Still more to do, of course. I've got notes for more LA puzzles to uhm, reify. Some folks were muttering about writing puzzles earlier; I should nudge them.
And now that there's data, I want to measure the "funnel." Sales folks look at a user's path through a web site as a funnel, perhaps because sales folks like funnel metaphors. They notice "OK, 1000 people came to our 'landing page' by clicking on an ad. Of those, 11 clicked through to the Product Details page, and 10 purchased something." They look at the fraction of users who made it through each step (11/1000 ain't so great; 10/11 is pretty darned good), trying to figure out where users run away from becoming customers. I'm not selling anything, but I bet a similar analysis would point out puzzles that are too hard; in an "arc" of puzzles, if 40 teams solved #2, but only 20 solved #3, probably someone should tinker with #3.
That tinkering can lead to changes. When playtesters went through, they struggled with some puzzles. It's OK if they struggle some; they gotta learn this stuff. But some puzzles they struggled with weren't teaching them anything they'd really use in other puzzlehunts. So I kicked those puzzles into a pile of bonus-puzzles at the end; they weren't broken per se but they broke the flow.
I'm giving myself the Iron Ass Award for this weekend. I was basically just sitting at the computer and looking at the guess-logs, trying to spot new partials to add. (A la, "Everyone keeps guessing 'blark' on the such-and-such puzzle… Oh, I think I can figure out why they're guessing that." then I tweak the website to give a "nudge" to future teams who guess "blark".) I was pretty glad that things calmed down enough on Sunday such that I granted myself permission to go out and procure sandwiches for lunch and dinner.
