Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts
|
|
|
||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
| Frequently Asked Forum Questions | |
|||
|
||||
|
|
|||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| Search Older Posts on This Forum: Posts on Current Forum | Archived Posts | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| I would like to apologize. | |
| Posted By: Louis Wu <halo@bungie.org> | Date: 10/31/10 10:19 a.m. |
In Response To: Want to fly a Pelican/Phantom? (kornman00) ...to EVERYONE. This is the second weekend in a row that the forum has seen a significant increase in bile and bad feelings - and it's the second weekend in a row that I haven't been around to moderate. This time, it's even partially my fault - since just before I left yesterday, I posted a poorly worded, inflammatory message and basically gave folks leave to take off the 'civil' gloves. That was stupid of me. I am genuinely sorry I didn't find a more tactful way to express my disappointment - it was unfair to kornman00, and it was unhealthy for the forum in general. Eggs are little thank-yous, added surreptitiously by programmers (I use that word because sometimes NOBODY knows about them except the person who puts them in... until they're found). They're often in plain sight (or near enough) to be stumbled over by blind luck - but sometimes they require a pretty convoluted series of triggers, and finding them completely on one's own is a near impossibility. While this might seem to be a justification for route that kornman00 took (I mean, he just found triggers, not where those triggers are, right? And he didn't do anything with nefariously-altered Xbox hardware; this was old-school PC code poring) - but in fact, there's a huge component of The Joy of Eggs (paperback coming soon) involved in the hunt. And digging through the code for triggers smacks of cheating, to a lot of us. Back in the day, Joe Staten put a tiny egg in Halo: CE (the pipe Keyes held in the first scene could be found later on in the game), and nobody found this for 4 months. At that time, Bungie had a regular series they called "Closeups" - Dave Candland would take screenshots of distinctive but hard-to-place bits of Halo's scenery, and the community would be able to play the "where is that from?" game. In March 2002 (4 months after Halo came out), Dave included the second pipe as a 'Closeup' - and within a day, the community had 1) figured out that it was Keyes' pipe, 2) figured out it was probably an egg, and 3) found it in-game. The search was really fun to watch. Once it had been found, though, Joe asked that we NOT document it (on our front page, or in our Easter Egg collection) - so that others could find it on their own. We honored his request. (Bungie themselves spilled the beans about 10 months later - if you weren't around then, you can read about it here.) About a month after Halo came out, Matt Soell hinted that hippos might still be somewhere in Halo - the search (at the time, there WERE no tools for looking through code) was epic. Took two and a half months - but Frogblast found them. For me, the granddaddy of them all was right here on bungie.org - because I got to watch the whole thing unfold. In mid-2000, Mike Watson redesigned b.org's front page (his design is still in use for that woefully-underused page!), and he included a series of 7 dials at the top of the page, with pretty unusual markings. Nobody noticed (or... nobody cared.) He was fine with that. I was fine with that. A little backstory: Mike came to me with the idea of adding a puzzle to the front page - a very difficult, very complicated puzzle. I went to Bungie with a proposition: would there be any super-cool schwag they could offer for whoever figured out this puzzle? They were interested - but as we talked, we came to the conclusion that nobody was going to solve this alone, so whatever the prize was, it had to be able to be spread. Matt Soell dug up a collection of hand-written documents created during the development phase of Marathon - the collection is fascinating, it's worthless monetarily, and it's priceless to fans of the game. And it's fully shareable. Perfect! Mike provided me a complete explanation of the images, and the design itself, and the site went live. And then it just sat there... for eight months. In 2001, I ran into Mig at E3 (I think), and he mentioned the dials, and how weird they were. I didn't tell him much - but the look on my face made him realize he might be on to something. (He thought it had something to do with a secret Bungie project we knew as Phoenix. He was totally wrong. That was fine.) He went running back to the bs.bungie.org forums, and started the ball rolling. The solution took 2 months, and more than 400 people, and would NEVER have been solved without cooperation and the skillsets and different knowledge bases that different people brought to the hunt. and it was AWE-INSPIRING TO WATCH. Had someone tapped into my computer, and found the text file with the explanation of the glyphs, and released it (or even a part of it)... an awful lof of fun would have been ruined. I know that what kornman00 did was not the same as breaking into a computer and stealing a solution file, so please don't go there in any response to this. What he did do was step outside the traditional "rules" (if there can actually be said to BE any rules) for egg-discovery. Lots of folks applaud this sort of 'thinking outside the box'. Others decry it as cheating. What made ME sad was that it was posted here like this with no warning, and no qualifiers. (To the people sneering that "if you didn't want to read about an egg, why'd you even open the post?" - this argument actually makes me angry, a little bit. "But you KNEW it would be about the egg!" No, only if you'd read the BWU - and put two and two together. "You could have stopped reading at any point, it was clear at the beginning that it was about code-searching." Gimme a break. So if someone spreads porn magazines on the ground around a grade school, it's okay, because it's obvious what they are, and nobody's been corrupted unless they CHOOSE to open the covers? The bottom line, for me, is that there's no spoiler tag, and there's no "I'll email my findings to anyone interested" - just a flat-out "here's what I found." No, it wasn't a complete solution - but gimme another break, he was able to go from what he wrote, to a fly-through of the actual solution, in a couple of hours. Do NOT try and convince me that the hunt is still an option.) To the people suggesting that the only alternative is 'blind luck' - you're 100% wrong. It's NEVER been about blind luck. There are ALWAYS clues - and I guarantee you there were clues here. We just never had the chance to find them. The biggest danger, as several people have pointed out, is that there won't BE elaborate eggs like this in future games - designers will think "what's the point?" (To the person who pointed to the IWHBYD skull egg in Halo 3 as proof that this argument is invalid - you're assuming that Bungie is a monolithic organization, and that eggs are officially-sanctioned code inserts. It's not, and they're not. And the truth is, there ARE people inside Bungie who think this way - and we're all poorer because of it.) Yeah, kornman00 could have simply posted the egg, without a description of the code-searching - and we wouldn't be having this conversation. I thank him for his honesty, in fact - I'm sorry it led to such an ugly showing here (again, I blame myself for that), but I think the whole conversation is a useful one. I'd really, really love it if we could HAVE the conversation without the namecalling, and the bile. This forum has gone from a civil place to discuss Halo topics (even controversial Halo topics) to a reflection of our current national political scene - divisive, angry, reactionary. (I find it more than amusing that some of the coolest heads in this discussion are people who do not live in the United States.) And once again, I'd like to apologize for contributing to the negativity with that post yesterday.
| |
|
| Replies: |
The HBO Forum Archive is maintained with WebBBS 4.33. |