The ARG has just stalled?

what is happening, been a month now, no new glyphs, nothing on myriad, no videos, no status change, im sure all the passes have been sent out and still its just silence

is this going to kick into action this weekend ?

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How can you be sure ?
Anashel said they will tell us when all passes will be sent so i’m sure all passes haven’t been sent out.

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@DarkbyDesign: I changed the topic category to “Waking Titan - Season 2”, as your topic is about the ARG specifically.

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Actually, I am sure not all the passes have been sent out. Looking at the serial numbers of the ones that have been reported, DevilinPixy estimates only about 30% of the 10,000 passes have been received, despite all regions of the world with appreciable NMS fan bases having received some.

I now believe that the next Waking Titan phase will require us to unlock the remaining 2/3 of the passes to be shipped. Why? Because it gives incentive to those who have not received one to participate in the ARG, and makes people like me, who have already received theirs, want to help others get theirs.

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I’m finally getting to my mailbox in Phoenix tomorrow. That’s the only piece of mail I’m looking for right now. Taxes may be there too.

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Hmmm that is a very curious idea, I would not put it past them to do this.

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I’m sorry. I don’t wish to keep labouring this point, but:

Alice & Smith / Hello Games have entered into a contract with the participants of the first phase of the ARG. They have stated that 10,000 passes will be randomly distributed amongst them.

The Atlas pass is a good. It has value, however small. The organisers have entered into a contract to supply those goods, under specific terms and conditions. They have confirmed their contract in writing.

The organisers cannot now change the terms of that contract. They cannot legally withold a proportion of the passes, contingent upon the recipient completing another phase of the ARG. That wasn’t in the original contract.

In August 2017 the organisers said quite clearly “Waking Titan has ended” Here’s the email header:

In the same email (8th August 2017) they said that all 10,000 passes were in production, and, due to the inevitable delay in international mail, they “may take several weeks to be delivered”. Here it is:

They did not say “We will withold two-thirds of the passes from people who’ve already legitimately won them, and make you jump through some more hoops in six months time”. They can’t legally do that. The process of awarding the passes ended in August 2017.

I know this is not what some people want to hear, but these are the facts. Not in my words, but in the words of the developers.

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Yes, but it says all the passes are in production not transit.
Also, it does legally provide them with the opportunity to distribute the passes to courier companies with instructions for delivery not to be before a certain date. Thus they are posted & in transit as they are now in the possesion of the courier company. Technical loophole.
Thus they abide by their contractual agreement but also apply their own control.
I would not be surprised if it is an effort to integrate some time displacement/loop/delay type of intrique into the ARG while buying time to apply more twists & turns.

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None of us signed a contract or paid any money. The only people A&S have any legal or monetary responsibility to are Hello Games.

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You don’t have to sign. There doesn’t need to be any money. A contract may be express or implied, and still be legally binding.

If I say “Will you marry me?”, and you say “Yes”, that’s a contract. No signature, no money, and not necessarily any witnesses.

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I agree with what Mad-Hatter said. They can have the items ready for delivery but kept in transit until a certain trigger; case in point, the email on the Multiverse website that triggered the sending of Coba TV’s package with his cassette tape.

You want something legally binding? There was a disclaimer on the typeform when we entered our addresses that said we would not receive tracking info for the packages.

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I agree, they can delay delivery. But they still have to deliver all 10,000, and deliver them to the same people who were going to get them in August 2017.

They may pretend that delivery depends on some factor in the upcoming ARG. They may say that batches have been somehow “released”. But in fact, they’re going to have to deliver the same passes to the same people they always were,

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To be clear, I did not estimate 30% to have arrived, the actual amount of arrived passes is likely higher. The 30% is the amount that has been reported, out of the highest documented serial number, which at the time of my writing was 06362. These numbers are purely based on reports, as that is all we have.

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I agree, I never said different people were going to receive the passes than were originally supposed to.

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That’s not my point. My point is that people don’t need to participate in the next phase of the ARG to get their passes. And Hello Games / Alice & Smith would be acting illegally if they tried to force them to.

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They aren’t going to say “you have to participate in the ARG or you won’t get your passes” just like Hello Games is still going to update NMS even if no one does the ARG, and yet the prospect of NMS having an update at the end of the ARG still seems to motivate people to solve the puzzles.

Obviously I could be wrong, but what I envision will happen is we will come across something on a website in the next phase and it will say “You have triggered the mailing of 3000 packages” and a few weeks later another third of the people will receive their Atlas Passes.

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There’s nothing I would disagree with in what you say, at least in terms of what could possibly happen.

For myself, I don’t think they are withholding passes. I think most deliveries are not being reported. But that’s just my personal feeling.

Anyway, thank you for a civil discussion of what could, anywhere else, have become a major fallout zone.

It’s nice to be somewhere civilised, isn’t it?

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I’d be inclined to say (with zero evidence) that maybe a quarter of passes aren’t recorded. Most people who are into this ARG would follow through but some possibly couldn’t be bothered or simply choose not to share details.
Maybe a tiny % go missing.
Whatever guestimation you apply, the numbers don’t add up anywhere near to 10,000.
There are a great number of passes still to arrive…one way or another…at some point…one day.

(runs off to check mailbox again)

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Civilised discussion is one of Atlas-65 (ETARC) greatest attributes. That & a bunch of likable individuals into NMS :grin:

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I wonder how many people in countries like China, Hong Kong, Iran, Singapore, or Pakistan (I’m not singling these out - there are lots of others), are able to play the game, and able to chance the odd contact through their mobile phone (like signing up to CSD), but for whom it is dangerous or impossible to participate in the regular message boards.

I equally wonder how many people in Africa, Asia and the Far East don’t communicate on the boards due to language difficulties. The internet speaks English, but most of the world doesn’t.

I suspect when we look at the usual suspects - (Reditt, Discord, Steam, ETARC, GoG, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc) we English speaking Westerners are only seeing a part (possibly a small part) of the game’s audience.

And in the reports we get back from those forums, how much of the world-wide interest in the game are we missing?

I also look at world-wide trading in game related paraphenalia. The use of Bots to gather in-game gold, skins or outfits, and offer them for sale. And I wonder how long it would have taken experts to set up Bots to farm Atlas Passes. And then I look at the long, contiguous gaps between the reported serial numbers.

And then I think of a study done a few years ago (sorry, I can’t give you the reference) that tracked a popular discussion group - and found the ratio of lurkers to participants was something in the region of 10 to 1. That’s 10 lurkers to every person who actually said something.

And remember, boards like Steam, Reddit, Twitter, and ETARC are public. You don’t need to register to read them.

And then Waking Titan says “Contact this email address, and we’ll send you something nice, for free”.

Is it any wonder we don’t know where most of the Atlas Passes are?

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