While I appreciate the need to curb potential cheating, and I've participated in a few (one at my alma mater, one at DefCon, if you want to count Build It Break

While I appreciate the need to curb potential cheating, and I've participated in a few (one at my alma mater, one at DefCon, if you want to count Build It Break It Fix It, and a couple others), I really personally don't like the format of CTFs. The chaos and rush of everything just turns it into an adrenaline frenzy (and people challenging rules) and not a skills or technical analysis, and that's not as fun or skills learning to me personally. It's kind of like cosplaying Elliot from Mr.Robot or something. But to each his own, I guess, I'm getting older I guess and the lost hair and stress from my regular blue team infosec job is starting to catch up to me. I like the format of these OverTheWire Wargames a lot since you can do them at your own pace, not that I'd likely learn much from them (hey who knows! I'll try them anyway). I also really enjoyed the NSA's codebreaker challenges (https://nsa-codebreaker.org/challenge https://nsa-codebreaker.org/challenge), they give you 6 months just relied on the challenge being so insanely difficult that it would take a lot of technical skill to actually accomplish (though I think you have to have a .edu email to sign up). Heavily reliant on reverse engineering, memory tracing, debugger skills, disassembly, etc.