<3 MxO Off-Topic forum

You guys keep me up to date on all new games, technology, movies/TV, and gossip. And news on current events. We don't have cable here so I tend to rely on you guys for news.

I don't want to lose that.

Neoteny wrote:

I really liked the Soniya storyline you had going, and was very disappointed that the rest of LESIG discredited you at that point, especially since there seemed to be a fair bit going on.

The so-called discrediting was not malicious, it was just that there were some problems with an ex-LESIG pretending to still be aboard the Scanline crew as it directly contradicted the storyline that we were preparing for Scanline. Since BA52 was never released it seems trivial now, but at the time it was interfering with the story that we were trying to produce. It was treated no differently than other player attempts to god-mod an existing LESIG/Rarebit storyline. Separating the Soniya sidestory from Scanline itself was all that was required.

Signs wrote:

It seems like there was a lot Chadwick wanted to do that just wasn't possible, in large part because it took much longer to tell the story than had been anticipated, with everything going on with the transfer to SOE.

Not to mention the stuff he wanted to do that couldn't be conveyed by our game engine. I'm thinking of the Unlimit stuff where he wanted to have these crazy characters like Caboclo with multiple arms and the really big guy or really small guy or whatever it was.

The way I remember it, Sarah Edmontons was a storyline invented by Paul Chadwick that was never revisited, aside from one ambitious LESIG members attempt to revive it that actually got through Rarebit's screening process. That was the event where some friend of Sarah Edmontons was interrogated by some such org.

Tranta wrote:

DaJustifier wrote:

what I felt the problem was with Lesig 2.0 is that they werent screened properly. Some, not all, took advantage of it and their friends benefited as well instead of being equal with all. In ways ruing the game for some people. I am not saying they didnt do a good job but there were areas that needed drastic improvements.

I remember somebody in LESIG 2.0 got booted on the second day of us being invited to the program. That was a bit of a shock to everyone. I think the old LESIG vets were a bit hesitant after to accept us, but I think we shook the stigma after a month or so, by and large.

Well, at the time of LESIG 2.0, the LESIG vets had been a solid group for quite some time. The problems were weeded out of LESIG 1.0 fairly early and we had gotten very used to trusting each other by the time 2.0 rolled around. When new members were brought in and continued to be brought in, we had to go through the process of trusting someone over and over again.

Nope, I'm not familiar with either of those. Sorry. I was only involved with the big projects that I already listed. And then I had varying levels of involvement in different LESIG projects other than my own.

I think that one of the reasons that my events were so successful was because it was done by a single person. Since I was behind all the characters involved, I had knowledge of every player's interaction with the story and could adjust other characters accordingly to take advantage. I also had a wide range of feedback from players' reactions and could adapt and tailor the events as I went along. I also didn't have to worry about creative disagreements as I had full control of my story.
The only disadvantage was that as I created more complicated storylines, I also had less time to focus certain elements of the story. For example, my inability to to plan United Tomorrow live events. As the puzzles became more complicated, they took up more of my time to complete. And then there were things like that bookcase that I spent weeks and weeks meticulously photoshopping and then never really used in the end.

Well, I can answer the first question and part of the second.

United Tomorrow was created to both foster an RP environment for players who were interested in that sort of thing and as part of a vital function in the upcoming chapter of the Keep Your Eyes Open storyline, which obviously will never be completed as originally intended. United Tomorrow was meant to be seen as a wonderful and uniting people's movement by some and a nefarious cult by others. The idea was to separate players into two distinct groups: those who favored the crew and their elitist views on gathering information (I tended to think of the Furious Angels and solo players as finding this group attractive) and then United Tomorrow, which featured more of a communist agenda that would suit the average player. I think I even used the quote "Share what you have so that you might take what you need" which I believe I lifted from Communist propaganda.

Once I got the UT boards running in February or March of 2008, I convinced some other LESIG members to register accounts and help me seed the forum with threads. I had seen some other attempts at RP forums and the one thing I had really noticed was that the main reason they would fail was due to lack of conversation by the player members. I think typically they would expect the players to make the threads and keep them going, but that's unrealistic. Players need to have examples to look at and encourage their own RP. So I and my fellow LESIGers began the task of seeding dozens of subforums with threads and posts of all types. I believe I had somewhere between 20 and 50 accounts on that forum and accounted for most of the posts and chatter. I held all the veteran positions in UT as well (the ones with white and gold forum names)

My biggest regret was that I did not have enough time to plan regular events for members of the UT community. The idea was to have one in-game event per week and we did manage to have 2 or 3 events during the course of UT, with the help of some LESIG volunteers. But there's really only so much that a one-man show could provide the players so United Tomorrow really failed to deliver in that regard.

Ooh, another big part of United Tomorrow was the idea of having players gain access to more and more information within the organization as they climbed the ranks. It took a long time to figure out how to mod the forum so that I could have automatic player ranks based on date joined AND post count. It was originally just date joined and I think some players were upset later when I figured out how to do both and they were instantly demoted. To those who got up there, there was a "War Room", a "Peace Room" and a "Black Ops" subforum. The War Room dealt with ways that UT could manipulate the balance of power in the Matrix universe and featured some objectives regarding current events. The Peace Room was similar to the War Room, but dealt with treaties and alliances. The Black Ops forum then had some very curious missions available that tied into the greater story. Then there was the upper level forums that featured major spoilers about United Tomorrow's goals. Unfortunately, we never reached the point where United Tomorrow would have gone to war and the need for intrigue and espionage would have begun.

As for my forum personas, the ones I remember are: Mr. X (the leader of UT, aka Henry), Mr. J (Jakkaal of Syntax), M (MissEmm of Recursion), :) (SurrogateSmile of Vector), Mr. Book (possibly an archivist), Isis (her avatar was Jada Pinkett Smith :P), Gray Knight (I tried to make him sound like a jaded Ghost), Miss Orange (EPN counter to Mr. Blue), Mrs. B (some kindly old woman from Zion who comes across as everybody's grandmother), Icebreaker (Zion hacker), Mistress L (some sort of Dominating lupine), Mr. Raven, Mr. Slate (definitely a machinist), Mr. Blue (Cyph counter to Miss Orange), Mr. G (tried to make him come across like an Oligarch), Loki (there was a lot of Jokerishness in that one).

Oh, can't forget Dr. Watch, who certain players knew was awaiting extraction from the tunnels in the Real at some uncertain date in the future. ;)

Just finishing my third year of physics at UCSB. Not fun at all.

Took general relativity, cosmology, and classical mechanics II this quarter, along with late modern philosophy. Was also taking observational astrophysics but had to drop it.

I'm more interested in engineering but I thought the physics degree would be more marketable. Hopefully this summer I'll be continuing work in robotics and AI development though.

Oh funny story, a lot of the desert images used in the hunt for Mauser mini-game that Vogt made were taken in the area near where I live. I was just reminded of that.

mantra777 wrote:

Would You have anything to do with those mysterious Morpheus Sim HEX Codes?

Since I'm not entirely sure what the Morph Sim hex codes were, I think it's safe to say no.

Hydrazine wrote:

Entropi was great. I enjoyed interacting with her in secret and finding you sneeking around here and there.  You're stories were always above and beyond and on great scales with twists and turns.

I thought your stories were great but I couldn't be involved with them because they frustrated me too much.  I was pretty miffed to find out you go afk with a running macro while we stood around for hours trying to figure out just the right thing to say to get a response.  There was no one home! lol

I was there when the watchmaker was fixed and was taken out by the Agent and was impressed with the folks that helped you out because I knew it must've taken a lot of patience.

I interacted with the joker on vector a few times, he was completely insane and very suicidal lol

 

Well, TheWatchmaker's macros ran while I was at work so that people could get more exposure to the story. 6414's running macros were more of a taunting mechanism, although I had specific conditions planned that would get responses from her. I think only one person ever managed to trigger a response and he didn't realize what he had done to do it.

Wolfess wrote:

The final issue was then that I couldn't get a hold of our ex-member olink, who had control of the 01mainframe website, to help me upload it. I had been able to get in touch with him originally, and he gave me ftp access to the domain, but then I was having trouble with something and couldn't reach him to help straighten it out. :/ So I'm sorry you guys. It was something I was really excited about, but never got to make it happen.

Aww, I wish I had known about that. I had a lot of experience with setting stuff up on 01mainframe and I also had a pretty stable line of communication with Olink.

Conrac wrote:

10011 wrote:

Conrac wrote:

Did the matrix characters assigned to various data items on the Pamela images have any significance. If so what did it mean ?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you're asking about the significance of the images and text in the Joker nodes.

To write the Joker nodes, I really just put myself into the twisted state that allowed me to RP 991 and then just wrote stream of consciousness about whatever came to mind. Then I added excerpts from my girlfriend's psychology textbooks, Sun Tzu's Art of War, various articles about the future of AI, some pieces of art that I seemed to suit 991's interests. The result was a 88-page word document of 38,000 words. I added some player artwork and tried to connect relevant text with it. I also raved about various characters from the Matrix universe and speculated on their true intentions.  I really loved the twisted images of the Oracle that I did with my basic photoshop skills at the time. There was some stuff about players that was either from previous Joker encounters or intended for future ones. And I also threw in a few interesting forum threads that nobody probably noticed. One about whether machines could lie and... I forget the other one. I was really trying to add a lot of player recognition to the nodes. I wanted people to say "Hey, that's me!"

Umm... I'm not sure if I've really answered your question... Moving on...

Yeah I guess i could have phrased that better, but the genesis of the Nodes was interesting background as well.

 

I was asking about the Matrix font characters appended to the various data tags in the Pamela target images.

Oh. No, those were just there to add the feeling of something Matrix-y. Clearly those glyphs were used a lot in the films with no real significance and I continued with that. Although I think in a few instances I put minor messages in them as easter eggs.

mantra777 wrote:

10011 wrote:

mantra777 wrote:

Can these please be Declassified now that we can't pretty much dig deeper down our rabbit hole???

 

If you have any questions about the story, you can have them answered by its creator here: http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300028810

Before the game ends, I'm willing to answer any remaining questions about my stories. Although some questions about Keep Your Eyes Open will have to remain unanswered until the release of the final puzzle.

I speak of those Error messages that once decoded a series of spaced numbers from 1 thru 9 and HAVE NO ZEROS at all...

Oh, I think you'll want to read my answer to Conrac's question here: http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300028810

It was an unfortunate brick wall at the end of the tunnel.

zeroone506 wrote:

What was Paul Chadwick's involvement in those storylines (he did mention it in some interview, or Fain Faire, whatevah, and said he couldn't give away anything)? Didn't he once write an RP blog from the perspective of some bluepill, who encountered a "faceless clown" somewhere on the street?

Would be intrigued to get to know about that (as, of course, all the rest as well).

Paul Chadwick had no real involvement with my story, although I recall the incident you mentioned. I think it might have been at the SOE Block Party in San Diego where Paul Chadwick did an interview. One of the players asked him if he was responsible for the Joker character who had recently attained fame on all 3 servers. I think I recall Chadwick giving some cryptic answer like you mentioned "I wouldnt want to give anything away". Bonus points if anyone can find a recording of that, I'd love to have it posterity.

Anyways, after hearing him provide some vague recognition for me, I got his email from his blog and sent him a full overview of what material I had produced for the Joker storyline at the time. I never got a response, but he must have read it and liked it because the next issue of The Sentinel had a personal ad that directly quoted the first line of Doctor Rajlich's "Tier 1" journal: "I must be saying obsession is a terrible thing." More bonus points if someone can link to that issue of The Sentinel.

zeroone506 wrote:

interesting bluepills on MySpace, etc.

Didn't he once write an RP blog from the perspective of some bluepill, who encountered a "faceless clown" somewhere on the street?

You reminded me of something else I worked on years ago that I had forgotten.

Back during the MySpace craze, I made MySpace pages for two bluepills, Chad Williams and his girlfriend. I happen to forget her name and can't find it. Their pages and blog entries provided some perspective on what it was like to be a bluepill. For example, Chad's girlfriend and her friends went to Club Succubus for Halloween and her friend went into the back with a man and never came back. She wrote about her agitation trying to find her friend and the unhelpfulness of the police. Then there was a sudden transition where she never mentioned the incident again and started talking about her new friend.

Chad Williams lived in an apartment above Debir Court and wrote a series of blog entries about a homeless man in the courtyard without a shirt (who happened to be TheWatchmaker) and then after the Watchmaker Finale, Chad noticed a strange man making noise in the courtyard. When he looked at the man, he looked back and Chad could have sworn he had no face, alluding to The Joker's supposed facelessness behind his signature bandana.

Their MySpace pages also had lots of photos of them attending the Piece of Blue Sky concert together, which was also around that time.

Conrac wrote:

Finally, What was the encryption method used on the primary node. I know the first pass was base64. what did you do to generate the numbers ?

This one has always been a sore point for me and it was simply a case of me creating layers and layers of puzzles and then having no extraordinary content to put at the top. When it came down to the most extreme level of information that the Joker would have access to, I didn't have a whole lot to offer. As a LESIG member, I really didn't have any story information beyond a normal player. I was able to give away lots of info pertaining to my own story, but the value of that information was only proportional to the puzzle-solvers interest in my story. Since Rare didn't have any special insider information to offer me (the Oligarchs would have been a nice touch), I was forced to just leave an unbreakable code to represent the intel that 991 inevitably would have had about those particular characters.

In reality, it was just random strings of numbers.

Later, I thought about relating it back to the story and having those numbers be relevant for cracking "Pandora's Box", but since I never had a chance to make it, I never had to worry about it.

Anyways, many apologies for any lost time spent trying to crack a random string of numbers.

Conrac wrote:

Did the matrix characters assigned to various data items on the Pamela images have any significance. If so what did it mean ?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'm guessing you're asking about the significance of the images and text in the Joker nodes.

To write the Joker nodes, I really just put myself into the twisted state that allowed me to RP 991 and then just wrote stream of consciousness about whatever came to mind. Then I added excerpts from my girlfriend's psychology textbooks, Sun Tzu's Art of War, various articles about the future of AI, some pieces of art that I seemed to suit 991's interests. The result was a 88-page word document of 38,000 words. I added some player artwork and tried to connect relevant text with it. I also raved about various characters from the Matrix universe and speculated on their true intentions.  I really loved the twisted images of the Oracle that I did with my basic photoshop skills at the time. There was some stuff about players that was either from previous Joker encounters or intended for future ones. And I also threw in a few interesting forum threads that nobody probably noticed. One about whether machines could lie and... I forget the other one. I was really trying to add a lot of player recognition to the nodes. I wanted people to say "Hey, that's me!"

Umm... I'm not sure if I've really answered your question... Moving on...

Conrac wrote:

I had a problem getting three of the  "ley lines" to converge ... I managed to resolve two of them (although factoring the outgoing frequencies still proved to be a problem. however the one I marked Mara 3 (on page 9 of the unidentified Broadcast thread) ran of in the direction of tabor Park. What was that all about ?In one of the Pamela Target images an area of the image was marked as anomalous .. Was that a easter egg reference to the Morpheus Sim ?  Was it desgned to be RP'ed out some way ? If so what happened with that ?

Lets just say that while I do make mistakes from time to time, this was not one of them. It was a very subtle tie to the continuation of the 991 story, but the people who were aware of it on the 991 end never met up with the people who were aware of it in-game.

This is something I'll explain at the very end. I think that when Keep Your Eyes Open ends, I will make a master timeline that explains everything chronologically from the origins of 991 through the end of this July.

Conrac wrote:

First of all exactly what was "The Tower" ?  I had a few possibilities I came up with, including a web blog for hard core gamers I ran across one day or a reference to a Tower I ran across in the Prima guide. What did you have in mind ? Were you trying to talk Rare into allowing us to make a trip to the "ascension" island construct that was never released into the game as part of the Joker event ?

"The Tower" as it was vaguely mentioned in some of my writings, particularly Dr. Rajlich's journals, was a sort of private and underground club where redpills, Exiles, and even some members of the bluepill underground would meet to exchange information. The name "The Tower" is applied to the place where these people meet, although the location would change every time they meet in order to preserve the safety of the group.  So The Tower could be anywhere in the city at any particular moment in time, although most likely to be found in some seedy underground location like a basement or underground bar.  Rajlich writes about The Tower as a place where he would go to exchange information about 991. I'm not sure where else I might have referenced it.

Players made the assumption that it referred to the "ascension" island construct on their own and turned it into a red herring. There was never a connection to that construct as far as I was concerned.

I did actually write The Tower into the BA52 story as a place where players had to go and meet with random exiles played by LESIG but we'll see if that ever bears fruit.

mantra777 wrote:

10011 wrote:

mantra777 wrote:

Can these please be Declassified now that we can't pretty much dig deeper down our rabbit hole???

 

If you have any questions about the story, you can have them answered by its creator here: http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300028810

Before the game ends, I'm willing to answer any remaining questions about my stories. Although some questions about Keep Your Eyes Open will have to remain unanswered until the release of the final puzzle.

I speak of those Error messages that once decoded a series of spaced numbers from 1 thru 9 and HAVE NO ZEROS at all...

What exactly is the question?

Arkiya wrote:

Does anyone know if people can still resub, or are the doors firmly shut now? I have a couple of friends I couldn't reach who've been out of town, but I know they wanted to be here for the end.

We won't know for sure until someone tries to sub today. Even the people at SOE seem confused as to what will work after the 1st.

Just have your friends try subbing and see if they can get in.

ZippyTheSquirrel wrote:

Left 4 Dead 2 announcement makes me a sad camper.

Left 4 Dead 1 has been out all of eight months. I hope that by "sequel" they mean to the Xbox version and expansion onto PC.

It seems like an extended expansion to me. Set in the US South with 4 new characters, new special infected, new weapons (including melee weapons), new maps. They also said that it will release with more maps for campaign and versus at launch. Oh, and Survival mode will come built-in at release.

Additionally, they're boasting an improved AI Director 2.0 that will be able to control weather and environment and map characteristics. Made it sound as though the new maps won't be entirely linear, maybe multiple paths to choose.

"Set for Nov. 17 as an Xbox 360 and PC "exclusive", the game will add melee combat, deeper cooperative gameplay and new weapons, including a chainsaw, frying pan, axe and baseball bat.

The game will make use of AI Director 2.0, which Valve says will take the game's dynamic gameplay to the next level. That means the ability to procedurally change weather, world objects and pathways and "tailoring" enemy population, effects and sound."

And I round out the list with Inkblot.

I was mod for a year but when Virrago decided to make the change to unnamed mods and I was given the chance to continue, I decided to devote less time to MxO and more time to school and declined.

I should also add that while we worked together on the Sentinel, Toluca (Gluevane) really championed the process. She was the one who made our articles fit on the page and did the bulk of the compilation and editing, as well as the necessary hounding of Rarebit. Outstanding effort.

Vesuveus wrote:

Who wrote the sentinel, specifically the one with Meretrix's Torgo ad?

The Sentinel issues were a group collaboration, where individuals could volunteer to write specific articles we needed. Then everyone would assist in proof-reading before eventually sending it to Rarebit.

Although Rarebit usually had a mountain of corrections to make before it could go live. Actually, in our defense, we often had a complete Sentinel more than a month before it actually went live, simply because of the Rarebit approval process. It was always very frustrating for us to have it finished and then have to wait as the threads started popping up denouncing that lazy, shiftless LESIG who cant even produce a Sentinel issue every month.

edit: I don't remember whose idea it was to add player's advertisements from the billboard contest.

double edit: haha turns out it was me:
"Another thing I thought of last night. Remember that contest for designing in-game billboards. Well, that didn't really pan out for the players, but those images did become the property of SOE I think. Which means that we could use those advertisements in the Sentinel! I think it would be great if we could adapt those billboard images that players submitted into Sentinel ads. It would save us the time of having to make ads from scratch and it'd be a prestige thing for those players who participated in the contest. Here's the only thread I could find with people's submissions:
http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300005719
Most of them look perfect for a newspaper ad."

Since the Ptolemy's Maps site is no longer active, here is the entirety of Coffin's Nail's remaining journals. They were intended to provide more depth into the 991 story as the Keep Your Eyes Open story wrapped itself up, tying the story back into 991 and its rebirth.

Included here are some entries I hadn't uploaded to Ptolemy's Maps yet:

Set 1:

The glass is cold. There's ice in the glass. I hate when there's ice in my glass. Makes my teeth too cold. Doesn't matter now. I know my teeth aren't really cold and so they aren't. It's been years since I've had ice.

 And now we have come full circle. I guess you have to go backwards to go forwards. I could jack out if I wanted to. I don't want to.

 I could have started dating my journals again. I have rejoined civilization after all. I figure why bother. Time is an illusion created by aging cells. I don't need any reminders of lost time and aging years. I thought I'd have vital information to send back to Zion in these encrypted messages. I was wrong. I don't know where I am. I don't know how I got here. I don't know the secrets of the machines. I don't know anything that Zion cares about knowing. As far as they're concerned, I'm dead. And aren't I?

 I have an office now. It's small but I've gotten accustomed to that, haven't I? There are no walls. Just a pocket of infinite whiteness. Why waste resources rendering walls, shadows, depth, textures. There is a desk and a chair. Comfortable enough not to be a distraction and uncomfortable enough not to be a distraction. The desk has nine drawers. There could be more but nine is good. In one drawer there is an apple. Never forget how rare the crunch of an apple. In another drawer there is a gun. There is always enough ammunition for the gun in the drawer. On the desk there is a computer. Far better than the ones I used to know. There is an Out box and an In box. When I enter the room, the Out box is always empty. The In box is not always full. I have a key to the office. When I open the door, the office is there. Doesn't matter which door. Despite the absence of paper clips, it is perfect.

Set 2:

Approached the bluepill-imposter instance of the 991 program that has been under surveillance. It recognized me on sight. It did not initiate dialogue. Instead, it knocked over a coworker's desk and leapt through a twenty-fourth story window.  Don't need a coroner to know the cause of death. Interesting to learn that it plays by the rules. The rules of gravity, that is. Would think that it could have survived impact, yet it reacted the same as any other bluepill. Other office workers seem only minimally concerned. Machines do a good job of keeping reactions suppressed. Wish I could tell them not to mourn their coworker's death. It was not human. Fortunate that I did not have to execute it in the office. That would have been more difficult to suppress.

As I was examining the contents of its desk, noticed nearby coworker righting desk and arranging papers. He meticulously aligned four pens on the desk surface. Strange how orthogonality and rigid forms provide comfort in this chaotic system. "Creature comforts." As long as individual microcosmic lives are balanced to acceptable parameters, they feel that everything is right with their world.

It isn't.

Cursory examination of the 991-bluepill's computer revealed nothing. Literally nothing. No files pertaining to its bluepill job at the insurance firm and no seditious plots. There was a single word document with the word "Slam." written again and again. The motivation behind the actions, or inactions, of these 991 programs continues to elude me. Next stop is to check out the address listed as place of residence. Don't expect to find much.

 Society conditions us. We grow up knowing lunchtime and dinnertime. Work during the week, play during the weekend. Sleep at night, live at day. We're conditioned to conform to this pattern through every service and function of society. But when you start losing hold of that structure, you discover the basic primal structure of function beneath it. Eat when you need food, sleep when you need sleep. Your body becomes a machine. A device that functions with proper maintenance. Freed from the constraints of conventional temporal structure.

 On the way to the field office, saw a woman, a man, and their child. They looked very happy. Immediately walked into alley. Shot myself. Usual pain as I was kicked from the simulation. In the dark, I remembered my friends. All dead. Cannot hope to embrace love or friendship again. Too many inhuman monsters who abuse the emotions of humans. My humanity continues to afford them too many weaknesses to exploit.

 Was called to a meeting with an Agent and a group of redpills. Skinner was his name. Must be one of the new ones. They were all talking about Morpheus. A palpable excitement in the crowd. Many young faces. Newly awakened but they support the system. Very odd. Wasn't very interested in the discussion, found myself reflecting on Rajlich instead. Never trusted him, thought he was part of 991's game. Still a possibility, but I find myself believing that he was sincere after all. Maybe he really was just a man trapped between worlds and looking for help. I gave him none. Other news. The war has been over for months. I was never told. Zion is allowed to recruit openly now as long as they follow certain rules. A truce. Explains all the young faces. Don't think this change will affect me.  Besides, it happened months ago and I was not yet even aware of it. I will continue protecting them from the threat they cannot see. Cannot be allowed to see. ...Contamination. I did not consider this. With many naive newly awakeneds, 991 may take advantage. Either to begin new experiments and games or to garner support. I can only imagine a force of Zionists aiding the program. Disastrous. Will have to be careful to control access to the case files.

 I haven't left the office for... a long time. I was going to say days, but I realized I don't know. It could have been weeks. There is a large volume of material to cover. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of log files from multiple sources. The 991 program's ability to manifest itself in a variety of forms, combined with the fact that it pursues many different activities within the simulation, makes it very difficult to distinguish between instances of 991 and other exile programs. I believe 991 relies on this ambiguity to hide its actions and obscure its true intentions. It may be difficult and undoubtedly thankless work, but I will need to determine a motive or a pattern before I can start intercepting these programs and deleting them. However that works. The machines haven't given me any information on that front yet. I don't even know if they can be deleted. Maybe with some sort of virus inserted into the shell. Maybe with a bullet. Time will tell.

 I discovered some sort of machine technology. It monitors neurokinetics and stress levels. At critical stress levels, it safely initiates a jackout. As near as I can tell, this technology could keep me from being killed in the simulation. Unfortunately, there weren't exactly any manuals and specifications lying around. Sure, it would be nice if it worked. I'm not planning on going out and putting it to the test anytime soon. Something like this would radically change the war for Zion. No more death. A chance for peace? I will see if I can find more information. Over and out.

 No sign of 991 yet since I have returned to the simulation. I didn't expect this from it. It spent so long watching me, taunting me, toying with me. Now I've come back and it does nothing. Is it resisting its nature? I hope it does not disappoint. So long I ran from this twisted creature. No longer. It can do nothing to me. All it can do is kill me, and ending this game with my death would only be a joke on it. And even if I must be bait so that the machines can kill it, then so be it. I will keep studying the data until I learn how to find 991 myself. If it won't come to me, then I'll come to it.

A pocketwatch was waiting on my desk when I returned to the office. I had not left it there. It didn't strike me as a gift from the system. A quick scan revealed nothing. Opened it. Inside was Mari's photo. I exited to the courtyard without a word and threw it into a dumpster. I have its attention now. As I eliminate more of its resources, it will have no choice but to pay greater attention. Must be very careful in coming weeks. I deleted her photo from my encrypted files. That was my last piece of her. Her ghost will haunt me no more.

 Sometimes I wonder why I'm here.

 I guess I'm technically a federal employee. My badge gets me into the local field office. I wonder where else my badge gets me. I'm not sure if I should push my luck testing. Today I wanted to test the properties of various firearms. That's why I went looking for a firing range. As a redpill, you become accustomed to seeing certain irregularities within the simulation. After awhile, you stop paying attention to the things that don't make sense. I am trying to rediscover these irregularities. Lately, I have become increasingly aware of the system of rules that governs the simulation. As much bending of said rules that goes on here, those rules cannot be broken. I can only imagine what would happen to the system if redpills started flying around the city or spitting fireballs. These rules provide a sort of safety net. I want to know just how much give that net has.  I imagine I will be making more frequent trips to the firing range in the future.

 I woke up outside the simulation. I hate when that happens. The machines have cut my access to the Matrix. I don't know why. They're not telling me anything. So I just sit here alone in the dark and write. I don't like it out here. My body feels soft and weak. I'd like to ignore it, but I can't. It festers in the back of my mind. It's colder than I remember. Nothing to see, nothing to do. I can't hope to sleep like this. Sometimes when this happens, I take solace in counting primes. 2. 3. 5. 7. 11. 13. 17. 19. 19. Always 19. 9+9+1=19. Maybe 991's obsessions are the key to destroying it. It can't seem to deny its compulsions. If it were human, I'd call them unconscious impulses. But it is a construct of coded rules. Why then the obsessions? Why couldn't they simply be reprogrammed? Each time I attempt to determine an answer, I find myself reverting to thinking of things in human terms. How is it that of the machines, it’s the broken ones that seem almost human?

 I encountered two redpills in the park. Not sure if they support the system or not. Not my concern. They were talking about a machine program called "The Architect." Immediately, this caught my attention. They warily allowed me to approach. They claim that a single program is responsible for designing the entirety of the simulation. Furthermore, they claim that this was not the first attempt. This seems to corroborate what I have seen in the records, although I didn't understand what I was seeing before. This would mean that 991 is not from the current iteration of the simulation, but a previous one. Would definitely explain some of the inconsistencies. Will need to investigate information pertaining to previous iterations.

 I realize that I have become accustomed to a fully virtual existence. Eating has become a memory to me. Sleep is not what it once was. It is an odd thing, to look back and remember these essential functions with nostalgia. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the afternoon. A cup of noodles while waiting for late-night breakthroughs. A quick snack on the crew deck. Eating the last ration cube and not knowing how long it would be before I ate again. I have become a stranger to the progression of time. I have inadvertently remade myself in the image of the machine and the humor there is not lost on me.

 I retrieved Mari's photo from the safety deposit box. I could wait no longer. The fear of losing her face forever overpowered the inherent danger in retrieving it. I will add it to my personal files. Encrypted, as if that would stop anyone. Perhaps a picture frame for my desk then. The sunset works wonders on her hair. I will always love her. In death, I will love her forever.

 I was given a case file. Incidence 5.991. This is the information I have been waiting for. It was not as helpful as I had expected. The story of Vaere was not listed. Unknown truth or handy fabrication? I will have to decide. Either way, I will let it stay missing from the file. It's too bad I didn't erase the logs before I left Zion. 991 doesn't deserve any sympathy.

One thing stands out to me again and again. Persistence of survival. The agents have been playing hide and seek. Single eliminations will be useless against a diversely distributed and self-sustaining network. Will have to research alternative methods.

 Thought of Doctor Rajlich today. Trusted him too late. Now he is dead and his insights are gone. He tried to talk to me about 991. I would not listen. I was as foolish then as I am now. Crying over lost opportunities is worthless. I will place a search for relevant criteria and move on.

 Today I investigated a man who told his psychiatrist he was repeatedly abducted by faceless aliens. Grunt work. I want to be out deleting instances of 991's programming structure, not discussing the delusions of an elderly man. The system can sort the bluepills out. I exist to destroy 991.

Sleep. Sleep now. Body finally reaches limits. Sleep.

I am lost. Where do I belong? I feel these hands grabbing me, trying to pull me under. I am tangled in the wreckage. we float at sea. I struggle to untangle myself. I cast debris aside. I am adrift. I float on a sea of tranquility.

mantra777 wrote:

Can these please be Declassified now that we can't pretty much dig deeper down our rabbit hole???

If you have any questions about the story, you can have them answered by its creator here: http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300028810

Before the game ends, I'm willing to answer any remaining questions about my stories. Although some questions about Keep Your Eyes Open will have to remain unanswered until the release of the final puzzle.

Procurator wrote:

Well done to the minds behind this, and to those who solved it!

It was more or less just one mind behind it, and thank you.

If you have any questions about the story, feel free to ask them here: http://forums.station.sony.com/mxo/..._id=36300028810

I'd like to host a little Q&A session before we're all gone. Spill the beans on all the remaining mysteries.

I found these humorous clips from when players were interrogating ZAITSOProxy. I had several very specific cues planned that would trigger the information and everything else would lead to annoying and repetitive chatter. And believe me, my roommate and I had so much practice playing with DR SBAITSO, "Let's talk about exciting stuffs."

Tseng. wrote:

10011, all those times ininja hit on you while you where entropi. so you know, he knew you where a guy but still kept on.

I had forgotten ininja, it's been so long. He was like my first and only MxO stalker (aside from the enterprising Othinn). Somehow ininja had gotten ahold of my MSN and he used to send me stuff. I could swear I remember having a video of him dancing at his computer. And... badgers. I should search my comp.

SEPET got to be pretty close to stalkerish with Kisoku though, as Diced would discover:

Okay, I'll get you the complete list of everything listed in the profiles folder. It's funny, Schwartzwald is in there dozens of times because he kept getting deleted and moved to another server every day.

I'll look up the mcd.cfg too. You only need the details for Entropi and BrickDissuader?

And for the 2800 screenshots, it might be easier if I put them in a .rar or something. I don't want to have to upload them one by one.

The chatlogs will probably take me some time to get to you because I'm not sure I'll have time for it for awhile and editing them could be very tedious given their length. But I promise I will do my best to get them to you eventually.

Winter of 2007... Hard at work on the thermal map in Photoshop.

What's his power level?
Over nine-thousannnnnnnnd!!!

Villemar_MxO wrote:

Thinking about the old days, who was our first Mero liason on Vector, Entropi?  Good times farming PB3 boxes in SVC with her. 

I can't believe you'd forget Entropi, Vill. She was pretty much the only Vector Merv LO for almost 2 years. Baelroth did 2 LEs with her, but I think other than that she was the only LO.

LET was great about farming her to 50. You guys took it so seriously. It wouldnt have been an issue if the Furious Angels and Cyphs weren't so hellbent on chasing her across Downtown all the time. We had such great PvP battles though. We'd be running missions downtown and FA would ambush us at the hardline and then we'd call in reinforcements and they'd call in reinforcements and we'd have a huge battle in some random part of the city and we'd inevitable be outnumbered by Zion and I'd go running across the city toying with them. I remember I got so good at evading those 50s when she was level 25. Go up one elevator, run to the other elevator, go down to floor 16, stealth, wait 15 seconds, go back to lobby and walk out the front door.

Then start talking to them while stealthed next to them and start the whole chase over again.

Golly, those were the days.

All the mervs were super great and we ran so many missions and PvP-killathons.

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It's funny. You wait 3 years for the game to end so you can go public and make a big fancy goodbye post and then the time comes and you don't know what to say.

I suppose I should start with the names for which I'm best known: SgtSteele, Entropi, TheWatchmaker, TheJokerOfSpades, TheJokerOfClubs, TheJokerOfDiamonds, Strayshot, CoffinsNail, BrickDissuader, The "Keep Your Eyes Open" crew [6414, Caigne, Kabarr, Diced, Phasmata, Kitasu, Kisoku, ToroFurioso, and Piqo], as well as many of the United Tomorrow characters.

Next, I'd just like to say thank you. Thank you Rarebit for giving me the opportunity to be in LESIG and the tools to put on events in MxO. Thank you LESIG for supporting my stories, at least when I wasn't being a lone wolf.  Thank you Paul Chadwick for mentioning me in an issue of The Sentinel.  And thank you, members of my audience, for supporting my stories and playing along. Thank you for making me believe that I could make it as a writer some day.  I've had such a great 3 years here and, while I'm glad that I don't have to leave wondering how MxO is doing without me, I'm sorry it has to end.  I hope that many of you stay in touch in the future via my blog.

I've had a lot of names in the Matrix Online. 10011 from the start. Bodhisattva in LESIG. Message_Buffer for posting story stuffs. Inkblot the volunteer forum mod.  Outside the Matrix, I'm a 21-year old physics major at UCSB. Next year I'll be graduating and hopefully getting a job continuing my work on robotics.
Back when I started MxO, I was still in high school. I was 10011 the Vector machinist. I was the faction leader of ASSIMILATION, which was a fairly unremarkable PvP faction aside from the fact that Bayamos was in it. I enjoyed the game for the first few months, LEs and private meetings with Agent Gray, but after the events dried up, so did my interest and I quit. I probably never would have come back to MxO if it weren't for one fateful story that cognoscente from Vector told me about the afk data-mining exploit. Eager to come back and try it out for myself, I logged into the forums and discovered an invitation to LESIG. It's very funny to think that if I hadn't been trying to exploit the game, I never would have come back and written all those stories.

After joining LESIG, I had the pleasure of becoming one of the first commandos on Syntax: SgtSteele. That was a fun acting experience and we LESIG really had a blast reviving the players' interest in the game.
Soon thereafter, Rarebit announced the Liaison positions and once again, I jumped at the offer. I immediately knew that I was going to be the liaison for the Vector Mervs and that I was going to be the saucy and impetuous Entropi. Fortunately the "cant LO your home server" rule wasn't in place at the time, although I had no ties to the Vector machinists anyways by that time, with my faction gone and Bayamos having been banned. I'm not entirely certain, but I think I can lay claim to having been the first LO ever, as I was the first to be publicly introduced by the Merovingian in a private meeting with Merv faction leaders.
My time as Entropi was wonderful and the Mervs were great and extremely enthusiastic about the RP-PvP we did. To my surprise, the Zion and Mech players also took quite a liking to me and we had our share of hostility and name-calling as Entropi leveled all the way to 49. As Merv LO, I also had the pleasure of laying claim to some of the best events each month. Most notably, I remember claiming the very first Twin reintroduction. I think I might have done one of the first events involving org areas too, but I don't recall. Anyways, it was wonderful fun and I managed to pick up ~500 CQs along the way. That was my senior year in high school and I had only 2-3 classes per day and a robotics job in the late afternoon, so I had a tendency to spend long lunches jacked in.

Of course, I began to develop an interest in trying to recreate events on the scale of what the old LE team produced and the Watchmaker was born. Once again, I think I can brag and say that I produced the first LESIG event back then in January of 2006. The Watchmaker began as just a random character that I intended to provide chit chat on the bench at Mara C. But as players discovered him and talked with him, they grew convinced that there was more to him than meets the eye. So naturally, I was forced to craft a 2-month story for them to unravel. First came the quest to decipher the Watchmaker's macroed looping error message and determine the proper steps to fix him.  I don't know if anyone remembers the binary code hidden in his pants, but that was amazing.  With macros, his pants flashed black and white to spell out a binary message.
After players fixed him, they discovered that a portion of his timing code had been stolen and could pose a potential threat to the Matrix. The players then had to run checks of specific hardlines throughout the city, with the help of the Watchmaker's pal Mercury (the Uriah mission contact) in order to uncover messages that had passed through those hardlines. Now, these messages were from the various mission contacts around the city and I spent a lot of time researching their mannerisms and backstories before writing those messages. Through reading the messages and solving a simple puzzle, players discovered that Grisaille was to blame and was trying to engineer a virus that would incapacitate his father, Mr. Black, so that he and his siblings could usurp his power and take control of his substantial holdings. I often consider this to be my best story and closest to the heart of the Matrix Online.
Unfortunately, with the end of the story, it also meant the end of the Watchmaker. That event had a really spectacular finale, with the Oracle arriving to thank the players and the Watchmaker, before hugging him goodbye and apologizing. There was a crowd of quite a few people there. I could maybe exaggerate it to a hundred people. The instant they saw Agent Harris show up at Debir Court, they knew something was up. And they really surprised both me and Rarebit. Everyone screaming "Nooooooo" and yelling at Agent Harris and trying to break his Admin bubble. We put on a rather dramatic show for them. I'll put up some screenshots when I have a chance.

As for the Joker and the rest... I'm going to need a little more time to write about that but I have to be dressed for my girlfriend's sorority formal in 20 minutes so I must leave now. Thank you all for being such a wonderful audience for my stories.

Please check out my blog (http://binaryvisions.wordpress.com/) which I will hopefully continue to update with supplementary material and anecdotes about MxO. Also, if you have any unanswered questions about my stories and the things I did in MxO, please ask them here and I'll do my best to leave no question unanswered. I'll continue my nostalgia trip later with the Jokers, Keep Your Eyes Open, and United Tomorrow.

Oh, and as you may have noticed, I found an old sig I used years ago after the Watchmaker. Enjoy!

ShiXinFeng wrote:

if there was any one LESIG member that could be said to have kept Rarebit from going off the deep end on things, it was Vogt.

If there was any one LESIG member that could be said to have kept Vogt from going off the deep end on things, it was me.

<3 Vogt. He had a great technical mind for puzzles. I was sad to see him leave.

I also want to give props to Olink of the Glitch Society from Syntax. He was the one who kept 01mainframe running for as long as it did and he did so for more than a year after the quit MxO. He also briefly joined me as Vector Merv LO as Baelroth.

Oh, and some other people who deserve a little appreciation: Acheronia, Banshae, BloodlustV, Systematica. Along with myself, we are all that remains of the original LESIG invites. We've been with the program for 3 years now working to make MxO a slightly more immersive world. And we'll be here til the end, it seems.

Oh, and Wolfy, you left one of your "artworks" out:

Hey Othinn.

First of all, I don't have the character details for Entropi and BrickDissuader. I checked.

I updated the "About" section of my blog with all the character names that were listed in the Profiles folder in my MxO directory, so that should give you all the character names that I know about at the moment. I omitted all the random broken program names as they didn't have any interesting details anyways, just "This program appears to be broken."  There's some others that are on a different account that I ran on a different computer that I can look up at the end of June.

I was considering just sending you my entire collection of MxO screenshots if you want them. Almost all of them are of LESIG chars or LE chars. And quite a few of them have dialog of people talking to my characters. Sheesh, looks like I have quite a few archives.
There's 162 of 10011 before he joined LESIG, 541 that look like a mix of Entropi, TheWatchmaker, SgtSteele, and the Jokers. Then 811 of mostly Entropi and the Jokers, but a few from the start of the KYEO storyline. Those 811 also include lots of images from the Joker finale, including the Morpheus sim code bombing. My last archive has 499 screenshots of the crew.

Then my current screenshot folder has another 800 of the crew. Some quick math... and... about 2800 screenshots total. They're yours if you want.

Oh, and those last two sets of screenshots are largely taken through the eyes of the crew, which makes for some interesting vantage points.

I also have LOTS of chatlogs, but I might want to go through those and censor portions that contained private conversations between myself and other LESIG members, so those might take longer to get to you.