15.05.2020, 09:52
I think Puzzle_Maestro is right; there has been an unusual puzzle flood recently; The portal exists a bit over 11 years, and in that time, roughly 1 puzzle per day was published. In recent times, that has increased to an average of 4-6 puzzles per day, and there are quite a lot fairly hard ones among them. So there is plenty choice of unsolved puzzles for most players at the moment.
A side effect of this puzzle flood is that most puzzles don't get as much attention as we were used to/ they deserve, as you have experienced yourself.
Players tend to do puzzles that they like, that are easy or look promising.
As long as a puzzle doesn't have a rating in red stars (hence: the average difficulty-rating of the people who submitted such a rating), it is uncertain how difficult it really is. Also, the number of solvers can be an indicator of how interesting the puzzle is. And when there are so many puzzles to chose from, many players tend to go for the safe ones, namely those with a difficulty ratng and/or decent number of solvers and/or promising comments.
When I first read the instructions of your puzzle, I stopped after reading the first lines. I am one of the people who likes short and clear instructions; the shorter the better; the large number of instructions withheld me from trying the puzzle, although I am quite fond of sudoku variants.
But after reading your request here in the forum, I decided to give it a go. I had to read the instructions very careful in order to get them all right. After that, it was a very easy puzzle, with many forced steps in the beginning. Keeping track of all the different constraints was (much) harder for me than solving the puzzle itself.
A side effect of this puzzle flood is that most puzzles don't get as much attention as we were used to/ they deserve, as you have experienced yourself.
Players tend to do puzzles that they like, that are easy or look promising.
As long as a puzzle doesn't have a rating in red stars (hence: the average difficulty-rating of the people who submitted such a rating), it is uncertain how difficult it really is. Also, the number of solvers can be an indicator of how interesting the puzzle is. And when there are so many puzzles to chose from, many players tend to go for the safe ones, namely those with a difficulty ratng and/or decent number of solvers and/or promising comments.
When I first read the instructions of your puzzle, I stopped after reading the first lines. I am one of the people who likes short and clear instructions; the shorter the better; the large number of instructions withheld me from trying the puzzle, although I am quite fond of sudoku variants.
But after reading your request here in the forum, I decided to give it a go. I had to read the instructions very careful in order to get them all right. After that, it was a very easy puzzle, with many forced steps in the beginning. Keeping track of all the different constraints was (much) harder for me than solving the puzzle itself.