Sometimes, in a challenge you might want to create some variations. You might want to encourage some extra constraint or limitation, but don't want to obligate everyone to attempt the extra difficulty, especially if you want to encourage using esolangs. The versions may still be too similar to post separately.
Normally, you'd solve this using a bonus. You say: If you meet this extra requirement, subtract X from your byte count. This is, however, discouraged. It's really hard to balance a bonus, either it's so overpowered that everyone needs to use it to be competitive or so useless nobody will.
What if, instead, you just state in a challenge that any submissions meeting requirement A do not compete against submissions that don't. That way, everyone is completely free to choose if they want to try either variant, no matter if it's "worth it" for a fixed bonus.
Some examples of possible extra challenges:
- Less restrictions on input, for example all Unicode for the harder version vs ASCII only for the easy version
- Not assuming a solution exists
- Restricted complexity, in a challenge where brute force and efficient solutions are both possible
- Not using specific builtins
This is specifically about posting a single challenge where I mention both variants count as a separate category. Would something like this be appreciated or are there some problems I'm not seeing?