[Results + solutions] Preferred puzzle type poll

And we're done. As some of you figured out, there was an actual giveaway here, but in addition to wanting to give away a couple of games I actually was curious to see what kind of puzzles people would gravitate to when they thought they were just solving them for the fun of it. All of the puzzles led to the same place, with links to a Cubemen and Sol Survivor giveaway. Congrats to jatan11t for winning both, the lucky bastard. :P Quick run-down of the solutions and results:

Decoding - 17 players, 2 solvers.
First string: hex, then base64, then binary, gives you "Tales of Brave Ulysses"
Second string: ascii, then reverse string, then binary, then feron74 (found on the linked crypo.com), gives you "Bad Moon Rising"

The answers are just songs that were stuck in my head. There was a minor snafu with this one where I toned down the original version of the answer, but forgot to switch the links at first. I meant to make it hard, in the same vein as some of the other ones I've seen on here, but felt like I had made it a little too hard so I took out a rot13 at the end that made the obscure one even harder to recognize. I was surprised that this one was the one that had the most players, considering the warning about the use of an obscure encryption and relatively few people expressing a preference for it.

Random guessing - 8 players, 0 solvers.
Q1: Doug Flutie, flaky hint refers to Flutie Flakes
Q2: Kurt Vonnegut, asterisk hint refers to his illustrations
Q3: The Big Lebowski, no hint on this one because I felt like my avatar was already a pretty big clue. I actually waffled at the last minute and allowed The Empire Strikes Back as an answer, too.
Q4: Orange, splot hint refers to one of my favorite childhood books.
Q5: New Model Army, stupid heroin-using bastard hint refers to an incident where the lead singer was forced to cover the "inappropriate" message "Only stupid bastards use heroin." on British television.

Not really surprised no one solved this one, but I figured for the sake of completeness it should be included.

Trivia - 6 players, 3 solvers.
Q1: Wally Pipp
Q2: Joe DiMaggio
Q3: R.A. Dickey
Q4: Dan Duquette
Q5: Boston Red Sox

Just a random set of thematic trivia questions, all of which were hopefully fairly easy to Google. Why baseball? Because I made it in between innings of a baseball game I was watching. :p

Observation - 4 players, 3 solvers.
With the irregular line-breaks, the first letter of each line spells out BITLY. The bolded/italicized letters are the end of a bit.ly url: http://bit.ly/Lcznxe. The link redirects to an itstoohard puzzle with a single prompt: Type the password in the space below. The answer, then, was "the password".

The number of players on this one may be a little misleading, because the counter only tracks people who made it to the second step.

Hidden - 10 players, 9 solvers.
Just for the hell of it, I threw yet another link in the source code, leading to an itstoohard puzzle with one question that literally answered itself.

I think the results on this one were skewed a little bit by people finding out it existed on the giveaway comments and then going back to see it themselves, but quite a few people reported that this was the way they got in in the first place. I found it amusing that, when offered 4 different puzzles, a lot of people went hunting for yet another one. :)

I tried to include variations on the answers wherever I thought there might be a problem (preceding articles, punctuation, etc). Thanks to everyone who participated or offered an opinion. I really was curious about the results and will keep them in mind in the future!

Original post:

Hey folks. I'm planning on throwing up a couple of giveaways in the near future, probably hidden behind a puzzle or quiz. But I'd like it to be something people enjoy participating in and I'm not entirely sure where to go with it, so I thought I'd conduct a quick survey to see what kinds of puzzles people like to see. These seem to be the most common types:

Decoding
(example - corrected link) - Usually means using xlate and similar tools to manipulate an encoded string to find an answer that leads you to the giveaway. Some are easy, others require some random/obscure manipulations with other tools, like the ones at crypo.com.

Random guessing
(example) - This can mean bruteforcing a random number, having to guess at questions only the creator knows the answer to, etc. They can be frustrating, but you also might learn some fun facts about the puzzle maker!

Trivia
(example) - Often similar to random guessing, but with questions that are a bit more straight-forward so that someone else might already know the answer or be able to Google them.

Observation/logic
Because there's such a huge variety of possibiLities,
It's difficult to provide a comprehensive example for this one.
There were the mazes Jexel hid in his massive puzzle,
Links can be disguised in obvious or extremely sneaky ways, etc.
You probably won't have to spend a ton of time on them, it's just a matter of whether or not you pick up on subtle hints provided.

This is obviously not an all-encompassing list, and quite a few puzzles are hybrids of several different types. I'm just trying to get an idea of how people feel, and hopefully the results of this poll will be useful to other people as well. You have until Monday evening (probably around 8pm EST or so) to make your vote count! Thanks for reading.