Written by: Nick Harbour
The eleventh Flare-On challenge is now over! This year proved to be a tough challenge for the over 5,300 players, with only 275 completing all 10 stages. We had a blast making this contest and are happy to see it continue to be a world-wide phenomenon. Those that finished all stages this year may be eligible to receive this elite desk trophy to the envy of your coworkers and family.
We would like to thank the challenge authors individually for their great puzzles and solutions:
frog – Nick Harbour (@nickharbour)
checksum – Chuong Dong (@cPeterr)
aray – Jakub Jozwiak
FLARE Meme Maker 3000 – Moritz Raabe (@m_r_tz)
sshd – Christopher Gardner (@t00manybananas)
bloke2 – Dave Riley (@6502_ftw)
fullspeed – Sam Kim
Clearly Fake – Blas Kojusner (@bkojusner)
serpentine – Mustafa Nasser (@d35ha)
CATBERT Ransomware – Mark Lechtik (@_marklech_)
This year’s challenge hosted 5,324 registered users, with 3,066 of them solving at least one stage. The difficulty curve ended up smoother than last year’s, with a nice progression of people falling off at stages 5, 7, and 9. Coincidentally, based on finisher feedback those were also the consensus favorite challenges this year. Does that mean we should up the difficulty next time?
Last year Germany was far out ahead of the leaderboard with 19 finishers to 2nd place Singapore’s 15. This year Vietnam takes the lead with 21 finishers and the USA comes in second with 20.
All the binaries from this year’s challenge are now posted on the Flare-On website. Here are the solutions written by each challenge author:
SOLUTION #1
SOLUTION #2
SOLUTION #3
SOLUTION #4
SOLUTION #5
SOLUTION #6
SOLUTION #7
SOLUTION #8
SOLUTION #9
SOLUTION #10