Excellent mission! I had been thinking for a while about how mission clues could present a more realistic view of a body evidence. So far just about every mission has included only clues relevant to the solution. In the real world, of course, the relevant clues must be sifted out of mishmash of evidence. I yearn for the day when there are dozens of pieces of evidence that may take weeks to sift through, but this is a very good start : ). I personally like these kinds of missions, so that makes it hard for me to give an unbiased evaluation of how a trainee would see it, but I don’t think it is too difficult. I think it is a good foreshadow of the kinds of actual mission they will be seeing without being too demanding. Though I knew who the possible culprit was my initial answer was rejected because it wasn’t a complete name. My second attempt used a more proper name and worked. In this case I find the specific name requirement to be acceptable. Below is a rough log of my activities. Total time was about 30 minutes. That is perhaps twice as long as I might have taken to do this some months ago, but I have gradually learned to be more patient and enjoy the mission instead of racing to the finish. Spoiler Log ----- Ran case number though asciitohex – found nothing of note Looked up street view for address on flyer – made note of missing spot for location, but otherwise found nothing of note Investigated church web site and DNS records – a couple of interesting items, but not significant Deciphered the encrypted message and visited pastebin Researched the Cipher MMS and formulated idea of who the possible culprit was – GD (more likely) or Rosies (less likely) Reviewed all other clues again to look for supporting evidence – found none, but also nothing contradictory Went with intuition and entered possible solution – rejected Sure of answer, reviewed research again and reentered answer as a more proper name - success
Oh man you guys ramped up the difficulty on this one. Excellent job! Rohva, I probably put in the first answer you did as well. Looking it up it had the long form name, and then (more commonly, short form name.) I used the short form name and my accuracy was hit. My initial thought was to get all prim and proper and use the full title, but I was unsure of the text limit of the box. oh well I know better for next time. P.S. I found something that may be a bug or working as intended I am unsure. I replay the mission and write the correct answer and it updates my accuracy. So theoretically you could redo it again and again to make your accuracy 99.99% if you had the patience.
Update: I spammed the same answer a few times and am at 92% currently. I keep getting minor upgrades, but I don't think I have the patience to try and push it to 99% or even so many that it flips to 100%
I'm still working it, going to take a break. I think y'all are too serious about an accuracy rate. It is meaningful only to an agent that knows they actually earned it. Anybody can bang their head against a wall and then use another agent's proven solution to get 100%.
Hello, I am sorry but I don't know if I will be able to be online today just like I was unable to yesterday, unfortunately due to internet issues my connection has been down and too slow. I will HOPEFULLY be able to be online tomorrow to assist in testing, but I can not make any promises. Once again, I am really sorry.
I'm going to have to go with it being pretty good, and did need a bit of extra thinking/research than what was just given. A good way to cap off the training missions. I didn't run into any errors or anything I could point at either. For note, I'm using wireless (even though it's in my house), and have never had an issue with the videos or sound.
Heya, Post briefing video it only took about 5 minutes. I love love love the archive and downloaded the images because I like to zoom. Spoiler Recognized the hex and the website format and followed the clues in that image to the webpage. I figured the answer and then reviewed all the images to make sure I was looking for the group name rather than an individual's name. I think if I'd done this a week or two ago that I would have spent more time trying to figure out if we were looking for an individual, say a descendant of one of the order members.[\spoiler] Video. This is the worst time I have had with video ever. It fully buffered, started to play, and as soon a the briefing agent came on it was stutter city. I quit, reloaded, hit play again. This time was actually worse than the first. No idea what's going on. The original hypothesis, some how video decoding was eating up all of my CPU, we were able to disprove.
I hadn't done it to artificially pad my stats, I could care less. Long as I solve it how many tries is irrelevant. When I said "My accuracy was hit" it was my way of saying "I was going back and forth between the options and I chose... poorly." which was in jest. This is a game after all. I did it on accident first. I was going to count if there was a character limit in the text box. But I repeated it because we are testing this game, and in the dozens and dozens of alpha and beta tests I have done in my life I was always told "If you find a bug, try to exploit it. And keep trying to break the game until launch." Which is what I was doing. We are the elite few selected to push this game to the limits. We are supposed to find things that are or can be broken. The life of an Early Access Agent isn't just the glitz and glamor of Cryptology and Obscure Religious Texts.
You are correct in what you are doing. LOL, after 90 minutes of banging my head on a wall and destroying my own accuracy rating, and remembering several other posts that mention concern about accuracy rating, it made me wonder if it is a meaningful metric - is it something that should even be tracked? Maybe so, maybe not. You just happened to make a post at a time when I should have cooled down.
I think accuracy rating has to be of personal interest. I like it but you're completely correct, wait a day and you can find soemone to give you the answer but then you wonder why you would play a game based on ARGs. *shrug* I do think being able to pad your score is a no-go and I do wonder if there's a use for the accuracy score that we don't know of. Side note: I think I re-achieved my achievement. I don't have anyway to tell since the Steam achievement list is locked but it says I have 2 of 17 where as the achievement window only shows 1.
Upon finishing Mission 3 you get achievement "New Recruit". Steam says I have 2 achievements, and two of them are lit in the client after I relogged in. I managed to figure it out Spoiler: Where I Went Wrong It didn't occur to me that "Folio 13 of Cipher Manuscript (Cipher MMS)" is a particular object. In the pastebin it looked to me as a fancy worded description meaning something along the line of "page 13 of some non-descript old cipher book". I spent 2 hours trying to nail it on the priest at St Ferdinand or the auctioneer. Then I restarted, googling everything just looking for ideas. To my amazement "Folio 13 of Cipher Manuscript (Cipher MMS)" is a particular object, not a description. I think I wouldn't have fallen into the abyss if it were more plain what that line meant. Maybe put quotes around the title in the pastebin.
I think you were over thinking it. I've done that a few times myself, it is inevitable. Spoiler When I solved it, searching "Cipher MMS" brings you to a wiki page that states The Cipher Manuscripts are a collection of 60 folios containing the structural outline of a series of magical initiation rituals corresponding to the spiritual elements of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The "occult" materials in the Manuscripts are a compendium of the classical magical theory and symbolism known in the Western world up until the middle of the 19th century, combined to create an encompassing model of the Western mystery tradition, and arranged into a syllabus of a graded course of instruction in magical symbolism. It was used as the structure for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. That states there is a collection of folios used for a group. And this individual is selling one, folio 13. Which points to the most obvious culprit belonging to said group the folios were used to structure. Very straight forward I thought.
I must be way over thinking this for a training mission. I spent two hours this mission. Two hours ! I finally found the answer, but only after many attempts . I think my biggest mistake was to try the "short version". (GD) Obviously, my answer was refused... I spent the next 20 minutes hit my head against a wall , not understanding where I 'm wrong. Knowing that he was just a training assignment summarizing the various skills acquired during the preceeding missions, but also knowing that the difficulty level would be increased as it is a "test " to become Black Watchmen real agent ... The solution should be neither obvious nor too hard to find for a new recruit. The "full version" seemed far too long. It felt to offer a complete sentence as an answer ! (7 words , it's a lot) Since there is no indication of the size of the response to propose a new agent may have trouble . The problem does not lay in the difficulty of finding clues to follow leading to the solution. The problem was simply to propose a solution recognized as correct ! I tried (like an idiot , I admit) different solutions. The answer "Short Version" . The answer I put only the initials of the "Shot Version". I even tried to separate the different initial by " . " After another Google search I found a response similar to this : "The Tiny Group of the Small Rabbits ® (T.G.S.R.) is a magical Group founded in 2015 in Tarn et Garonne, France" Obviously , the answer was not T.G.S.R. For the third mission, I found that the wording of the answer can be difficult for any new agent. I had problems because I put myself "in the skin" of a new agent, trying answers that seem obvious . Yet it seems clear that an agent who will provide an answer "Small Rabbits", or T.G.S.R. (or tgsr) speaks indeed of the "Tiny Group of the Small Rabbits". To talk about the mission itself : It is very good ! The difficulty is increased. Yet the solution is not out of reach for a new unaccustomed agent. The problem lies only in the solution in itself : without indication on the "many letters" of the solution , it can be difficult for a new agent. What may annoy the players! A happy player to have resolved the first two tasks at once, with 100 % success can be very frustrated to see his scoring success drastically reduced because he persisted in not writing "Tiny Group of the Small Rabbits". For a player like me, Black Watchmen since ... so long I do not even remember , it's not a problem. But for any new recruit, who has not yet truly the mastery of his role as Agent , this can be very frustrating. Two solutions: Either specify the number of letters of the solution... or add a guard put somewhere in the game, which specify that the success score does not affect the flow of play, and is for informational purposes only.
One thing I just noticed was that it says "A new mission is now available" once a mission is completed, even though there isn't. Also inputting answers to test the flexibility of the box has lowered my accuracy score and that makes me sad. But we already knew that bug anyway. Along those lines, does anyone else feel that "2 answers is less than 100% accuracy" is maybe a little too strict? Maybe a 3 strikes and then start losing accuracy? Especially once it gets to more difficult missions where no one is going to be answering correct their first try, it wont be a useful statistic, it will just tell who went and looked up the answer after the problem had been solved. Notes on mission later.
Thank you everyone for your feedback! Oh, and @Eternimus, "The life of an Early Access Agent isn't just the glitz and glamor of Cryptology and Obscure Religious Texts." Nicely put, that line made my day.
I realized quite some time ago the accuracy rating was not something I would care about due to some faults others have already pointed out. I am somewhat interested in stats like the time spent working a mission, or number of wrong answers before the right answer (the first time through of course), or the size of a mind map it takes me to solve a mission, but only in a general sense to see how well I improve as an agent over time or gauge how tough a particular mission was for me. The problem with stats, even when they are completely accurate, is that some people tend to gravitate toward improving them in and of themselves. For me, my vice was not chasing accuracy but chasing time. I wanted to see how quick I could be compared to others. Games just about always include some kind of lederboards, metrics, etc. I understand that, but the way I forced myself to slow down in this case was to stop thinking of this as a game. I found that many of my mistakes on previous missions arose because I abandoned my more normal methodical approach in favor of cutting corners to see how much quicker I could "play the game". I don't want to advocate for eliminating the accuracy rating. I realize some people might really want things like that. I am content with just ignoring it (and occasionally giving it some good natured ribbing), but it may be worth while to poll the entire community to see what people think. It might generate some surprising ideas about how people like to measure their improvement.
