unforum

[Grout]

aannddd... we slowly drift OT again.

[tiercel]

Nate's right about the nine-digit zip codes. According to the post office, zip codes break down like this:

The nine digits of a ZIP+4 code (e.g., 12345-6789) may be grouped as follows: [123] [45] – [67] [89 ]

[123] – Sectional Center or Large City
[45] – Post Office™ facility or Delivery Area (The required "dash" or "hyphen" separates the first five digits from the last four digits; the +4 )
[67] – Sector or Several Blocks
[89] – Segment or One Side of a Street

Now whether or not this is actually *helpful* I don't know, but at least we've all learned something new about zip codes. I feel fulfilled.

[Danzilla76]

[Danzilla76]

Oh yeah, and I also checked addresses of Applebee's in Fargo, ND (46.8846 -96.8067) & Austin, MN (43.6766 -92.9746). They coords we have for those 2 places are nowhere near an Applebee's.

There are soooooo many possibilities here.

[vpisteve]

Well, at the very least, what with all the countless forums playing along with this thing, it'll be real interesting to see how many folks show up at the various locations on the 24th.

[bosshogg]

[vpisteve]

[Danzilla76]

Which means that the ones that do point to places such as game stores, malls, restaurants, landmarks make sense.
We'll just have to see if the coordinates change or not and get to those places. Of course why just those ones? (Stop thinking about it!! We'll find out later!!)

[floorneyne]

[Speaker]

Its worth point out that the one mistake we know was in the coords was fixed almost immediately. There have (as far as I can tell) been no more adjustments to the GPS coords... and the mailing certainly implies that rather than discarding coords with errors, that the queen would fix or create new ones with correct coords.

I don't think we should write off the current coords completely until we see whether any more are changed or any more are added. I certainly don't think the emails suggest we should be ignoring anything.

[Freelance]

I know this whole thing is about Halo 2, obviously... But it's also much more than that, you need to remember. The best illustration I can think of is that Christmas movie where all the kid wants is a red-rider bb gun...

You remember when he gets that Annie Oakley decoder ring, and he listens to the radio program, and gets the secret message, and he goes to his room and decodes it as fast as he can, and he's so hyped up and excited over this secret message and wondering what it could be... And when he finally gets it done it says "Don't forget to drink your ovaltine" and he gets really pissed?

Well, it seems like that's what you're making this game out to be. Getting us all pumped up for this interesting story and saving Dana and at the end it'll just turn out to be people at 220 locations handing out fliars for Halo 2... An advertising scheme like that actually does more bad than good... You know the saying "there is no bad press"? Well, that's wrong. If you piss people off with your advertisements, they're not gonna buy your stuff.

And if you just assume that all these spots that aren't heavily populated are mistakes, I think you're going a bit beyond reason there and into the realm of guessing. Yes, the Princess tells us that the Widow has been making a lot of mistakes, but I think that's just a desperate (yet VERY well-conceived) cover for the one ocean coordinate that was fixed, to explain it a bit more. If that line was left out, you might think "why would a robot like the widow make a mistake?" But this tells us she's becoming unreliable, and so much so that the Queen became furious with her...

The spots in the middle of fields MAY be wrong, I'll give you that, but I highly doubt the ones in small towns and such were really meant to be in heavily populated areas like NYC...

IMHO, the only mistake is the coordinate off the coast of California, and like I said, they covered that up very well with this new email, and that just proves how versitile our PM's really are.

[floorneyne]

I knew there had to be an optimist out there somewhere to boost our morale! Well put!

[Grout]

I'm in freelance's boat... unfortunately no one else seems to be... The email was just a cover up for that one mistake - no where in the email does it give any indication that the whole thing is bogus and we should just sit and wait... yet that seems to be what people want to do now.

If lots of the locations are bogus - then that leaves only 2 exlainations:

1.) The PMs are royal screw ups

or

2.) The PMs did it on purpose because they are sadistic.

I'm still tying to cling on to optimism - I'm not yet willing to believe either of those are true... but I'm getting close.

[Speaker]

An interesting spec that ponders some out-of-game puzzle designing issues... perhaps the coords aren't quite as specific as we've been thinking nor as specific as our friendly PMs had thought. If the PMs had a list of locations and simply did a reverse-lookup from address to GPS and whatever tool they used happened to uhmm... give coords with a high precision but relatively low accuracy... it wouldn't be their fault that SPDR(their SPDR) screwed up. And the new mails might be a way of letting us know that the accuracy on these coords is a bit off and the queen'll be sure in the future to not let it happen again.

Now... what that means in terms of figuring things out I'm not sure...

[vpisteve]