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Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.
Posted By: Louis Wu <halo@bungie.org>	Date: 5/18/04 3:17 p.m.
In Response To: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton. (gspawn) : Anton, : Was there a way to question the terminals? In the whole of my exploration, I : never saw a route to contact anyone about them except to check with Louis. : His cryptic responses quite obviously hinted he was probably hosting the : data (or knew more about who was than he would say), but who cares? Bungie : could very well someday say "Hey Louis, we cooked something up, serve : it nice and hot!", and we trust the man enough that if he was : deciding not to talk, we would trust that it was in our own best : interests. That's not blind or stupid- that's community. If I had seen : "email Anton P. Nym" on a terminal I would have known it was : fake from the start anyway, or barring that a quick route sniff on the : header a la Cortana would have confirmed it. I never ever saw any way to : track it back to sender- and I'm not alone. At least one person tried the obvious - they sent mail to enkidu@bungie.org, and asked what was up. (They didn't get an answer... but we sure discussed it. :) ) My guess is, if more folks had tried this, we probably would have set up a way for Steve to answer through the servers here; so IP addresses would trace back to b.org and no farther. It came late enough in the game, though, that Steve decided simply to keep mum. (The note didn't bounce, though, so the sender knew the address existed. :) ) [snip] : As I've pointed out before, the puzzles we tend to get don't have obvious : solutions. If I'd bother to search it up, I've had several posts during my : tenure about the flaws in various puzzles. The Megg was intentionally : given as an unsolvable quest, and in the end it was only found when : hackers were doing work unrelated to the Megg hunt. The great Scavenger : Hunt was a puzzle that most entrants could never have solved. Indeed, : locating the final and most important clue was utterly lost on most : everyone I'd talked to who was working on it. It was a puzzle that most : people looking were never going to get regardless of time or effort. Then, : c0ld and crew cooked up (forgot the name of their contest, the one with : "put your answer here to find a forum post to take you to the next : step") and time after time found out that their clues were absolutely : insufficient for nearly all entrants. It's not that people weren't trying, : it's that clues they thought were blatant turned out to be absolutely : cryptic for most entrants. I've told you before, you whine too much. We set up a puzzle once that we KNEW couldn't be solved by anyone. (At least, not in any reasonable amount of time.) Hell - folks didn't even realize it WAS a puzzle for over 8 months. Time was NOT an issue for us. When they finally DID notice that it was a puzzle, we got to watch an amazing thing - we watched a group of about 400 people get together and use their combined brainpower to solve it. And solve it they did. The Glyph puzzle still stands as one of the most impressive things I've been involved in - and not because the puzzle was brilliant (though Mikey did a wonderful job with the evil parts), but because we got to watch a community in action. If a puzzle is easy enough to be solved by EVERYONE, it will bore the brightest to tears. If it's hard enough to challenge the brightest, it'll lose the average guy. It's really, really hard to make it work so that everyone can experience the joy of getting to the end. One way is to force folks to work together (that's what the Glyph puzzle did). Another way is to provide two routes to the end - one easy and one hard (that's what the Scavenger Hunt did). The Megg is a stupid example on your part - it was never meant to be a public puzzle in the first place, and if you weren't enjoying the search, you should have simply dropped out. You, as a member of the community, have a choice every time a new mystery is thrown out. You can work on it - or you can ignore it. Whining that you WANT to work on it, but only if someone will give you a crutch... eh. : In the end, there are a few facts. : -Not all puzzles can be solved by skill, knowledge, or work. Most of the : hunts and quests people come up with around here are not tasks of work or : patience or knowledge. They come down to people either seeing or not : seeing a certain pattern or gesture from the given. Nearly always, even : the best puzzle seems to come down to sheer luck- you get it or you don't. : When people get it, they fly through the clues (the first Scavenger : winners were out in hours becaues they "got it") but the rest of : us grasp at nothing. This is true of every friggin' puzzle on earth. The Riddle of the Sphinx got a ton of people killed until Oedipus came along and 'got it'. You'd be one of those Thebans going 'but it's not fair! This is unsolvable if you don't 'see' the answer!' ...until you got eaten, of course. [more snippage] : It becomes obvious that YOU- and : any in the know- were obviously not doing a good job cluing the rest of us : in. You thought your clues were blatant, hundreds of other people didn't. : Evidence says one side is more likely to be correct. Holy crap, are you a whiner. There are over a dozen posts from the VERY FIRST DAY stating that this was obviously fan-created. As time went on, there were more of these. lots and lots of people 'got it', with more 'getting it' as time went on - which is exactly how a long-term puzzle should work. If everyone figured out the mystery on day one, what the hell would be the point of continuing to add clues for 3 weeks?

Message Index

Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/17/04 9:05 p.m.
Quoth the angel	Colopatiron	5/17/04 9:15 p.m.
I am kicking myself for one small thing...	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/17/04 11:23 p.m.
I'll sum up what I saw	Miguel Chavez	5/18/04 12:11 a.m.
:p	Traize	5/18/04 12:43 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Carlo	5/18/04 1:31 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/18/04 8:42 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Anonymous Coward	5/18/04 1:33 p.m.
I still don't get it...	BloodBlade	5/18/04 1:49 p.m.
Re: I still don't get it...	Tarrsk	5/18/04 2:19 p.m.
(Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.	gspawn	5/18/04 2:21 p.m.
Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.	mnemesis	5/18/04 3:01 p.m.
Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.	Count Zero	5/18/04 5:49 p.m.
Living in Denial	Narcogen	5/20/04 12:28 a.m.
Re: Living in Denial	Wado SG	5/20/04 3:34 p.m.
Re: Living in Denial	Narcogen	5/21/04 5:58 a.m.
Re: Living in Denial	mnemesis	5/21/04 1:29 p.m.
Re: Living in Denial	Wado SG	5/21/04 2:41 p.m.
Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.	Zaknafein	5/18/04 6:17 p.m.
Re: (Mis)informed opinion, a letter to Anton.	Louis Wu	5/18/04 3:17 p.m.
Once upon a time...	Wado SG	5/18/04 2:32 p.m.
Re: Once upon a time...	Dark Bastion	5/18/04 7:06 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	doesitmatter?no	5/18/04 3:34 p.m.
Extraordinary claims / exraordinary evidence	CENOBITE	5/18/04 4:20 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	AeroJonesy	5/18/04 4:00 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	rAgn4rokK	5/18/04 4:52 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Dark Bastion	5/18/04 6:41 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/18/04 8:57 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Dark Bastion	5/19/04 12:01 a.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Namaste	5/18/04 10:00 p.m.
Re: Suspension of Disbelief.. But Not to Death	Haesslich	5/19/04 2:16 a.m.
Ok, but...	Narcogen	5/20/04 7:14 a.m.
Re: Ok, but...	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/20/04 7:36 a.m.
Re: Ok, but...	Narcogen	5/20/04 11:50 p.m.
Blaspheme Quarantined?	[BGH]Viper	5/20/04 10:19 p.m.
Fantastic, Marathon-like job	Ken	5/20/04 11:02 p.m.
Re: Fantastic, Marathon-like job	Anton P. Nym (aka Steve)	5/21/04 6:13 a.m.