That's a fair point about the difficulty of earning that award over time. The award is currently determined based on the set of problems you see in the first Archives page when sorted in descending order of difficulty and solving any twenty-five of those problems. In contrast, Easy Prey is all fifty problems on the first page when sorted in ascending order of difficulty. As it happens, all of the hardest problems on the first page are currently >= 95%; the first problem on page 2 is 90%. But maybe it needs to be changed to "Solve twenty-five of the top one-hundred hardest problems"? That is, any twenty-five from the first two pages.
I guess it is up to you guys, but I had good fun taking the challenge of the >= 95% difficulty one as well.
But I guess the first 100 hardest problems reflects the difficulty of the original award better.
You could make two versions, hardest 100 and hardest 50, where the current award is replaced by the former, and the latter is a more challenging one. Though it will inevitably suffer from the same problem of increasing difficulty over time.
Maybe your suggestion is best, make it top 100 hardest.
UPDATE: thought it's better to define a difficulty-based cut-off so that the same problem doesn't occur in another 10 years.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz fabas indulcet fames
The thinking behind the two awards was to keep it as simple as "sort by difficulty" and the target problems are {all of/any twenty-five from among} the problems on the first page for {easiest/hardest} difficulty award. Going to one-hundred moves it to the first two pages.
However, there may some changes in the near future that completely changes the current difficulty metrics anyway.
Interesting, I was about to post the same thing because when 967 comes out, for the first time, not all 95%+ problems will count for Big Game Hunter!
I managed to get Big Game Hunter 11 hours before 774 conjuctive sequences, the last 90%, got knocked out of the top 50 by DottedCalculator solving 943 and boosting it to 95%. And then I lost the award when that happened
On the one hand, this incentivizes you to keep solving hard problems, but on the other hand, it makes it a lot harder for new users to get the award over time. (Overall, I don't really like losing awards in general.) My suggestion would be to leave it how it is but cap it so that 100% problems always count, so that even in a couple years when the 95% problems have all been crowded out of the top 50, the 100% problems always count
I was under the impression that once you get an award, you never lose it, apart from perfection.
If you lost it maybe it's a bug?
This is a quote from euler:
Okay, as I suspected it was to do with some recent changes. It meant that anyone who had already earned a difficulty based award, after solving a recent problem would lose those awards. It could be re-issued by visiting the progress page, but it was an oversight. It should now be fixed and work as expected.
Thank you, ecnerwal, for alerting me to this issue.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz fabas indulcet fames
So apparently I misunderstood how awards works. You can lose them!
In that case, having “Perfect Game” (get all diagonals) seems a bit redundant as pretty much everyone with that award also has Master of the archives (solve all archive problems).
But if you can lose awards, that would seem to me to encourage the competitive aspect of PE, which I think is not good, and has already been discussed.
I think awards should just act as milestones and encourage solvers to explore a range of problems, rather than a league table, which we already have.
E.g. Big Game Hunter should just encourage users to attempt the more difficult problems.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz fabas indulcet fames
