http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/hal ... ead=857779

They popped into HBO to thank the people who followed things. Woo?

Does this mean that they'll be shutting down more of the sites like they did Artifact Location?
Then again, even if they do, we still technically have them (thanks DHalo).

But several things in the note I found interesting; they said that they were reading our (or other) speculation and using it in creating some of the next steps. Therefore, can we accept all the things that we learned here to true? If their ideas were comming out of our heads, then that means that the ARG lands us with only the servers available as reliable background.

In summary, can we regard this ARG as halo fact, or a really expensive and complex piece of fan fiction?

well the way I see it, the 'characters' are pretty much all right now, modern, not Halo characters. The AI's, I'd assume and hope, were based on as much canon as possible, as they are essentially in the game.

The puzzles and whatnot, meh. Some of the facts and info revealed from the servers, again, I'd assume and hope are canon.

Basically, pretty much anything from 'today' could be considered non-canon off the bat (and this is what I'd assume they adjusted based on community input). The question is the assets directly linked to the game (AIs, flood info, etc)

Am I the only one who is a little angry with this? If they have the nerve to come and say thanks in the forums, then shouldn't they have had the nerve to step up and say what took them so long with they prizes? Or why the prizes from the last 3 servers weren't even half as good as those from the first 2? Yes, I did NOT open any of the servers myself, but I still thought that something was very wrong with what happened to those who did. Now that we know who is responsible for this, I want some answers.

I really appreciate all that was done for us with the entire IRIS arg, and all the work that they put into it. But when we really boil it down, I think we can all agree that it seriously needed some better planning, especially for server 5.

I agree with Hojo. The ball was dropped on IRIS.

If you had actually read his post, he mentioned that they were making the next steps just as fast as we were solving them. That means they were creating on the fly, and our super-fast solving speedz didn't exactly help them have more time to make said puzzles. However, in retrospect, maybe they should have planned most of it out before they started it...

Exactly. They dropped the ball. That's like going to a concert and having the musicians improvise the whole thing. They dropped the ball because they improvised. It should have been planned.

Actually, improvisation is a good thing - that makes the experience dynamic and allows the players to have a role in the story and become a part of it. The problem was that it wasn't improvised well enough, whoever's fault it may have been.

as much as i like the idea of improvisation - there has to be a certain amount of forward planning to make improvisation work in any circumstance

and yeah as much as i like the idea that everyone gets a prize s to speak - it would have been a lot sweeter if the actual server prizes where still decent