Keys of Fate walkthrough guide and the list of winners [Archive]

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Seccia_Ravenloft

02-16-2010, 01:59 AM

Wow! What an event! I think I blew you guys out of the water with the puzzles, but I hope you all had a good time!Everyone, please congratulate our two grand prize winners! Contestwinner (not kidding, that was his character name) and Lokosto! Those two were able to crack the puzzles first and claim the keys!Our retail version key winners also deserve some mad props! Congratulations to (in order of solving the puzzle):<ul><li> Melodew</li><li> Uine</li><li> Ratilla</li><li> Rowrow</li><li> Reiisha</li><li> Epeeb</li><li> Maskius</li><li> Drohma</li><li> Fallenstar</li><li> Piun</li></ul>Even with huge hints, the event ran for 2 hours and 30 minutes of mayhem, sending everyone scrambling to figure out codes and break puzzles. Here's how to solve each puzzle.Puzzle 1 & 2 -- trailofadventure.wordpress.comtowrrestufpaenol.iseomvdrc.adr3 7 12 57 60 34 30 10 1 6 2 23 3 13 6 23 46 72 49 24 41 8 62 91 92 102This puzzle was a combination puzzle. The first jumble of letters was exactly that -- a jumble. If you re-arrange the letters, you'd get <a href="http://trailofadventure.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">trailofadventure.wordpress.com</a> -- a blog site. As a hint, I included the periods in the correct places, and each phrase has the same amount of letters as the final answer (so towrrestufpaenol is the same length of letters as trailofadventure.)The numbers are used on the Trail of Adventure blogpost. Each number is a certain letter in the blog post. So 3 is the third letter of the post -- D. 7 is the seventh letter -- A, and so forth. When you get all done with the numbers, it will spell darklightwoodswordpresscom. Obviously, this is <a href="http://darklightwoods.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">darklightwoods.wordpress.com</a>.Puzzle 3 -- darklightwoods.wordpress.comIn this puzzle, you were presented with a series of foreign characters. Those letters are Erudite letters, and you could have easily found the translation keys here in this very forum (thanks to Kiara's last puzzle event) or on Massively.com's posting on the same event. <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=469484" target="_blank">Thanks to Malachi for the translation key</a>!Once the script is deciphered, it will lead you to <a href="http://cityofgorowyn.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">cityofgorowyn.wordpress.com</a>.Puzzle 4 -- cityofgorowyn.wordpress.comThis puzzle was most likely the one that scared you away. Written on Seccia's stone was the following:_||__||__||_|__|_||_|||__||____|_||_||___|||__|__||__|_|_|||__||_|||_|____|_|||__|||_|||_||_||||_|||__|__||__|___|||_____|||__|__||__|_|_|||__||_|||__||__|_|||__||___||_||_||||_||_||_|Many players thought it was morse code. Close, but no cigar! What you're looking at is modified binary code. Each underscore is a 0, each upright line is a 1.If you type all of that out and use a <a href="http://www.nickciske.com/tools/binary.php" target="_blank">binary translator</a> (one of my favorite tricks) you'll get: <a href="http://finalrest.wordpress.com" target="_blank">finalrest.wordpress.com</a>.Puzzle 5 -- finalrest.wordpress.comAnd, finally, the one that got so many people stuck. The final puzzle that lead to the answer.This puzzle actually gave two pieces of information -- my location and the location of how to properly greet Seccia. My location was the "easy" part -- find the crossroads of all of my flight paths. If you would open the zone map and trace the carpet's flight route, you'd get the following:<img src="http://finalrest.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/eq2walkthroughanswer.jpg" />The flight paths cross over a very specific area -- the area where I was standing. That are was the Skystrider Launch Dock -- the gnomish airship that flies over the sands. I know the paths don't cross perfectly, but many people were able to figure out where I was from my flight path, so hey, it must have worked. ^_^The part that stumped everyone was where my instructions were located. Seccia keeps a notebook... A <a href="http://www.massively.com/category/the-tattered-notebook/" target="_blank">Tattered Notebook</a>. As I wrote, "Once I’m successfully safe and on the ground, I’m going to update my last Tattered Notebook entry. I’ll hide their instructions in plain sight."<a href="http://www.massively.com/2010/02/09/the-tattered-notebook-roleplaying-advice-for-veterans-and-pt2/" target="_blank">In my last Tattered Notebook column, check out the second page.</a> Looks pretty normal, right?<img src="http://finalrest.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/eq2notebookreveal1.jpg" width="770" height="700" /> But what about if you highlight the page (hidden in plain sight) and look between the lines...<img src="http://finalrest.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/eq2notebookreveal2.jpg" /> If you still don't see it, here's a clearer version that's a bit photoshopped for emphasis.<img src="http://finalrest.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/eq2notebookreveal3.jpg" /> And that's it! There are your final instructions, hidden in plain sight! I hope you all had a great time with this event. I loved putting it together and running it! It was great to meet you all, and I will most likely see y'all around soon as we continue onwards to Odus and Sentinel's Fate!If you really loved the event, please tell me so here! If you had any problems, or criticisms, I want to hear those too! I want to keep doing events for your guys, so expect more in the future!If you want to help support the events, well, there's one easy way to do that: please visit <a href="http://www.massively.com" target="_blank">Massively.com</a>. Read our stuff, as we have some great EQII coverage that we're really stepping up on. We want to be your MMO news source, and reading Massively and showing your support means that they'll give me more time and ability to keep doing fun events like this. It makes my bosses happy when they get new readers. ^_^Once again, I hope you all had a great time, and I look forward to seeing you all again soon!Sincerely,Seraphina Brennan (Seccia Ravenloft)

Clav

02-16-2010, 02:33 AM

Since you asked, I'll give my thoughts on the design: Overall I thought it was a fun event. Mixing a story with the puzzles made it very interesting. I found it a bit odd that, at least to me, the puzzles seemed to start hard and get easier. I was utterly stuck on the first one until clue #2, but after that it was fairly smooth sailing. Part of the initial confusion was because I assumed the series of numbers was a key to decode the first address--the fact that there were 26 numbers (the number of letters in the alphabet) made me certain of it. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /> On the Darklight Woods step, I was delayed a bit because I didn't realize I had to click in order to see the full entry. That's the only thing I would definitely suggest 'fixing.' The Erudian and binary puzzles clicked immediately for me. The use of the in-game fonts had been mentioned to me earlier today when talking about another puzzle, and I'm a terrible computer nerd so binary was obvious. Chance advantages for me on those two, which may have been what gave me the lead to come in first.Great job overall.

Arkenor

02-16-2010, 02:38 AM

Overall it was good fun. Thanks for putting it on. My one point would be that the final problem, knowing what to say to you, was only really solvable by folks who already read Massively, so had any idea what your blog there is called, or that you had one. Most of the rest of us, understandably, thought that that referred to the previous notebook entries from the other wordpress sites we'd been sent via, so were rummaging through the previous clues looking for something we'd missed.

Frens

02-16-2010, 08:31 AM

I created "Uine" (after my wife's character) for this event.First, I decided to find Seccia /before/ I did anything else. She said it was possible to get to her from the TD starting area in ten minutes. So that limited my choice of zones: Any of the docks in the Shattered Lands adventure zones (Ant, TS, EL, Zek, EF, LS, Nek, CL, Feer) or Sinking Sands. So I made the character and started zone hopping, doing a /who Seccia to find the zone. Once I determined she was in Sinking Sands, I thought of all the places one could go without getting eaten at first level, decided the Airship Dock was most likely (since that's where the last expansion 'started'<img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> and sure enough, there she was!So I started on the puzzles. The first one didn't make much sense to me. Once the wordpress clue was out, I wrote the letters down, crossed out the ones that were already used, and tried to jumble around the rest. Unfortunately, no luck there. I had little luck with the numbers as well, because I thought of FOUR different ways it could be encoded: fixed position words, fixed position letters, rolling position words (3rd word in, then 7 after that, etc.), and rolling position letters. Ends up I somehow managed to get the right answer, but one of the letters was wrong, making me think it made no sense. Waited until the next step.The runes were just hard work. I knew that they were done using a font from the game - I just didn't know WHICH font. So I opened up my EQ2 folder, did a search for .ttf, and used the preview to try to find something that looked similar. Erudian did the trick. After that it was just a matter of finding the corresponding letters. Unfortunately W7 doesn't have Character Map, so I ended up typing every letter into Word and changing fonts back and forth when I hit a match.The binary was pretty obvious. I pasted the whole puzzle into Word, did a find/replace, and then pasted into a binary translator. However, my initial thought was Morse Code, until I saw that it was all one string. Because my grandfather was trying to get me to be a HAM radio operator like himself, I started to learn it, and I knew that you just can't DO that. So I tried out the binary method.The last clue was a complete mystery. The problem, of course, being that I'm not one to visit fansites often - well, at all really. Since I play on AB, my guild's site and the official forums are just about all I need - one for delicious arpees, and one for news. As such, I didn't know about the massively.com site or Seccia's blog. Until I punched it into google. So I brought it up, looked through it, and I couldn't figure it out. This was because... in my browser, the 'hidden' text wasn't. And the text, while it looked a touch out of place, could simply be poor writing or an editor with no skills changing things during publishing. (Sorry Secc - no offense intended, but I knew it was 'hidden' text that I needed to find, but nothing was hidden!)I think the main problem with the 'end' of the contest was the fact that there was nothing beyond the hail. I could have repeated the first winner's hail, and when asked say something vague like 'from your blog of course' (since every jump was done using blogs) and depending on how suspicious Seccia was I could have taken a collector's key instead. I liked the overall design, though. If a contest like this is to be run again, I'd try to get multiple free blog sites involved, and/or require different answers depending on what position you completed. That way nobody could try to finesse it, or only have to solve half the puzzle because you can assume that wordpress.com is the last part.Thanks for the fun run, and woo-hoo, forty bucks saved (with which I will spoil my wife, since I did use her account for this).

Buffie

02-16-2010, 10:20 AM

I was Piun, thanks for the key <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> I actually got the first question answered after her first clue was given and was a bit disappointed she spelled it out right AFTER I figured it out, lol.On to the next, I was doing number combos not realizing to just count out the letters in the paragraph, like an idiot I laughed when I figured it out, wasted 10 minutes there.The following one, the words actually were easy to know they were Erudite because I followed the map piece threads when they came out, so just doing side by side comparisons I was able to decode.I was stumped on the final one (binary code) I have to admit, but from reading her paragraph I figured it out to try sinking sands and the only place I would know a gnome surely to be was the airship docks. I didnt even bother running to Gorowyn,I knew to try sinking sands by this comment - "perhaps these adventurers could catch up with me there."I didnt know the binary code thing and I wasnt familiar with Seccia or her blogs with massively (sorry ><, Ill read them from now on) so I searched to see most updated posts on wordpress and found the second to final clue to go back to massively. I was pondering and waiting for a clue when I read a link to "Tattered Notebook" on the massively page she was updating and clicked there on happenstance.I too did not see any hidden text, as another had mentioned(most important foible for me).I could see it all without highlighting it. Maybe next time this wont be a part of the game (hidden texts). I did see the very obvious part about hailing her then, and took its meaning to hail her with that greeting, unfortunatly, it came on the heels of Melodew and seemed I was just copy catting, so I can only guess this is why I was overlooked when Seccia started handing out the regular keys. I repeated the hail sequence several times and Seccia said nothing just I was close so I was confused then. I saw a few others say it and she gave them keys so I just bonked my head on the desk a few times and scratched my head. After about an hour of this cat n mouse guessing what else it could be, with 1 key to go, Seccia realized I was indeed at the right place, but having the hidden text not hidden for me made me confused on what to tell her because nothing was hidden for me,lol. I could have spared myself an extra hour and Seccia's time, if I was but a nano second faster on my initial -Hail, Lady of the Night. lol, and not giving Seccia doubt of my authenticity of figuring out the puzzles. Thanks again, I had a wild ride. :3

thesiren

02-16-2010, 11:06 AM

I came home from work as my daughter was mid-puzzle, and I didn't have any free character slots, so I wound up being an innocent bystander. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />I still think what you did was very creative, Seraphina, and I also noticed Kiara on hand and cheering everyone on during the event. So thanks to you both for your work during the contest and for what you do on the internet every day. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />PS/Sinking Sands, huh? Well, I could tell right away it wasn't Nagafen y'all were lounging around on, lol. Do you have any longstanding characters on Nagafen, Seraphina? And if so, what do you think of the overall experience there?

Moondancer

02-16-2010, 01:16 PM

Thank you very much for the key and for organizing the event, Seccia-- I had a lot of fun with it. ^^ Like Uine, I tracked down Seccia before solving the puzzles. Intuition led me to the Sinking Sands, as it was the only zone easily accessible from both Qeynos and Freeport in addition to posing very little threat to lowbies (assuming you stay in the vicinity of the beach where you first arrive). I used /who to confirm her presence in the zone, and then I went about looking for her. Several minutes of searching led me to the Airship Dock, where I found her sitting on a crate. I sat down beside her, claiming my place as the first to find her, and then went to work solving the first puzzle. The letters seemed to be an anagram. "Ten tofu live radar" was the best I could come up with until the second clue ("trailsofadventure.wordpress.com") was given. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />So I went there and tried to find out what the numbers corresponded to. I'd originally been thinking page numbers, but the fact that the numbers were out of order and that the webpage only contained two paragraphs quickly eliminated that theory. Then I checked to see if they referred to words- third word, seventh word, etcetera. The first three made very little sense, so I scrapped that idea as well. Then I decided that they must refer to letters, and I got darklightwoods.wordpress.com, which is where I headed next. The ancient script threw me off- since Seccia was in Darklight wood, I assumed that it was the language of Dark Elves and Arasai, which was Thexian. I was wrong, of course. A google search for EQ2 languages eventually led me to a <a href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?p=418706" target="_blank">Ten Ton Hammer Article</a> where someone posted <a href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showpost.php?s=471519c0bcf43058e3639c85827e71c7&p=418690&postcount=5" target="_blank">a key for the Erudite language</a>, which to my amazement matched the characters before me. When translated, they spelled out "cityofgorowyn.wordpress.com", which was my next destination.The lines and dashes awaiting me on that page didn't look like a real EQ2 language-- the reference to Gnomes must be indicating something technological. The look of all those lines and dashes seemed reminiscent of morse code, but didn't have any spaces, thus indicating that it was something else. The lines looked rather like 1s, so I tried binary code instead. When converted to 1s and 0s via Microsoft Word and translated via an online translator, it came out as "finalrest.wordpress.com".I made that my next destination. After reading through it once, I was surprised at the absence of a puzzle at the bottom, like all the others contained. Then, I realized that the puzzle must be in the text. Being an active reader of Seraphina Brennan's posts on Massively, I instantly recognized the reference to her EQ2 column, the Tattered Notebook. Her most recent post was an article on roleplaying from February 9th. In between the paragraphs was my answer- literally "in between the lines". Very clever. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />Overall, I had a lot of fun with this. Thank you so much for putting the time and effort into making it! ^^ And thank you for the free expansion pack. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />