unforum

[Atoner]

Still waiting.

Nothing to do with this ARG right now but watch the spec threads spiral further and further away from sanity.

SPEC: Master Chief is Melissa's father's brother's mother's cousin's son's sister's former roommate.

SPEC: Dana = Cortana = Buddha = GS343 = Bob From Accounting = Mayor McCheese

-Atoner-

[Mukaikubo]

But... but Melissa has 7 letters... QUICK! Has anyone checked Bungie's corporate directory for people named melissa?!

[Sep7imus]

You know, a number of people have suggested that this delay is to allow a bigger audience to build up. That may be, but its actual effect has been the opposite. People are starting to lose interest, post less often, and, I assume, drift away.

Perhaps, THAT is the point of the delay. Maybe the PMs are making sure that we 1) have our act together for when things really get going and 2) get rid of the random people who speculate like crazy and don't know what's going on. I.e., although the more publicity the better (usually), if people are just posting stupid stuff all over random forums and pissing people off *cough*HBO*cough*, then maybe there's too much attention being paid.

I think if we are patient, more will come, once things simmer down, and we'll be ready for it.

-Sep7imus

[babbler]

Well, we know that the Beast team thought that tCM burned through the puzzles too quickly -- it may simply be that they're trying to pace the game through timed "drops" of information. One way to constrain game advancement would be to leave an open puzzle -- such as the stegged image -- and provide the answer in a later drop.

However -- and let me change hats here -- letting players bash their heads against an insoluble riddle is an immediate Twinkie Denial Condition. At best, you're going to condition your players to "just wait a while, the answer will come along soon," and at worst you're telling them not to play the game, because it's going to consist of days of boredom coupled with hours of frantic typing. So it's either dependency or apathy. Right now a lot of people are tending towards the latter.

I will admit that the initial countdown was an elegant way to pace the game, because it told us just how long we needed to wait for the next drop, and gave us plenty to play with until then.

But at some point you have to hand the game over to the players and let them figure out how fast they're going to burn your design: that's the 'active' in 'interactive.' I would hope that the design team are crafty enough that they've provided the necessary clues for us to move forward, but if not, they better get crackin' on that drop -- it might just be that you folks have opened their puzzle box a bit faster than they anticipated. Again.

[NUCatsFan]

next update?

[cpip]

I am REALLY hoping for one...

[number8]

We need an update fast. I'd say 90% of all post during the past week are either 1) pointless speculation and 2) I mean really, so far we have only one website to play from, and the website only has 10 or so pages. The blog doesn't give us much info, and the hotmail get replied once every 2 weeks. I liked it when Dana was ansewring our mail, at least then we had somehting to do. Now it's nothing but waiting, waiting, and more waiting.

At least Doom 3's coming out, so I'd have something to keep me occupied between updates. That is if my PC can run the the damn game (stupid insanely high requirements).

[Roc]

Odds are the delay and deliberate pacing is because they can't accurately forecast how long it will take us to crack these puzzles. All the ones we know were there, we sorted through in about a day for each phase. I think they're leaving themselves time to tailor the game to our particular capabilities.

Either that or they're keeping the game watered down and slow to ensure as broad an audience as possible can keep up.

[babbler]

Bungie's not known for keeping things easy, plotwise -- Halo was the most straightforward (and disappointingly so) script they came up with. (NaN's Marathon Infinity is infamously complicated, worse than splicing Phillip K. Dick with Heinlein through the text of Finnegan's Wake.) If Bungie has kept significant involvement in the development of the Ap', as the tone of the text suggests, then I'd assume they're not watering it down. Perhaps I'm just overly optimistic, but I'm betting on your first call: they're trying to figure out how to throttle the pacing to match the players' capabilities.

[Wolf]

Not to start anything here, but let me address the "lack of updates" from a puppetmaster's perspective.

There were many times in both Lockjaw and Mu—particularly Mu—when the players were in the IRC channel moaning about the lack of updates and discussing how they'd analyzed every word seven ways to Sunday, talking about how badly they wanted new puzzles and more plot advancement—when there were major chunks of plot/puzzle either waiting to be discovered *cough*dina.thenekodas.com*cough* or discovered-attempted-failed, so they moved on without more trying.

I can't say whether or not that's the case here, but it might be. Give a little credit. Cut a little slack.

[Giskard]

[Macavity]

[Atoner]

Looks like the board is mostly dead now.
I can't believe we have to wait so loooong...

-Atoner-

[Danzilla76]

[vpisteve]

In my opinion, this game is still in the lift hill phase, building a player base, slowly building momentum.

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