i could too

yeah well.... your mamma

yup, i never could solve that one

yeah well... i sloved her good.... thats not what she said last night... yer 'ol lass.... wears old army boots...... let her drive MY bus etc.etc.etc.

she put the old army boots on for you ? you know what that means...... she's gonna take you down to the sty....... oink oink

squjeel like a pig boy!!! SQWEEEEEELLLLLLLLL ;P bedsy beds

well time shouldnt be a concept to mesure on this things......some people needs a long time to get the idea of several challengues,,,,,,of course experiencie is more than useful, but saying that most of the net-force tooks you only 3 days is a personal thinking.
May be you got the easy ones, maybe you have made a lot of them around the web....maybe
But scaling with your same measures mister caesum, what should be mean than you took the same time for my crypto than for most of the net-force?
i am so clever? no
was it so dificult? you know....not
so why are you talking about you got?
i think is out
personally i dont believe mandingo got them in so short time.........but is just a thinking, and if someone ask me ¿ would it be posible in so short time? my worlds should be NOT
and of course is no question of how much smart you are, probabily mandingo is, but i dont see posible to do in soooooo short time?

As Caesum already told =>

experience & perseverence
With experience you will solve a lot of the challenges (because you already know how it works...)
And perseverence keeps you going .

the fact is that you would solve 80% in 5 days and the other 20% would take longer.... at first you can complete many straight away, or within 5 minutes. if i was starting now then i would take the approach of spending at most 5 minutes on each and then seeing what was left at the end of a first go, and picking those that looked most promising. just because you have one left at the end which takes you a week to solve doesnt mean that someone cant solve 80 in 3 days.

and two further comments cabrero:
1. net-force is more difficult that tbs, imho.
2. your crypto: i wasted 3 days trying literally hundreds of possible METHODS of encryption. thats not real crypto, sorry. if you had given a better clue as to the method then i might have solved it quicker. as it is: 1. it is to short to perform any meaningful cryptanalysis on it. 2: without being able to perform any meaningful cryptoanalysis on it people need to a/ guess the method and then b/ cryptanalyse it regarding the method of encryption. the fact is that if i have to waste loads of time trying to guess whether you've used an autokey variant beaufort on it then yes, it will take me 3 days to do it, and no amount of experience will make it any quicker. that i can solve most of the other challenges in under 5 minutes is purely proof that it is much clearer with them what you have to do.

so the end result is that if someone knows asm, javascript, c/c++, is good with maths, and has some experience of other sites then most of these levels should be doable in under 5 minutes, with 30 minutes max for levels where you might have to do some programming and debugging. the odd problem in each section will probably be a stopper and they will need to put those aside for another time. stegano and crypto seem to be the areas where that mostly happens.