Puzzles #684 & #685 - A/B Testing (Fillomino, Cross the Streams)

My other two submissions for The Sixty Second Logic Showcase are a bit different. In both cases, the puzzles turned out much harder than I expected or wanted them to, so I had to add clues to nerf the puzzle. In both cases even the nerfed puzzle was something I knew was overshooting the difficulty side of things, though again my incorrect understanding of the timing component of scoring meant I wasn't too worried about the overshoot if the quality was way up there. And I felt for this Fillomino, it was. The Cross the Streams I thought had an outside chance of being quick enough for a secret reason but would almost definitely be the slowest puzzle in the set if not enough people caught on. Somehow I'd never made one of these before either!

I'll show and link the original version of the puzzles first - I'll include an image of the nerfed versions I submitted at the bottom of this post. I will not be linking the nerfed versions, however.

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

The Fillomino here took a half dozen aborted attempts and as many hours across a few days of trying, while the CTS took a much shorter time due to the nature of the puzzle. Honestly I think the Fillomino took me more time than every other puzzle I made for this showcase combined, even tomorrows' bonus pair!

And here are the nerfed versions - the Fillomino gets an extra pair of clues that smooth out the toughest part of the solve (but it still has a lot of steps) while the CTS gets more concrete values and less uncertainty in a few key clue rows. I don't think either of these changes moved the needle all that much.