On the lighter side...

[rarified]

As long as we're dreaming up things to do I had a thought...

Do any of you have connections with the puzzle-artists that have occasionally set the MOULa forum alight with their treasure hunts?

What if we either staged a prelude to the opening (could be at the front door of OU.org or the foundry) or had some easter eggs on the website for people to look for? That would be entirely in character with the mindset of Myst/Uru, and probably generate interest.

Just a free-ranging thought

_R

[JWPlatt]

Heh, that would be fun. The extent of my thinking on that has been to place some Lorem Ipsum text on the website and wiki pages as placeholders to be replaced by the real text (yet to be written) upon Cyan's announcement. These might appear a day or two before. But that's not really a puzzle, just some sign that maybe we've lost our minds.

These forums and their Lorem Ipsum text, in fact, were (unintentionally) on the news feed until just before using them for real. I turned off the feeds at that time after a security check. Not a peep about from anyone like Christian Walther who has helped us in the past with his feed database, asking "What was all that stuff?".

This hypothetical puzzle maker would have to be one of us, or someone doing it on a lark without any knowledge of what it's for.

[Mac_Fife]

"Throwing them a bone" to re-quote many people.

I like that idea, I just wonder if we can pull it off at this stage

A couple of mysterious posts by "The X-Men"? It'd have to be able to be played out in fairly short order once we're sure we're ready.

[JWPlatt]

More thoughts on a puzzle:

Who'd design it? There are five of us, plus Cyan. I hear Cyan is pretty good at puzzles. But who has the time? Are we talking about something like what the Mysteriacs have done, or something less ambitious? And generally speaking, a puzzle is solvable and reveals something. The time to solution by participants can be unpredictable - something to remember about timing things. Unless we do a Willy Wonka where the first ten to solve the puzzle get a ticket (an approved IP) to be first in line to saturate Foundry's brand new TeleBit Trailblazer T2000 with repo downloads. The purpose of the ticket to be revealed upon Announcement. Just a crazy idea, folks. I'm actually still trying to think about how to throttle the initial downloads, but that's another ToDo...

If you read my post about the mascot, you know Mac and I were talking about having it pop up on various pages and then disappear. Perhaps she (the mascot, "Mini") would appear more frequently, less transparent, or more whole as we get closer to Announcement. I've also thought about fading my MOUL sig/avatar into Mini over time in a series of revisions to the graphic which appears on each forum where I display my avatar.

I was also thinking of drawing a mustache on Mac's avatar. <looks at Mac's avatar> D'oh!

[rarified]

Ah, just in time before I retire after finding CWE-10

Some simple thoughts I can recall

• How elaborate? One of the successful paradigms in puzzles that appeared in the MOULa forums was the URL to a simple book, that had (at first) a single page, with some clues (both forefront and hidden). The puzzle couldn't be solved until a later update which eventually came, but that allowed for pacing the group, and speculation. I was thinking something like that -- the initial hints may have nothing to do with source, or OU.org, but just ... something new.
• Maybe a "Sharper's Journal" kind of book with an entry about "I found this today..."
• Something Mysterious, perhaps in the "The ending is not yet written" motif. Espousing "Patience".
• Maybe a "Where's Squee?" kind of thing?
• Something about finding new Ink or blank Books (forget the D'ni names right now)

I'm not really that creative at the moment, but maybe this gives something of the flavor of what I was thinking about.

_R