(no subject)

[zotmeister]

You'd think that, when testsolving for a competition where most puzzles don't have given rules, people would read the rules for those puzzles that do have them very carefully. I know I thought that. I was apparently very wrong. [facepalm] - ZM

UPDATE: More importantly, you'd think that the testsolvers would be given the complete instructions to begin with. [headdesk] But even more importantly than that, you'd think that the constructor would provide an error-free puzzle so that the previous two would even make a difference! [bodyfloor]

Comments

Loved this puzzle

[aerionblue.livejournal.com]

Seeking Scotchy was among my very favorites of the weekend. Friends from two other teams agreed; one of them liked it so much he spent Monday morning at work finishing up the grids he hadn't done during the hunt proper.

I'd actually stumbled across your Seeking Syren puzzles on this blog last year sometime, but almost all of my teammates working on the puzzle hadn't. As you discovered, nobody wanted to read the instructions (TLDR?), which posed a major obstacle to actually solving the puzzles until finally everybody gave in and read them.

A large subset of us went directly from there into Prince of Kong, never knowing they were by the same author. Kudos for some great puzzles!

Re: Loved this puzzle

[zotmeister]

Thank you very much for the kind words. That's quite the coincidence to go straight from one of my puzzles to the other!

I come from a gaming background, where rules are everything; my puzzle preferences tend toward the logical, where instructions are everything. For that matter, my degree is in computer science, where processes are everything. The thought of people being unwilling to read instructions in order to learn what they're supposed to be doing is so foreign to me that it frankly frightens me! Actually, if you even did so much as looked at the sample puzzle before diving in, then you apparently did better than average. Given the reviews I've gotten, I've decided that making people read rules is a good thing, as the end result is something they enjoy more. I hope your experiences set an example for others to follow.

...Ugh. Mentally edit that previous paragraph so that it sounds like it was written by a human being and not a robot, and THAT is what I mean to say. :)

- ZM

Re: Loved this puzzle

[aerionblue.livejournal.com]

Heh, actually a lot of us were CS people, too, but at Mystery Hunt it seems like people are always in a hurry. I try not to, but sometimes I find myself jumping in and hoping that it will take less time to guess the rules than to read them. (Reading is hard! >_>)

That ... usually doesn't work out.