unforum

[dashcat]

So we missed the obvious and we are over thinking. I am throwing up my hands on this. If we go by the example of One Ring then the next is Two Arches (?) then Three Pyramids and finally Four Squares (or maybe boxes).

One Ring was supposed to lead us to LotR and the Ring Poem. What are the other three leading us to?

2 Arches could be MaDonalds

3 Pyramids could be Giza

4 Squares. One more meal than most of us eat in a day

Maybe we just read down and the answer is RAPS.

I give. Maybe I'll just lurk here.

[Typoxic]

Replace "pyramids" with "triangles" and you have RATS.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I can usually hold my own with the "puzzle solvey types" and can say that what typically gets (or keeps) them going is what Jared Spool called "the scent of information" (The concept which makes Wikipedia so popular).

Personally, I find it increasingly hard to invest a lot of time or effort in the paranormal themed games. I don't know if others are getting as tired of the theme as I am, but that may be a reason for what looks like a small player base.

Or, there could be a lot of lurkers. I can't count the number of times I've checked this thread, seen some small update and started looking around for clues. After spending (progressively less) time spinning my wheels, I move on to another thread having found a ton of marginally related nothing which serves only to obfuscate any real solve.

Like the numbers in Christopher's email. I too, thought 'IP Address' and checked the whois, (forward and backward) and applied a lot of Kama Sutra to the numbers and the best I could come up with was Mod(26) which gives "JPGF" after an alpha conversion. Hardly worth posting about, though. It must just be the case numbering system they use.

I lost the scent.

I'd like to find justification for Christopher's apparent back-channeling of the "don't go there" message and just can't. If only it were as easy as Wesley Wyndam-Pryce makes it look to connect all the obscure arcana.

At this point, I don't much care about the bigger picture for this game and am only curious to see how the mechanics of the puzzles/meta-puzzles was supposed to work.

*Rogi crosses his fingers for Orbital Colony II

[Sylvia]

[mortality]

[General Spec]
Maybe we're going to the opposite extreme of simplicity now by looking only at the handwritten page number/clue? MSG1 and MSG2 both had unique solves. It's important to crack MSG3 and MSG4 as well, unless our PMs decided to torture us by handing us solvable puzzles with no ultimate relationship to the big picture.

My feeling is that the page number/clue will guide us in figuring out how the four puzzles relate to each other and maybe the other case, but that won't be readily apparent until we have the solution. It's good to have ideas as to how that stuff connects now, but we won't know which is right until we solve MSG3 and MSG4.

If Ethan is telling us to think more simply, then he's probably directing us to figure out the logic of the last two puzzles. Maybe the connections we've tried to find for Enlil, Ahasuerus and W. Wallace aren't meaningful.

What kind of puzzles are we looking at for 0701? Maybe anagrams for both? Maybe Simson Lines for MSG3?
What kind of solution do we expect to get? Ethan seemed to say that Spearmint's comments on 0702 may be a red herring. However, he did tell us to try to find a site on a free web host. Could that apply to 0701, too? Maybe the 0701 puzzles are directing us to a website?

[Kings and Solomon]
References to Solomon also appear in medieval/renaissance references to magic. For instance the Triangle of Art already mentioned or grimoires like the Key of Solomon. John Dee could be familiar with him. He also could be familiar with King Arthur. Ethan seemed to be steering us away from King Arthur.

[meta] Short version: me too, but I'm going to stick around.

Long version: Other than the occasional fantasy novel, I'm also not really a fan of it or the paranormal. here are only two reasons I even bothered with this game/story was because I had a mostly favorable experience with Djinn's other project, OverWatch. I liked the espionage story they created, how they populated it with well thought-out characters, justified the puzzles they threw at us, and did a good job with player interaction.

It's just a little too hard to suspend disbelief when dealing with the paranormal stories. The other reason I continued was because the purpose of this game intrigued me. They wanted it to be an open collaboration (something they struggled with in OverWatch); they really made the 4th wall disappear, most notably by including the production company and Jade into the story; and they're taking a skeptical approach to everything.

At this point, we've already sunk a month into the game and come up with a few solves, so I'll willingly fall for the psychological trap and stick around to justify my investment.

[dashcat]

I like supernatural and paranormal. I have no problem with the subject matter of this game and I find the whole presentation charming.

I don't much care for PMs making me feel dumb through incredulous posts by in game characters.

If we aren't getting the puzzles then the problem is with the puzzles, not the players.

If the PMs didn't get the puzzle experts they were hoping for then they need to adjust their game to the players they did get.

I notice that a couple of the "code monkeys" who were playing before are not playing now. I notice that they never solved these puzzles either.

[Sylvia]

Not much to go on, but

[Sylvia]

I just realized I uploaded the wrong image to flickr last night. I just now uploaded the correct version and sent the link to Ethan.

correct image should have been http://www.flickr.com/photos/iamsylvia2/2173092162/

[yellowcard]

[mortality]

Sylvia, did you have to alter the shapes to combine them, or did they fit naturally?

Cryto is allegedly a demon. So the study of demonic entities might be what they're getting at with 'crytozoological'. In which case, if there's a ritual summoning a demon, 0702 is right up WF's alley. I mean, you want weird, here's weird: Summoning Cryto (according to Charmed, the tv series).

[casablanca]

More Meta

[Rogi Ocnorb]

The Charmed reference is a perfect example of what I was trying to say, earlier. We really shouldn't be adding fictional arcana to our melting pot.

WF is, so far, based on reasonably well-established paranormal canon and R/L reported phenomenon.

The bulk of our posted sentences already include words like "could", "maybe" and "might". An unfortunate telltale of our overall cluelessness.

While doing a supernatural/paranormal game is much easier and attractive to PMs than say, a tech offering, PMs should also realize that having such a wide array of mythos built upon mythos to try and find a path through means that we may have trouble finding the Wikipedia reference they were using when they were building it out. Maybe more targeted hints would help. A historical reference that actually leads to a single cohesive noun or event would be welcome.

[mortality]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

So lets just report to WF that all this is all simply fanboy art and not anything their charter was meant to include.

[mortality]

Sure, but I think Directors Patel and Kennedy would still like to know which fanboys. Maybe so they can join the club?