[Hunt03] Re: 2004 MIT Mystery Hunt

[Mike Selinker <selinker comcast net>]

on 11/3/03 7:04 AM, Ken Olum at kdo cosmos phy tufts edu wrote:

> I don't understand the issue of needing to make it harder for larger
> teams explicitly.  Isn't it sufficient to not have very many puzzles
> active at once?  Then it will not be very fun to be on a gargantuan
> team, because there isn't anything for all those people to do, so people
> will be motivated to form smaller teams in order to have more fun.
> Announcing in advance that the Hunt would be structured in that way
> would encourage people to split early instead of not having a good
> time and splitting next year.
> 
> Making things explicitly harder requires a definitive list of who is
> on the team.  At least on the palindrome team we've never had such a
> clear specification.  In fact, last year, I wasn't completely certain
> if I was on the team myself.  (But when we needed some of our "team
> members" not to be touching the floors or the walls my twins suddenly
> became members of the team.)  I think puzzles which are an explicit
> function of team size are a bad idea.
> 
> Ken


Right, I get that. You do get a vastly different (and likely less fun) 
event
if you allow unlimited team size but try to control for difficulty by
creating coordination-heavy games. Merely releasing fewer puzzles at once
doesn't solve the problem, though: Even if each additional person gives you
diminishing returns, the person still gives you SOME returns. And thus, 
even
though the large team doesn't have as much fun per capita, they'll likely
still win, and they then might set the hunt back to favoring larger teams.

That's why I favor at least loose caps on team size. But it's not my event.
It's currently Kappa Sig's event, and I'm interested in seeing what they
have in mind.

Mike