Puzzle Description Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

#1: Jota (jota) on Sep 11, 2018

I'm trying to reconstruct the WCP. This # 166 was about beds!

Found to have a unique solution by infrapinklizzard.

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by infrapinklizzard.

Comment Suppressed:Click below to view hints

Change a few pixels and you get the Golden Gate Bridge over San Francisco Bay. That's what I saw during the solve, tho ... :/

Found to be solvable with moderate lookahead by infrapinklizzard.

Another puzzle that un-determined itself, and then was voted much guessing. *Sigh*

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Thanks, Lollipop. This puzzle had a better rating before the Missing Times. I'm not sure why the ratings of the missing puzzles seem lower than they were originally. A different demographic are playing them (people who go back to older ones), but why is that demographic harsher raters I wonder?

Turns out I was so excited to find and solve it that I forgot to rate it. I've done it now, which edged the quality number up a little. It isn't me undervaluing the puzzles. I think I'm more generous now than I was when I started on the site nine(!) years ago. I used to look only at the picture, but now I consider the title, sometimes the description, whether the final image was worth the effort of a hard solve, cleverness, and a bunch of other intangibles, basically my experience of puzzle joy on any level.

Anyone who leaves a nice comment is unlikely to have left a bad rating, so I had no worries on that count. ;)

As for the ratings, I believe the Quality rating should definitely be about the quality of the *puzzle*, not the picture (after all, that's why we're here). If an ugly mess is actually fun to solve, then one should rate it as a fun puzzle regardless of the mess. However, everyone has their own way of looking at things, and that opinion seems to be in the minority here.

Someone here tried to make a series of puzzles to "train" solvers as to how to properly rate puzzles, but it was a lost cause from the start. It was like herding cats.

I was thinking about why puzzles that were recovered from the crash tend to get lower ratings than other puzzles. To me, part of the fun of solving a puzzle is getting to see what the author said in the puzzle's description. That is, earning the "reveal" of the author's message feels like it's a *reward* for solving the puzzle. And that "reveal" is missing in the recovered puzzles. Plus also it is embarrassingly common for me to finish a puzzle and still have *no* idea what image I am looking at, until I read what the author said, which leads to the "Aha!" moment where I find out what the picture actually is. When the puzzle's only description says "this puzzle was recovered from the database crash," then that means that both of those things are missing. And I think each of those things can reduce people's enjoyment of the puzzle, which would lower its ratings.

Anyway, that's my theory.

Comment Suppressed:Click below to view spoilers

Having read the comments, I'm going to weigh in with a "ditto" to #8, 10, 11, 12. Loved the image and enjoyed the solve.

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