Afaik, ANOMALY’s 16th issue was supposed to release on August 9th. The Architect giving an earlier deadline probably means that while they want NMSzine to include that as the final Q&A, they’re also timing this to fit the ARG timeline.
5 Likes
@DevilinPixy @sheralmyst @Polyphemus @Mad-Hatter
Here’s the latest we’ve come up with for a plan on how to organize this and get feedback from relevant communities. Any feedback? We should probably get things setup in the next day to make sure we have time for people to give feedback and get the list of Qs ready for Archie.
- Open a Discord forum for question submissions. 1 hour slowmode. No responses. Default :
: reaction. - Take X questions with a net +Y rating to put into a final poll.
- Put 2x (X from Discord, X from ETARC) questions in a poll on an external site with SSO of some kind.
- Users vote on Z number of the best questions, possibly ranked?
- Pick the top 10 questions to give to Architect.
- Maybe have alternate questions in case the Architect refuses some?
9 Likes
Some questions (inspired by online lists about good conversation starters) 
What is System and when/how did you get involved with it?
Who else knows of System and what are their plans with it?
If you could change anything about your attempts of contacting someone (us) for this project, what would that have been?
Assume everything goes according to your plan. What would you consider the best outcome of Project Skyscraper?
You see a vision of a Wikipedia article about Project Skyscraper after August 2026, what does it say?
Top three things you value in a trustworthy operator?
How well do you know Ghost, which kinds of things do you think you keep secret from one another?
Why was now the time for you to start this project, why not earlier, why not later?
After the project is completed, what would surprise operators (about you or the project)?
Name something new about your project that you learned by working with the Operators?
Project Skyscraper wins the Academy Award for (fill in the blank)…? 
6 Likes
My most burning, but most basic question is still the one I asked via email before the email was public and am yet to get a response on:
What is the purpose of Project Skyscraper?
7 Likes
This is an ARG. The whole point is the mystery, and the gradual discovery.
The very last thing I want is someone answering questions.
7 Likes
Yeah, I don’t want the answers to be revealed in a Q&A before they are revealed in the ARG, either. The Architect offered the Q&A and date, I hope he has a plan with respect to revelations. 
4 Likes
Sometimes how you answer a question can be just as mysterious. He could have a whole lore/event planned out that he alludes to that brings up 100 more questions. Seems to me we will be reaching the climax/reveal or a MAJOR phase shift prior to.
6 Likes
I find it really interesting that the Architect felt the need to clarify that the chat conversation was not a Turing test. That wouldn’t even have occurred to me if they hadn’t said that. And it made me think: does the Architect even have access to the social media accounts? I only ever recall System posting. I also don’t remember the Architect ever posting in English instead of French, but correct me if I’m wrong. Are we sure System is not impersonating the Architect here?
4 Likes
He is likely referring to Waking Titan, Phase 2:
The end of Phase 2 required players to write a Turing test to be administered to Loop16 [Emily], one of which would be selected and administered to the AI. The test that was chosen mentioned Emily’s name directly, and in the responses we were provided, Loop16 appears to answer to her name.
6 Likes
This is why I think some carefully crafted baseline testing questions are a good idea. It will help assess the truth and reliability of the situation and the entity/person.
6 Likes
What has prevented you from coming forward sooner.
1 Like
The only issue with this, it seems, is that the architect wants the full list and will answer to the complete set only. We seemingly don’t have any time to set up a baseline and get answers. Or else I’d love to science and poke this out honestly!
3 Likes
Then as a community there is something we need to know from the architect before finalizing our list. Will there be any more major developments prior to Q&A. That’s going to completely change the scene. If we can’t establish that then we have to assume no.
If he can answer that first freebie we can read a lot into it.
3 Likes
I mean more that those question will give weight to the others, not that there is a second round of questions.
2 Likes
I would say, considering when Tom was contacted and when they were allowed to reveal the prompt for the Q&A, that it is intended to cover up to the end of the current phase.
Any questions relating to what is system/whats its purpose etc or whats currently happening will probably go unanswered or be left with cryptic answers that wont tell us much, since Architect is flabbergasted by its behaviour a lot of the times just as much as we are.
Any questions relating to their goal or other end game stuff will probably be met with a similar resistance.
I feel this is more an opportunity for us to get to know Archie on a more personal level.
Some questions on their background or history before or in the lead up to working on tower/system might bare some fruit, where as direct questions like “are you arnaud?” may be sidestepped completely.
How did you get involved with reviving system and attempting to gain access to tower?
What led to getting ghost involved or was it they who reached out to you?
What is your prior work experience before undertaking this task?
Have you been keeping track of the Operators in jokes/meta puzzles? How do you feel about those, if so?
Were the Operators recruited from the communities you chose due to a former familiarity with system?
Stuff like that…
But mostly, who was the DJ in your town? 
6 Likes
Oo completely misread that, my bad 
I think that’s a really good way to structure the questions honestly. Might be a lil difficult to do with a community selected list while preserving the original questions, but it could be done with a lot of community engagement and working together with the original posters!
1 Like
Just for some additional info and thoughts on the process.
The end goal is a list of 10 questions (assuming in-character) we can all agree on asking Archie.
Some possible concerns:
- Ease of access to provide questions.
Both NMS Discord and this Atlas CSD/ETARC forum likely have the largest and most active group of operators. Can we agree on using just these two for sourcing?- We may however not be the only communities who have an interest.
- Other operators may not have a presence in either of our communities.
- Overlapping presence/activity of operators in active communities.
How is this influencing any results? - Final list of questions for voting.
Should in my opinion contain a list of questions, fairly distilled from the total amount of questions provided. It would certainly help if we source this pre-distilled from a limited amount of communities. Would be great if we can get this list down to 20-25, which is still quite many to go through. - Final voting access.
For final voting, every operator should be able to vote. Neutral ground, without account requirement, might be the best choice? Not everyone is on Discord, nor is everyone having an account with us here on the forum. Cheating?
With how specific Archie stated 10 questions, no more, I don’t think we should have any alternatives.
Info on Discourse Poll creation
4 Likes
Whatever we do, we don’t have a lot of time. And all questions must be listed here on TRACE, per Archie’s demand. So, we need to get started soon.
4 Likes
I totally agree and we should be setting up a topic for gathering questions, which we can ultimately vote on to get a top 10 to provide as our forum submission for the final list to vote on?
I do think we should also ask our users to limit their submissions to x amount of questions to gather in the above yet-to-be-created topic? And do we also ask our users to make a choice to submit either here or on the NMS Discord if they are present in both?
3 Likes
I think limiting at least the initial phase to NMSCord and ETARC is a good option. We can’t coordinate between more than that on such a short timeframe.
I’m sure membership overlap will have some effect, but I’m guessing/hoping it will be negligible in the grand scheme of things.
I think we should have a single location for the final poll. I was thinking 30 in the final poll, 15 from each source. Some will likely repeat across the two sources, so we’ll end up with 25 to 30 questions, from which to select 10.
2 Likes