The RedHill Institute thread

[MattScott 15281]

Hi all,

 

Couple recap items for the ARG:

 

- We did award 1 G1C to any account who redeemed the code. We needed to award something so we could track the dates for each player.

 

- The rewards have 3 tiers. Everyone who redeemed will get something, but the tier will be related to your level of participation. The team has done their best to keep a watchful eye on the forum thread and Discord thread. We originally planned to only monitor the forum, but then random players started posting solutions that were being worked out on the Unofficial Discord. So I feel the need to include the participation of those dedicated Discord players too. We sincerely hope that players will feel the rewards match their level of effort. 

 

- The last puzzle was hard. So hard, that we mitigated the length of the password by making it potentially guessable from the hint or even solveable by brute force. 

 

NOTE: While the password has been posted, no one has shown the puzzle and solution for how it was solved. I will still give a tier 1 reward to any player who posts the correct solution. If no one gets it right by the time I post the rewards, winners, and random tidbits on Friday, then I will reveal how the puzzle was intended to be solved.

 

- While the last puzzle was brute forced, I want to congratulate the team that took the time to implement the script. It is important to understand that it wasn’t possible to simply take all the numbers and letters from the spectrogram and execute the brute force script. That would have taken months to find the correct combination. Instead that team used the Morse Code phrase (which also intentionally contained the 4 letters of the password) to eliminate enough characters and get close enough to the correct steps to apply the brute force method.  

 

I am amazed and thankful for all the players who spent countless hours brainstorming with the rest of the community to solve our ARG. This was largely driven by a very small team at Little Orbit, and you guys made the entire process so much fun for us.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[yood 345]

thank you was very interesting and exciting .

 

[Snubnose 653]

13 minutes ago, MattScott said:

-snip-

how many people are actually in tier 1 and tier 2? (I guess tier 3 is pretty much everyone that entered the code without contributing anything towards this ARG?)
I'm not asking for names, just some numbers
are you even done putting people in tier 1 and 2, or is that still being worked on?

sorry for my impatience...

Edited March 28, 2019 by Snubnose

[Kewlin 692]

11 minutes ago, MattScott said:

~snip~

 

What exactly do the tiers correlate to? I'm guessing something like: Solving, showing up (I.E. posting here or on discord,) and redeeming? Or is it time based?

[MattScott 15281]

19 minutes ago, Kewlin said:

 

What exactly do the tiers correlate to? I'm guessing something like: Solving, showing up (I.E. posting here or on discord,) and redeeming? Or is it time based?

 

Tier 1 = Anyone who was early to publicly contribute part of a puzzle solution. (It’s hard for us to gauge who was absolutely first between the two channels).

 

Tier 2 = Anyone who spent a reasonable amount of effort brainstorming and contributing to puzzle solving.

 

Tier 3 = Anyone who redeems the code before my post on Friday.

[yood 345]

It’s hard for us to gauge who was absolutely first between the two channels

 

 

there are 3 threads associated with REDHILL , this is wrong.

Edited March 28, 2019 by Yood

[Acornie 490]

32 minutes ago, MattScott said:

Tier 2 = Anyone who spent a reasonable amount of effort brainstorming and contributing to puzzle solving

I dunno if I even fit in this category, let's see, a snippet of my contributions in the discord channel;  'Patridge's cat is named Clawdia, why is that not the password, ree' and 'I just want the prize, to prove I'm smart :GWsetmyxPeepoCry:'

 

I didn't make any discoveries myself, but I did invest a bit of time to trying to solve things, even though I hardly found anything due to the fact I has a case of the dumbs

Edited March 28, 2019 by Acornie

[WitchQueen 316]

I don't suppose someone wants to post a 'what we know so far' summary of the whole ARG?

 

Edit:

Nevermind I didn't notice the original post was being constantly updated. Thanks again for the work @Ketog and thanks @Saxtus for pointing me in the right direction.

Edited March 28, 2019 by WitchQueen

[UubeNubeh DaWog 136]

While the ARG was pretty thorough and consistent, worked well to give people enough of a challenge to complete it but also giving everyone the opportunity to do so by not being overly complex.

It was an interesting new piece of content APB hasn't seen in a long time.

 

My only question is "Why now?".

 

The whole ordeal seemed incredibly miss timed, between the servers having the worst months of their life and no new updates or content to speak of (besides the RIOT game mode itself, which again is another piece of the game out of place because of the issues stated before.) wouldn't this kind of adventure have created more hype for the game, gotten more attention and been an even more positive experience overall if the game was in a better place?

 

Im not speaking for everyone but i, myself was not interested in the slightest until the last few hours before the solve. Arguably because i had nothing better to do at the time.

 

If this was implemented at a better time and place for the game i would have been eager to ride the bandwagon from the beginning. Although, it felt lack luster because every time i thought about getting involved with this new lore progression presented to the player base as a" deep seeded conspiracy". I couldn't help but think that regardless of how relatable and interesting this story was, the game itself is at a crawl.

 

Not being able to continue onto the game with that same feeling that the ARG brought to the plate is a bit disappointing.

Edited March 28, 2019 by UubeNubeh DaWog

[NekoSensei 8]

I found on discord that nobody found the way to get the password even if we know the password. (?) But I thought people already found the password with the correct way...

 

DCRXJLPDCLAAGVEVYW

  C      L  D    A    

 

If you try to write Clawdia in order with those letters, CLAWDIA, this letters are missing until the last A you can use in Clawdia.

 

DCRXJLPDCLAAGVEVYW

  C    LAWD I A            

 

I don't know how to explain this with my poor english, but I thought this was the way that people found. I'm confused now.

[SK4LP 62]

CLDA

 

we could have found it without brutality 

Edited March 28, 2019 by SK4LP

[NekoSensei 8]

5 minutes ago, SK4LP said:

CLDA

 

we could have found it without brutality 

??

[SK4LP 62]

2 minutes ago, NekoSensei said:

??

[Inquitoria 108]

1 minute ago, NekoSensei said:

??

 

You need to line up the boxes correctly. The spectrogram code image had a reverse L in the bottom of the image, and the horizontal line too. Lining those two up will make it match. Like so:

 

[NekoSensei 8]

I can't believe it x'DDDDDDDD

GG, I could never imagine it.

 

This was so funny x'D

[Latsha 71]

Wow, so the lines were useful somewhere, and I believed it was a red herring. GG LO after all, at first people at redhill discord chat made us believe it was an overused number 4 in the bee article and the 4.mp3 sound file that was supposed to link directly to the password length, but I (and I believe many other people too) found no correlation between these and overall it was very confusing for a last part of an ARG to be simple guessing and luck.
Also I'd like to apologize again for my offensive language in bold after alleged bruteforcer won the ARG, I really got driven by emotions and I thought that I wasted hours on this for nothing.

PS
Do you guys keep track of mails who people have input in the redhill newsletter?

[mtz 496]

I was following an entirely different trail of reasoning. I guess it's not worth much at this point, since people found the blue line mask thing, but still, here's what I tried to do:

 

There were talks of bruteforcing being part of the solving process, and I understood that 1) this is a signal to number-crunch the spectrogram symbol sheet, 2) some parts will have to be bruteforced/just put there to see if they fit. Maybe the math behind this is a bit farfetched, but... I dunno. It checks out for me, in a weird way. Somehow the numbers line up for me.

It's probably all wrong, but I just want to get this out of my system.

 

(image is from a private conversation)

 

("making all numbers check out" = meaning that the letters which correspond to the numbers used in the equations (C, L, D, A) are correct)

 

Still, GG I guess. Thanks for the organizing, LO.

Edited March 28, 2019 by MartinPL
clarifying the wording

[Ketog 1034]

1 hour ago, SK4LP said:

CLDA

 

we could have found it without brutality 

i thought about that , but i honestly didn't even gave it a try as i thought it would be weird/too much to ask for previous screenshot of the page to continue in the ARG  .

 

oh and i also don't know to use any kind of image editing software

 

Congrats to you !

 

gonna update the main topic.

 

Edited March 28, 2019 by Ketog

[Ketog 1034]

On a second note, honestly this ARG was one of the coolest things that happened to APB in a while, documenting player findings was awsome, i wouldn't have found all of this by myself , congrats and thanks to everyone that took part in it, and thanks to the whole LittleOrbit team too, they're the one at the origin of all of this !

Edited March 28, 2019 by Ketog

[Saxtus 497]

I agree @Ketog and that can only show that Little Orbit has big plans for APB and we can only hope for the best.

[MattScott 15281]

1 hour ago, SK4LP said:

CLDA

 

we could have found it without brutality 

Congrats SK4LP! That was the full solution to the final puzzle. 

[SK4LP 62]

1 minute ago, MattScott said:

Congrats SK4LP! That was the full solution to the final puzzle. 

couldn t do it alone

________________gg all !!!

[XanHighwind 8]

6 hours ago, MattScott said:

 

Tier 1 = Anyone who was early to publicly contribute part of a puzzle solution. (It’s hard for us to gauge who was absolutely first between the two channels).

 

Tier 2 = Anyone who spent a reasonable amount of effort brainstorming and contributing to puzzle solving.

 

Tier 3 = Anyone who redeems the code before my post on Friday.

Thanks for letting us know how it works.
Its an interesting take.
There are many people like me who just did the ARG alone and joined the discussions and brainstorms later (Myself included, did it mostly from the start but joined in brainstorm fiesta when site got PWNeD and prolly got zillion messages in the discord channel), so i guess we belong in Tier 2? or Tier 1 if we are lucky? Dunno

I loved the ARG and i hope you guys do them again just next time PLEASE no racing and whoever gets first get the biggest reward, as it hurts the "community effort" and makes people bruteforce and act selfish.
Just provide equal rewards next time and we all feel like we contributed.
 

[Inquitoria 108]

Maybe it's just me, but I would have preferred the ARG to be without any rewards at all.

 

It was a very fun experience and I really enjoyed the spirit and sense of community on Discord while we were trying to crack the codes and find clues, and that would have been enough reward for me. Uncovering bits of the lore, and feeling like LO actually cares about the community is all the reward I could possibly ask for.

 

I feel like this whole "the staff will judge who publicly claimed the most glory and reward them more" unnecessarily poisons what was otherwise an amazing, community-building event. Just my 2 cents, thanks for the event regardless.

[Seadee 107]

if only the series of events that happened last night and this morning that left me covered in sick and having poop on my trousers didnt happen, i'd have been in a hour before and posted the same thing

Grats SK4LP, well done.