Double post, but Bungie finally got around to banning contest mode cheaters. Assuming
the leaderboard is now accurate and all cheating fireteams have been removed, that means that only 195 teams managed a clear in the contest period (four more are on the board because they hadn't left the instance, including one that must have cleared mere seconds after the deadline and one that stayed an extra seventeen hours to finish the clear). Someone did the math and concluded that this meant over half of the contest clears cheated (1170 legit players/2497 emblems = 47% legit). Even that might not be fully accurate as there might be duplicates in there, though I doubt there are many if any exist considering how grueling an experience it was.
Honestly, even without the rampant cheating, this whole contest situation was pretty crazy. I actually went and crunched the numbers for all previous contests because I was bored and wanted to do direct comparisons, and here's the results of that, as well as data from the Pantheon and the recent dungeon contest modes:
I'll start with a caveat that these numbers won't necessarily be exact due to potential repeats in the data, but I'm not going to go to the trouble of figuring out how to filter those out. I included the first day's completions as well because of the eventual change to 48-hour contest mode, in order to get a more accurate comparison of how many people managed a clear on the first day for every raid (Vow's contest was extended due to server issues, King's Fall went back to a single day, and then every contest from Root on was 48 hours). I couldn't do this for Pantheon because the leaderboards were clearly off, probably only counting the time for the final boss in each instance (nobody cleared Nezarec and all seven prior bosses in under an hour).
There are a couple trends I noticed in the data. First, the total clears follow an interesting pattern that shows how wildly Bungie will swing difficulty. It seems that any time they make a raid noticeably easier than the previous one, they will immediately swing back to brutally hard for a couple of raids before gradually easing off again (EoW -> SoS/LW, SotP -> CoS/GoS, RoN -> CE/SE/TDP). They hit a decent stride between DSC and KF with a pretty decent amount of clears, though with Vow you can really see how much that extra day helped, bumping the total clears sixfold in that second day. Finally, with only three exceptions, every raid race has finished in under eight hours, and two of those three were the latest two raids. Part of the reason they extended contest to 48 hours was so that teams wouldn't feel the need to punish themselves raiding without sleep in order to get a clear, but the last two have taken nearly a full day of raiding just for the first clear.
At this point, contest feels like it's being designed solely around the world's first race and nothing else. I get that that's appealing to some teams, but most players who engage with contest mode just want a decent challenge that they have a fair chance of overcoming, to engage with the new activity before any strategies are known and figure it out together as a team. They have no illusions of being first to finish and they don't care to, they just want to have a challenging but fair fight. But Bungie seems focused only on the absolute pinnacle of the playerbase and trying to create something that will make even those players sweat, not even bothering to care about how that excludes everyone but those who dedicate their lives to this game. If those players want a challenge that goes above and beyond, they can make up their own rules and push themselves in that way (limit their loadouts, low-man, speedrun). For the base difficulty, though, let everyone have a chance.
