The 12th annual FLARE-On contest has come to a close! It did not overstay its welcome at a new shorter run length of just four weeks; we still captured the hearts and minds of over 4,000 players. At the time of this writing, approximately one day before the contest ends, only 273 of those crossed the finish line and completed all nine great challenges. Feedback was very positive this year, marking it as one of the crowd favorites in the history of the contest. Eligible finishers will receive a useful and fashionable FLARE-On Challenge Canvas Tote!
We would like to thank the challenge authors individually for their fantastic puzzles:
- Drill Baby Drill! - Nick Harbour (@nickharbour)
- Project Chimera - Ana Martinez Gomez
- Pretty Devilish File - Ange Albertini (@corkami)
- UnholyDragon - Christopher Gardner (@t00manybananas)
- ntfsm - Vince Weyell
- chat_client - Blas Kojusner (@bkojusner)
- The Boss Needs Help - Moritz Raabe (@m_r_tz)
- Flare Authenticator - Mustafa Nasser (@d35hax)
- 10000 - Sam Kim
This year’s challenge hosted 4,139 registered users, with 2,412 of them solving at least one stage. The difficulty curve was very smooth again this year, with the majority of players weeded out by the first five challenges. Challenges 6 through 9 proved to be the long tail, with finishing rates quite high for those fortunate enough to make it that far.
This year Vietnam once again takes the stacks the winners circle with 27 finishers and Israel surprising everybody with a solid 20 finishers.
All the binaries from this year’s challenge are now posted on the Flare-On website. The official challenge solution documents are attached below.
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