unforum

[Wakkadude21]

Everyone is still up to date. We all have the same amount of info.

[danteIL]

I just want to be clear that my problem is not with the fact of the dead drop. I agree that is pretty cool and classic ARG.

My problem is with the fact that the final simulation message was disseminated to one person (one person!) who then shared that within Discord chat, where the actual details of the dead drop pickup were arranged and fully completed before ANYONE else was even aware that the simulation had actually led to something new.

SOOO, rather than being able to share in the excitement of a pending dead drop and anticipating what it might be, those of us not in the loop were only left with the somewhat deflating feeling of "oh, well it's already been picked up and all the discoveries are already happening elsewhere."

And I have to agree - I don't like the use of Discord chat, which is apparently a real time voice chat application like those used in gaming, like TeamSpeak. Unless I am misunderstanding what it is, there is no record of the discussion or any way to actually keep track of what happens there. Part of what I like about ARGs and ARG forums is the actual documentation and organization of people sharing ideas. With posts and written text, you can quote people and respond to what they say in way that allows others who were not there at the time to come along later and still be able to contribute thoughtfully to the original discussion. Voice chat doesn't permit that.


And NOW we are in a position where apparently the next phase of the game is going to involve Howard talking to one person (one person!!) who he thinks is Megan. Maybe it will go in another direction, but that doesn't feel like it is going to allow much community involvement.

[CynAnne]

[IronJ146]

[AntaresMHD]

[gimlet]

I'm trying to look at time stamps and reverse engineer what happened, because it was really confusing as it was happening. At the time it was clear to me that the Sim was over, but not everybody seemed to know that. On top of that we had no clear way of progressing or moving forward. It was odd.

It was just total stagnation for a couple of hours. Then all of a sudden not only was there a clue to a dead drop in Chicago, it was already figured out & picked up.

As far as I can tell Magic Jesus posted on reddit about finishing his last run at around 5:30 ( going to use EST). Which is also around when FAPT posted.

We weren't told about what was going on until 7:00 - a full hour and a half after Magic Jesus' post. And there was no indication anything was happening on Discord (except for a post that was briefly posted and swiftly deleted before most could see it).

In fact the Instagram & other social media sites - that seem to congratulate us when we unlock something - updated with the "PLEASE KEEP THE BUNKER TIDY" around 4:30 - almost 3 hours before we were told about the dead drop. So that's pretty suspicious.

Everyone who complains or is confused by all this is told to just go on Discord where it can "be explained to them" which is just icky. No, people are asking you on Reddit, give them an answer there. Don't ask them to go somewhere else, just so they can get a straight answer! This is *exactly* what they are upset about!

It also sounds like the Mods at Discord have a hair trigger banning finger, and many people are saying the discord is not remotely "open to all" as it works on a funny system where you need invites from people currently in the channel to get in. There's also nothing preventing the mods from locking it down and only allowing pre-registered users on, and that's not at all unlikely, indeed I've seen it happen before.

There also seems to be a conflict of interest in that one of the only active mods on the Subreddit is also some kind of mod on the Discord, and is going around deleting critical posts - which is ludicrous given the extensive shit posting, double posting and downright trolling I've seen go unmoderated.

On top of all this it sounds like the Discord users are now quite hostile to the rest of us and spent the night calling us whiners or worse, and occasionally deigning to come down to Reddit soley to mock people upset by the situation. (Admittedly the Reddit users haven't been much nicer to the Discord users, but I think that's mostly coming from a place of having their frustrations go largely unacknowledged.)

It sounds like you are all right there is no way retain and re-examine information in this Discord voice chat, although related files can be linked. It relies on the users currently in the channel to be knowledgable and patient enough to regurgitate information, and as we've seen that's not easy or likely to happen - it's like these people have never played broken telephone before!

On top of all this, there are so many legit reasons why we may not want to use Discord.

Personally, I can only drop into things when I've got a spare moment here and there. Voice chat isn't going to work for me. I don't like the (compared to Discord relatively benign) chaos of reddit either, but I accept that some do, and at least I can lurk and share what's going on there, here, easily.

Discord indeed.

I think it's right that this wasn't initially malicious or intentional, but it does show a lack of consideration to the rest of us who have worked hard so that we can even get to this moment. And that snowballed.

[Pixiestix]

Unfortunately, there isn't anything that can be done about players on another platform. Once upon a time UF was the hub for everything ARG. A few other sites were out there, but we're basically populated with UF folk who kept everyone here in the loop anyway. Every time I've "trashed" Reddit, there has been a misconception I mean the people. While I do have some agism issues and distaste in that direction, I assure you I simply meant the platform. I literally can't follow discussions there. That said, there is a reason I kept asking people to describe stuff over here and not just LINK to Reddit (which is asking people to go there to get information) but I gave up because it became like a joke "oh, pixie hates that R place!" We have no control over what gets posted or deleted someplace else, and we want an accurate record (which is also what we do here, hence the "story so far" which I will update again tonight) of games for future players to see. We are all in this together HERE. We post no misinformation HERE. We are not competing HERE. That's not how everyone plays however, and it's a shame. Even games that had big time prizes were played collectively here up to a certain point.

[AntaresMHD]

[gimlet]

Yeah, as I'm reading through the deluge of Reddit drama posts it seems to me that Discord users don't understand how the choice made not to share this information - no matter how sensitive and well intentioned that choice was - is explicitly in *bad faith*. Of course that's going to create animosity.

If you assume that it's dangerous for all players not on Discord to know the details of the dead drop, then there's an inherent presuposition in that decision that Discord users are reliable and everyone else is not. This creates a toxic dichotomy between the two parties. This despite the fact that the LA DD went off without a hitch, with everyone patiently waiting for information to be shared as it devolped and then collaboratively worked on between the various platforms.

It's very frustrating there's not a designated central info hub for all this, and in fact that is bad game design - though it is also kinda industry standard, and does prevent the PMs from having a conflict of interest in running both the game, and it's communication channels (so I don't blame the pms too much for this. This time). I remember this issue being discussed during the (great! Worth a listen!) indiecade post mortem of The Jejune Institute. Their next project (The Latitude) then did seem to have a private IG forum. Not that that ended so well either

[AntaresMHD]

Only until today and after looking back into what happened is that I realize I should have paid more attention to what was unfolding the last couple of days, because I might have been made aware of what was going to happen days ago, and it just slipped off my mind. I'm sharing this information to add more weight to the argument that we should instill the notion of collaboration among us, even those from other sites like Reddit and we SHOULD encourage people to go beyond the impositions made by certain parties interested in withholding information for purposes not yet understood.

Three days ago (Feb 24th) I posted in the survival sim game thread along with others about the possibility of the game being hacked or cheated because someone mentioned there were some exploits. I wasn't at all sure of it, but I did say it could've explained such high scores when I could only get as far as 300+ days (at the time). Then someone, I'm not going to say who (because I'm not in the interest of calling people out), sent me a PM here telling me that the users in the top leaderboard were all real, that they have been putting a lot of effort into the game, and "were all present in the 10CL discord chat". This user also offered to give me stats rundowns and even spoke of an absolute day limit per days as well as other users involved. A the time I didn't think of it, I probably skimmed through the PM because I was basically just starting with the sim game, so I basically said I took his/her word for it, that no guidance was necessary.

And NOW this blows over and I check that PM to realize the Discord chat was mentioned to me and I wasn't aware, the same place where they were working together for a while even before these findings were posted in the survival sim thread. So basically this goes to show that instead of working together, a select few decided to play by themselves and share with the rest once they were well advanced with their findings. Someone posted earlier in this same thread saying that everyone gets access to the same information eventually... Sure, eventually, and only when the burden of new findings becomes too difficult to bear. That's not how it should be played, as we've all agreed.

[CynAnne]

[MissingTeddyHanssen]

*comes out of the cocoon*

Damn.. It's been a long time.

BR, I know that the marketing budget is mostly allocated to ads (I might be wrong) but.. can you do the mail swag all over again? I mean 42E did it nicely with nice payoff for Tron and apparently, you have a kicking history of doing that for people in the US. And that's the thing: you're only giving your goodies in your area. How about us here in Southeast Asia? Surely Tagruato is up to no good. I just sincerely hope you consider people in some parts of the world who are avid fans of your fantastic work some love.

Sincerely,
Captain Barbel, Rocket Poppeteer AKA (Now)FoundTeddyHanssen

[gimlet]

*sigh*

Well.

Things seem pretty dead right now. Player morale seems to be at an all time low and after all those messages about keeping morale up in the SIM that's pretty ironic. Maybe they knew this moment was coming, and they were warning us? It's entirely possible this is but a short calm in the eye of the storm. We have waited longer in this game to get (hypothetically) less.

But this non activity, with no clear way of progression is making me twitchy.

It makes me mildly paranoid that the Discord cabal has locked themselves down, and are now privately playing the game without the rest of us. I'm sure that's not happening, and I doubt Bad Robot would even allow that kind of thing - they seem more into the kumbaya collective than got mine individualism. But the thought has crossed my mind.

My feeling of whats most likely going on right now is that there might be some back to drawing board going on back at the PM's HQ.

In the midst of all the drama and screw ups there was one particular big screw up that happened, that I think had the potential to be game breaking.

We should not have Megan's number. Howards, sure. Megan's, no.

There was a long while where the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen, happened.

If Howard is only going to return Megan's calls then it doesn't matter if the rest of us have his number. If calling Howard results in ALL callers getting some sort of pre recorded message, we all NEED to have the number.

There is no scenario in which us having Howard's number is a problem.

(Well, ok, the one in which it is John Goodman's home phone, but that is so so incredibly super unlikely and would be the death of the PMs careers).

Megan's number on the other hand...

If Howard is the only one who's supposed to call that phone, we've already thrown a wrench in that plan by allowing it's number to be known.

Worse, if other new characters were supposed to call that phone to drop info, we now have a impenetrable wall in our way, as the player with the phone has no way to know what is legitimate and what is trolls and game jackers.

In fact, she has said she's not going to answer the phone at all, in any circumstances (except potentially a call from Howard).

So I wonder if after what happened, the PMS have a bad taste in their mouths and are loathe to trust the player with the phone, and are looking for new avenues to disseminate information.

So I guess we're waiting. For something.

Either the phone or Howard's number to start paying out... or for a new route entirely.

[kelwhite01]

Dear gimlet

Not to worry, there's always a backup plan, especially where a physical DD is concerned. Whatever the message is that will come through the phone, could be posted at FaPT, if the phone doesn't work out.
I really don't believe that the folks on Discord are really into gamejacking the whole game... that would leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Helveticat (Cat) seemed genuinely excited and nervous about how to handle the DD. She did what she thought would be best in the moment of excitement. At worst, the PMs can send her text explaining what they expected to happen with the phone, if it's gone awry.
We've had delays before. the Super8 ARG had a number of times where we waited for a few days at a time for progression. I use the time to go back through what we know to see if I can come up with any new theories, plus keep checking the IG sites for anything new.
I think we're fine, just waiting for the next step.

[The Game Breaker]

Here's a question. Why the hell did she give out the dead drops phone number in the first place? what did she think was gonna come out of that? And then when everyone blew up her phone number she was like "no way am i giving stamblers number!" seems kinda ass backwards to me.