they couldn't quite get past. In general, any kind of gating is a bad thing, because any team might get stuck on any given puzzle. Unless a team is close to completing the entire hunt, there should always be a variety of open puzzles. A lot of people were unhappy with Fruitaround and it was much discussed afterwards. This year the problem seemed to have increased rather than decreased, as there were several successive gates and in general things were slow to unlock... and the beginning was incredibly difficult. In general, you want to increase your difficulty as the hunt goes on, and you want to put your most interesting puzzles and round structures in the midgame.
They seem to have put the interesting round structures (and also the scavenger hunt, which... why?) at the end, much later than they should be. To give you an idea of how badly off their estimations of the difficulty level were, HQ was scheduled to close at 6 on Sunday. With the traditional "or until the coin is found, whichever is later," but the expectation is that someone will win the hunt by midday Sunday, some of the other top teams will have the chance to finish, and then HQ will close. "Whichever is the later" isn't really... supposed to come into play. Hunt was finished at 7:23 AM on Monday. Granted, if MIT had permitted people to stay all night as in days of old, this would likely have been a few hours earlier (since while solving can continue remotely while campus is closed, final runaround can't), but that's still way longer than it should take.
And I say that as part of a team that's fairly large and is usually in the higher echelons of the leaderboard. There is a trend in Hunt that's been noticeable even in the few years I've been solving, that it tends to increase in size with each year, landing you in a position where the team sizes have to rise to keep up, which seriously disadvantages the smaller student teams.... who are the ones actually associated with MIT. Puzzlehunting as a genre is getting larger and more complex as more people get into it and run things from it, which is fine, but I really do think Mystery Hunt needs a decrease in size and complexity to keep it fun and interesting.
Mystery Hunt was in person this year, although only something like a quarter of the participants chose to attend in person. One consequence of the pandemic is much better support for remote teams, and much better support on our team for having a lot of remote solvers even when there's a core on campus.
This was also my first Mystery Hunt where I had neither Friday nor the following Tuesday off (usually I have both), which I will remedy next year because I want to be there for the beginning and also Hunt is exhausting-- though normally I have more time to recover because normally the coin is found on Sunday, HQ closes, and continued solving becomes somewhat more desultory and I start paying a lot less attention. Then again, if I had to miss the beginning, this was probably one of the better years for it. (More on that later.)
On a personal level, this was one of my less active hunts. I went into it already fairly drained and most of the early puzzles did not match my skills and background knowledge, although I did contribute words gained from a list of cluephrases. I very much wish Zamboni had been unlocked earlier when I still had brain-- having encyclopedic knowledge of the Zoombinis on which the puzzle was based, I had very solid ideas of where to start just at a glance; I just didn't have enough ability to think to follow through. But since the team skipped solving it altogether as low priority for progress, Mathfriend and I will have fun solving it together once the Hunt archive for the year goes live.
Which brings me to something I had been vaguely aware of but have now had brought home to me: only puzzlehunting once a year and not having a lot of familiarity with the basic forms of puzzlehunts limits my ability to contribute unless something crashes into my subject knowledge. There are a lot of basic forms puzzles can take and I don't know most of them-- but I was able to get a lot from Zamboni just by glancing at it, because I know every inch of that game. If I want to get better I need to practice more frequently, to at least learn the general forms. (Would I have gotten stuck on extraction if I'd had enough brain to do the puzzle? Absolutely, 100%. But I could have gotten much farther on it than I generally can on my own.)
Which brings me to the Hunt itself. I have... issues with this year's structure, which judging by the comments on Puzzlvaria were shared by a lot of the participants. The first and most glaring is that nothing seems to have been learned from last year, when the gating of a huge swath of the Hunt behind the Fruitaround resulted in quite a lot of time with nothing else open for many teams, leaving everyone staring at a puzzle they couldn't quite get past. In general, any kind of gating is a bad thing, because any team might get stuck on any given puzzle. Unless a team is close to completing the entire hunt, there should always be a variety of open puzzles. A lot of people were unhappy with Fruitaround and it was much discussed afterwards. This year the problem seemed to have increased rather than decreased, as there were several successive gates and in general things were slow to unlock... and the beginning was incredibly difficult. In general, you want to increase your difficulty as the hunt goes on, and you want to put your most interesting puzzles and round structures in the midgame.
They seem to have put the interesting round structures (and also the scavenger hunt, which... why?) at the end, much later than they should be. To give you an idea of how badly off their estimations of the difficulty level were, HQ was scheduled to close at 6 on Sunday. With the traditional "or until the coin is found, whichever is later," but the expectation is that someone will win the hunt by midday Sunday, some of the other top teams will have the chance to finish, and then HQ will close. "Whichever is the later" isn't really... supposed to come into play. Hunt was finished at 7:23 AM on Monday. Granted, if MIT had permitted people to stay all night as in days of old, this would likely have been a few hours earlier (since while solving can continue remotely while campus is closed, final runaround can't), but that's still way longer than it should take.
And I say that as part of a team that's fairly large and is usually in the higher echelons of the leaderboard. There is a trend in Hunt that's been noticeable even in the few years I've been solving, that it tends to increase in size with each year, landing you in a position where the team sizes have to rise to keep up, which seriously disadvantages the smaller student teams.... who are the ones actually associated with MIT. Puzzlehunting as a genre is getting larger and more complex as more people get into it and run things from it, which is fine, but I really do think Mystery Hunt needs a decrease in size and complexity to keep it fun and interesting.
