Thanks @spectrumecons. Question 1 was quite the problem indeed. Obviously you couldn't give a response to my inquiry that gave away the key to solving the problem, and I couldn't give you an exact number on @wickedduck.7 at the time I made the inquiry, as had my line of logic matched up with yours (which it didn't), I would've risked someone else pouncing and potentially turning in a winning set of answers.
This was the line of logic that I had going: @ = 99, - = 1, digits were equal to their face value, letter values corresponded with their position in the English alphabet (A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, ... , Z = 26). With this system, I got these results:
- @rnp22-9 = 99 + 18 + 14 + 16 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 9 = 161
- @newwhan = 99 + 14 + 5 + 23 + 23 + 8 + 1 + 14 = 187
- @runaaw2m3 = 99 + 18 + 21 + 14 + 1 + 1 + 23 + 2 + 13 + 3 = 195
- @wickedduck.7 = 99 + 23 + 9 + 3 + 11 + 5 + 4 + 4 + 21 + 3 + 11 + ? + 7 = 200 + ?
I didn't know what the dot was valued at, but knew that the total would be at least 200 -- hence my statement that I got something in the 200s. Based on your response to my inquiry I decided to value the dot at 27 to make the total 227 and match up with yours. It turns out that it wouldn't have mattered what I valued the dot at, since it would have no effect on calculating my own value.
From there, I got @doughtaker = 99 + 4 + 15 + 21 + 7 + 8 + 20 + 1 + 11 + 5 + 18 = 209.
But it looks like you wanted @doughtaker = 36 + 13 + 24 + 30 + 16 + 17 + 29 + 10 + 20 + 14 + 27 = 236.
Oh well. On to the next round and the next set of puzzles!
I think the problem was the combinations of dot, dashes, numbers and letters made it too difficult to solve. I still want to include this type of puzzle but I think I need to include maybe another 5 or 6 names so that a definite pattern can be determined. I want the puzzles to be difficult but solvable. Hopefully, just needs a little tweaking.