The UTC time provided is inaccurate; the event will be kicking off at 19:00 UTC, which translates to 2 PM EST. I want to express my sincere gratitude to this amazing community for all the support!

I had a very uncomfortable experience on this platform, mainly due to the behavior of the admin angietechcafe. I was banned for messages that did not violate any stated rules, without clear explanation or any willingness to discuss the situation.

Additionally, several challenges were broken and, despite being reported, they were not fixed or properly acknowledged. What made the situation worse was the way I was addressed by angietechcafe: the communication felt dismissive and disrespectful, which is disappointing coming from someone in an administrative role.

As a player, this made me feel unfairly treated and discouraged from participating further. A basic level of professionalism and respect from administration is essential, and unfortunately, this was missing here.

I'm not often one to publicly comment or criticize, but this is definitely a special occasion in which I think it is needed.

My team's experiences with support and challenges echo those of Leslato (and likely many other competitors). Support was overly combative and refused to investigate or even acknowledge the possibility of glaring issues within the challenges, of which there were quite a few. The organizer, Angie Tech Cafe, was also just as combative, actively banning people who attempted to discuss their competition experience and showing blatant disrespect towards nearly everyone that entered the chat.

One of our team members was banned for simply sharing a meme regarding an experience he had with the support team. I posted a formal, constructive message about my experience which was immediately deleted and I was directed to send it into the survey form. From my brief time in the Discord, many other people seemed to have a similar experience - they would post something critical of the competition and immediately get banned. A lot of CTF servers are typically filled with banter/memes and to see such an overly strict application of rules and stifling of criticism is disheartening.

As someone who has been involved in both competing in as well as organizing CTFs over the past year, this is behavior that I genuinely do not think I have witnessed from any other CTF I've competed in. The combination of faulty challenges, organizers that refuse to accept accountability, and constant mellowing of competitor complaints, at least in my opinion, create for the "perfect storm" of a disastrous competition.

To be constructive: I believe there is a lot of work that needs to be put into both providing an environment that competitors feel welcome in (i.e. no overly strict moderation, provide competitors an outlet to discuss their experience), as well as ensuring challenges are tested thoroughly and that flags/solves are validated before the CTF starts (i.e. try to run through the challenge as if you were an ordinary CTF player - if you can do a blind playtest, that's even better - and see if everything goes well through the solve process including submitting in CTFd.)

Originally, I was looking forward to a nice, cozy winter-themed CTF. However, not long after the CTF started did problems start to appear.

First of all, a few challenges were broken/not working. That's fine, a quick ticket should fix that, right? Nope. Issues were not fixed nor properly acknowledged. Oh well, that's too bad. Surely it can't get worse... right?

The owner of the Discord server and the main administrator of the CTF, angietechcafe, was quite the person to deal with. You can read what Leslato and price8349 said. People were being silenced or banned simply for raising concerns or offering constructive criticism.

At the exact same time, the behavior coming from angietechcafe was unbelievable. They were always far more aggressive and disrespectful than anything the players were punished for. If the stated rules regarding respect and conduct were actually enforced without exception, angietechcafe themselves would be banned.

The double standard is what made the whole situation especially frustrating. Rules are meant to keep everything calm, mature, and maintain a nice community. But here? They were used as a one way shield to suppress the powerless for no absolute reason. It's simply disgusting. This whole situation reminded me exactly of 1984.

I hope this CTF gets removed from CTFTime for the misconduct that has happened. It is unacceptable and this CTF does not deserve to be on the platform.

awful orgs, awful challs, this should give negative points

i can make better challenges in my sleep. no clear format of flag. for example there was this flag - atcctf_356ONOQT1Vhv6RqvvtwiE}tUvt@hq4vuettFLrhtMD0'$h1Ddhlvptl:VptlomuA :)

Half the challenges didn’t work, support refused to listen, and the admin banned people for giving feedback. Absolute disaster of a CTF.

Oh ATC. Where do i even begin.

On the CTF side, there were broken challenges, challenges with no clear flag format, and unsolvable challenges. Not to mention guessy asl. No pwn, no interesting challenges, and overall just a really terrible ctf. It was so beginner that I feel this doesn’t even deserve the privilege to be on the amazing website CTFtime. It’s clear the authors have never played a real CTF before.

On the discord side was what made everyone go insane. Had the CTF organizer grown any braincells, they would be able to take a little criticism and fix their broken ctf. I’m sure 90% of the participants are better than the organizers. You’d think the ctf organizers realized it isn’t the players fault that all the challenges are broken when there’s 20 tickets open talking about the exact same issues.

Furthermore, the CTF organizer, angie tech cafe, instantly started banning everyone’s chat messages. Even those looking for guidance on the CTF or even mentioned anything remotely negative would be instantly banned. This is not how you manage a CTF. The “rules” were an absolute joke. Actually, the entire CTF was a joke.

overall, this ctf will probably receive more points than these organizers’ combined iq level.

actual dogshit ctf holyyyyyyy

vibecoded challs and stupid organizers - it was the worst ctf i've ever played :3

i feel like i deserve to lose points just for taking participation in this

kalau dlm loghat kedah org ckp mcm pelaq oo ctf ni

Feels like everything is just an excuse to steal my data

worst ctf i've ever played this year : (

Honestly, this CTF was a mess.

The web challenges weren’t even challenges. The flags were literally sitting in the source code. No exploitation, no logic, no difficulty — just read the code and you’re done. Hosting a web challenge on GitHub is already questionable, but leaving the flag publicly visible? That’s just embarrassing.

The AI challenges were even worse. Entire projects were publicly available on GitHub, with all the flags already there. No protection, no creativity, no effort. Anyone could solve them without doing anything remotely “AI-related.”

Every ticket I opened was about the flag format, and the only response was “wrong answer.” No hints, no explanations, no support. Just repeating the same thing over and over.

If you can’t properly design and host a CTF, don’t waste people’s time. This wasn’t a competition — it was a joke.

THIS IS FUCK YOUR CTF
NO SUPPORT NO ADVICE NO NOTHING AND FUCK THIS CTF

Poorly crafted challenges and CTF overall. Poor support staff, and confusing challenges with shitty flags.

This MIGHT be the worst CTF I've ever played out of the HUNDREDS I've participated in. Easily makes the top 3.

"Winter-themed" CTF my buttocks. The only consistent theming was broken challenges and the organizers’ refusal to acknowledge that anything was wrong. Unless the real winter theme was how cold they were toward participants.

For example, consider this challenge:

"Decrypt this Caesar cipher: PELCBFRPHEVGL"
"Hint: use a shift of 13"

These are the ONLY details provided. Seems simple.

Applying ROT13 yields "CRYPOSECURITY", the only correct result. That answer was rejected. Trying the obvious typo fix, "CRYPTOSECURITY", was also rejected.

When asked for clarification, the admin responded, "Please attempt again and use all resources available to you. That's all we can say without revealing the answer."

This canned response was given for any report of broken challenges. No explanation, no fixes, and NO ACCOUNTABILITY. Players who criticized these issues were banned from the Discord instead of the problems being addressed.

The admin who created this challenge, "Hak_S6INFOSEC", also said (and I quote):

"You're right buddy, I have no idea how to do a CTF, my 50+ wins including a black badge, and my 15yrs of competing and judging is trash."

And yet, somehow, bro couldn't even QA a simple Caesar cipher challenge. ?

Supposedly, the original flag was "crybersecurity", which was then later silently updated to "cybersecurity" mid-competition (without updating the distributed ciphertext! LOL)

Don't support these guys. Literally 1984.

^^^ what uoft said
this was the worst ctf i’ve ever played in, and i think ive had my fair share of dogshit ctfs
W 1984 ctf

the comments above are not wrong at all. the organizers are simply banning people in their discord server for giving constructive criticism. they refuse to listen to what the players say.

hope the organizers learn something from this ctf and learn how to host a proper ctf.

Lots of the comments are valid. But the thing I find most troubling is that 'angietechcafe' (or 'angieintech119' or whoever lurks behind the mask) describes themselves as a 'Lifelong Learner'. People learn the most from their mistakes but only if they have the presence to (a) admit their mistakes and (b) work toward not repeating them. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case here.

And judging by the 0.0 weight from last year's CTF, I think we can expect the scoreboard to be posted just short of never.

Fool me once...shame on you...

outdid CSAW Finals 2025, congrats organizers for accomplishing such a feat

The organizer has decided that they are not posting the scoreboard on CTFTIME for "legal reasons", whatever that means. While I'm no attorney, it seems like they're using "legal reasons" as an excuse for not following through on their commitment to the community to the end.

By doing so, they've shown lack of integrity and lost all credibility, IMHO. While I enjoyed parts of the CTF despite its many flaws and lack of depth, by dropping out of CTFTIME at this point in the process, they have demonstrated total disregard for my (our) time and energy.

Note that no scoreboard was posted the prior year either, so I would hope that the organizers be banned from organizing future events on CTFTIME.