There are many blogs about subtasks. After almost every round the participants discuss the subtasks and their scoring distribution. Sometimes even contest author doesn't want to see subtasks in his round, but they show up there against his opinion.
But so far people who don't like subtasks have not received a worthy answer from administration or MikeMirzayanov.
I want the administration to understand that many authoritative users are against subtasks(If it is not clear from this blog).
So I encourage everyone who reads this blog and who doesn't like subtasks to write "+" in comments. Also if you like subtasks please respect other opinions and don't dislike comments. You can just dislike this blog.
UPD I am really sorry you got so many dislikes. I can guess that this dislikes were put by bots.
UPD2 Definitely it was bots. Every comment got +9 in couple minutes.
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+ (I don't like (some aspects of) subtasks too), but...
I suppose you're angry because of this comment, but writing yet another blog to rant and provide no useful information is not a good way to help. Mike must have considered the problems with subtasks and decide that the advantages are larger.
Most of people who don't like subtasks are oranges and reds. Unfortunately, there are more purples and blues who would find subtasks useful and/or make a ton of complaints about the large difficulty gap in an unbalanced problemset. From an admin's perspective, catering to the second group seems like the better option because they're both larger and easier to lose interest in participation.
Similar problem has happened in gaming. The gameplay keeps getting updated to be more simple to fit casual players, which in turn upsets experienced players who have spent a lot of time developing complex mechanics and want to have a competitive gameplay.
It sucks for the minority but what can you do?
That's why I don't mind subtasks completely — as something that helps purple/orange contestants challenge themselves. The real problem is that at that level, it's hard to find a subtask that's about more than shitting out implementation quickly. I'm not saying that never exist, but just lowering constraints is useless when the point of some problem is finding an $$$O(N \log N)$$$ improvement to a standard boring $$$O(N^2)$$$.
tl;dr subtask resposibly
Maybe only allow subtasks which are not the most brute-force one?
For example, in 1172C2 - Nauuo and Pictures (hard version), the brute force is exponential, the official solution is $$$O(n+m^2+m\log p)$$$, and the easier version requires $$$O(n+wm^3)$$$ / $$$O(n+wm^2\log p)$$$ solution. As a result, it filled the difficulty gap very well.
Yes, not bruteforce and not too straightforward textbook things.
What about making subtasks for easier problems only? Kinder (I like it more than nuttela :) )/red/strong orange guys would still solve them optimally as if they weren't subtask problems (unless if I'm missing something about the nature of subtask problems)
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Next contest: Yet Another subtasks problem :'(
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Not my CF...
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I don't like "+" for voting. In Codeforces, voting is usually done by upvote/downvote. A blog full of duplicate comments is a disaster.
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Inb4 Mike deletes spam comments.
Obviously. I suppose in this case the poster is angry and just want to generate as much noise as possible.
Unfortunately, voting is anonymous, and it seems author wants to see who is up to the rebellion with him
Yes, you are right)
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To be honest, I am against abusing subtask instead of subtask itself. For a round with 5 tasks it might be a good option to add subtask in order to balance the round. However, a round with 6 or even 7 tasks containing subtasks (like A,B1,B2,C,D,E1,E2,F) is meaningless(or even annoying) to me.
Yup, we don't need 10 problems.
Also Errichto:
I was opposed to using so many subtasks there. I said the same thing that I wrote in a few comments recently: subtasks are bad if there are many problems already.
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It is strange to criticize subtasks in general. I agree that many of such problems (easy subtasks) are irritating, have stupid solution and often unfairly scored. But it's the question of quality. It sounds like "let's not to give problems any more cause in some previous rounds they were idealess and unpleasant". So subtasks aren't an evil by themselves, but many of them are prepared maximally carelessly, so unfortunately + yet
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(dmitriy umnov ya tvoy fanat!)
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