XWord Muggles Forum

Gman wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:18 pm Feeling very blind/stupid with all this chatter about how easy this one is supposed to be.

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:13 pm

TPS wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 9:29 pm I’ll never understand how people rate the difficulties of the WSJCC puzzle. Last week’s puzzle was a never solve for me yet I got this one in under an hour. Now I realize this puzzle was a more familiar method to those of us who have done these for at least a few months but in my view this week’s is an order of magnitude simpler than last week’s.

I don't do the difficulty ratings because I don't really know how to figure it out. Certainly sometimes there are clear theme answers with an obvious similarity and those should be easy. And others have multiple steps with different methodologies and that will be difficult. But most are somewhere in the middle. And I don't even think my own solving experience is relevant. If I get it quickly, was it easy or was I lucky? If it takes me a long time, was it hard, or was I dense?

I don't know how Matt calibrates the difficulty of MGWCC, and the fact that he sometimes blows it does not surprise me as much as that he so often gets it right.

Joe Ross wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 6:42 am

hazmat wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 6:16 am on shore.
Does anybody have a link or .puz for the "Variations on a Theme" special puzzle? I haven't watched the Q+A yet. Not a WSJ subscriber.

HERE

Prozach wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 6:49 am Hi all - This is my first Meta, really. And my first post here. Great to find you all. As the tradition goes, I will say that I am on shore. Just woke up and took a second (or, 100th) look and I *think* i got it. I had it all on paper since Thursday, but just getting a different look at things, and drilling down one more layer helped. Looking forward to many more of these.

Shana Tova!

MaineMarge wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 7:14 am Solved. There’s nothing like a middle of the night bathroom break to clear things up.

Before I head to shore Isaac is going to help me plant a hops vine (called bine) in the stern garden. E

TPS wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:48 pm

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 10:13 pm

TPS wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 9:29 pm I’ll never understand how people rate the difficulties of the WSJCC puzzle. Last week’s puzzle was a never solve for me yet I got this one in under an hour. Now I realize this puzzle was a more familiar method to those of us who have done these for at least a few months but in my view this week’s is an order of magnitude simpler than last week’s.

I don't do the difficulty ratings because I don't really know how to figure it out. Certainly sometimes there are clear theme answers with an obvious similarity and those should be easy. And others have multiple steps with different methodologies and that will be difficult. But most are somewhere in the middle. And I don't even think my own solving experience is relevant. If I get it quickly, was it easy or was I lucky? If it takes me a long time, was it hard, or was I dense?

I don't know how Matt calibrates the difficulty of MGWCC, and the fact that he sometimes blows it does not surprise me as much as that he so often gets it right.

This is a really good post IMO - probably because I generally feel the same way. I’ve been on the first page twice I think and so of course I thought those were easy puzzles but was the. Surprised to see much much better solvers than me say they thought those puzzles were tough and I have been on the reverse of that dynamic most recently last week.

Bob cruise director wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:20 pm

BarbaraK wrote: ↑Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:13 pm

TPS wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2020 7:15 pm

I like to do puzzles and have done a lot of them over my life but I had honestly forgotten that Word Squares were even a thing - so aside from about 5 other things that would have made that one unsolvable for me - that would have certainly killed me.

Hard to believe that Toy Box had a higher solve rate than Pageant.

I don't think solve percentage is the best way to compare puzzle difficulty. Some puzzles have a defined set of possibilities, and I think that encourages guessing. And then PAGEANT is really in a category of it's own.

In raw numbers, 242 people got the correct answer to PAGEANT. Only 98 got CLUE. So I'd argue that means Toy Box/CLUE was harder.

It took me all weekend to get that one. When I was refilling the grid yet again, I realized that I didn't really know exactly what a word square was, so I googled it and read the wikipedia article. And then, those 7 four letter words, 2 with the same first letter, suddenly made sense.

I prefer to solve the crossword part of metas without google. But for the meta part, I google everything I'm not absolutely sure of and even some of what I am.

Barbara
I am not sure what is a good metric which is why I keep graphs. The problem with pure numbers is that over time we have doubled the participation so naturally the contests from the "early years" would have lower numbers. I agree with you that the ones with a low and finite number of possible answers encourage guessing.

This contest was different in that there were very few references to actors/directors, or TV shows of which I know very little but when I reach a dead end, I will google them. I can't remember when I have had to google to get the meta