did the "breaking" of the ARG foul up the waters?

[forsakenwayfarer]

simply put, did the early "breaking" of the arg ruin whatever plan m$ had, and they are now flying by the seat of their pants basically? timeframes thrown off, servers opened too early, etc?

[ODST Epsilon]

simply put, did the early "breaking" of the arg ruin whatever plan m$ had, and they are now flying by the seat of their pants basically? timeframes thrown off, servers opened too early, etc?

I'm actually curious as to how people though we "broke" the ARG. It's not like we found a website early, that we know of, and if you think about it, that countdown went to a specific time and then changed to allow people to enter codes. From what I've seen, nothing has been "broken" by the players. It already started out broken.

[forsakenwayfarer]

all i know about the thing is that someone found an ad before it was supposed to run, which led to the comic, which led to the server, ad infinitum.


maybe it was broken to begin with.


where are all the king's horses and all the king's men?

[EliteSniper177]

didn't it kick off with AR's posts on bungie.net and HBO, and on that note, maybe MS wanted to use the HBO forums, but couldn't due to bandwidth, like AR said, so maybe that threw them off

[nattyhaze]

I can't help but feel we are missing something. After all, its almost impossible to "break" an arg, or any media campaign for that matter. The point is for people to find out about a product right? I don't think they want to keep us in the dark.

Every time we have been given a clue, it paned out. The circut city ad paned out. The SOTA people in the streets panned out. What do we know that seemed like a clue that we haven't solved? The sota membership (to be honest, that does seem like a dead end)? The flood image with the numbers that looked like todays date(070507)? The server videos?

If you were building a game, how would you start a new level?

[Xaos Maladay]

If you were building a game, how would you start a new level?

Giving them a map or an objective are two ways to start a new level.

[Air Sparrow Hawk]

If you were building a game, how would you start a new level?

Giving them a map or an objective are two ways to start a new level.

Or just letting them wander aimlessly until they understand something and continue with the story, it's sort of like what we are doing now.

[Pak]

If you were building a game, how would you start a new level?

Giving them a map or an objective are two ways to start a new level.

Or just letting them wander aimlessly until they understand something and continue with the story, it's sort of like what we are doing now.

There seems to be nothing to understand. The desperate players are finding the most minute details and going off on wild limbs of random speculation. There are no codes, no hidden ips, nothing. It seems there is just a large amount of dead space right now.

[Dalthanas]

The time lapse has been huge, but it could just be part of the ramp-up... but in terms of breaking the ARG, even with the comic getting leaked early we still wouldn't have broke it. The SOTA protests coincided with the discovery of the SOTA page (and clearly they had signs, shirts, and hired people ahead of time), and everything would have been set to zero with the server unlocking process. It doesn't matter how early we found the comic, we were at a standstill until the server opened at the time it was supposed to.
The only thing I could conceive of as being broken would be if they had indeed meant to open server 1 first, and a programming error or w/e led to them opening server 5 first, something they couldn't take back. So the time lapse since then has been a frantic rewrite/reprogram of all the story to go in reverse and still make sense.

I don't think this is the case, though. I'm pretty sure it's unfolding as it should, even if the wait is infuriatingly long.

But I do agree that often the hardcore folks on this and other forums are going off on tangents about things that are irrelevant to any story/not related to the ARG, but it's still a bit of fun. Understanding whether Halo's effect beings in slipspace isn't going to progress the ARG, but I had a helluva good time reading about it.

[endejas]

People are losing interest in this. Either we missed a huge clue, or something's up. It was hilarious how people joked about how fast it was going, but now, we're in a dry spell with no end in sight.