I am merely conveying what the mystery's author has commented.
Personally, I'm not sure that I meet the 'who' criteria, as I don't spend ages looking at the skybox, lining systems up and pouring through my old Classics textbooks.
So you want to know about the Formidine Rift? (Part 3)
- Thread starter Legacy_LuckyLuke
- Start date
I am merely conveying what the mystery's author has commented.
Personally, I'm not sure that I meet the 'who' criteria, as I don't spend ages looking at the skybox, lining systems up and pouring through my old Classics textbooks.
Masheikh Scytale
Banned
I know, my friend. Willingly provocative in order to try induce some kind of reaction from FDevs ...but shhhhh ..don't tell them
It's a bit of a stretch. You could argue that Alioth is a core world, as opposed to a frontier or edge system. However Alioth is not part of the old worlds (the Lave cluster) and did not exist in Elite or Oolite.
Alioth was included in FE2, but lived an anonymous life there. In FFE Alioth came to the forefront, with the inclusion of the Alliance. It was also center stage in the Thargoid missions.
I really hope not. I trust that Drew is a mature enough author not to go all Mary Sue / monsterbate over this, and is willing to progress plot without the presence of his creations.
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I don't think that's fair. Drew is a mature enough author to know that when you set up a cliffhanger, like the end of Reclamation, readers expect it to pay off. Kahina and Hassan went out looking for the Rift at the end of Reclamation. Maybe THEY have already found it and we're just playing catch-up. I think Drew is clever enough to find a satisfying way for us, the players, to unravel the mystery without ruining an important plot point for his upcoming novel. Besides, Kahina is far too imperfect to ever be mistaken as a Mary Sue.
You misunderstand.
I am trusting that Drew is *not* going to pull the afor-mentioned 'you cannot ultimately solve plot and meet resolution without my fave NPC' stunt, so loved by bad writers and bad game GMs alike.
![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
I will be disappointed if we are 'obliged' to find the answer in order for the solution to be included in the new novel.
Throwing increasingly obvious clues out in order to force a resolution is little better than having Salome show up and say 'yeah, I knew all along'.
If we solve it, include it in the novel. If we don't, it stays a mystery.
This is EXACTLY what I don't want.
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been using this
Coordinate Converter
What I was thinking about is what radius for a given distance the search area should be. In truth this could be over before it starts via the armchair voyaging of EDD, EDSM and the galmap by converting any candidate's galmap coordinates into spherical and the one that's closest to the target is the winner. At least that's a validation phase.
Maybe Fdev will slip Tycho and Cass A in with Guardians.
The hard part was a not a mathematician trying to determine the correct terms to goggle.
I've always expected, not increasing obvious clues, but more clues to be doled out that would make the resolution increasingly obvious. I think that it is pretty clear that, without some more clues, we're mostly chasing our tails.
I think there are two problems that the Rift mystery has, from the point of view of both author/developers and the players, that are an obstacle to solving it pre-2.2 (who knows what clues we'll get in that...).
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The first problem is that it has been possible to find since launch so, theoretically, it could be solved by anyone at any time (Drew has said something before about being hopeful that a lone wolf pilot just figures it out, or words to that effect as I understand it). That means any plot points the author/developers decide to plan out could all get thrown aside in a single forum post with supporting screenshots/video. As players, it would be bad if it were like the recent Hunt and that was it, all over and done with. This is why Drew has said it's not a POI - it won't be over and done with if it is found: it will be more like finding the first step. An analogy might be not so much trying to find our way out of a maze but to find the entrance to one from outside. There will be more to the mystery for us to investigate (even if we have to wait for the next update).
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The second problem is that the mystery is so obscure it is going to waste a lot of players' time investigating it, when we have no idea what we're really looking for, or where (to any significant degree of accuracy). There are a lot of really smart people here and in the Canonn but it's not like someone who reads Reclamation immediately knows to go check out systems x,y,z and post screenshots of whatever it is that's meant to be special there. This is a game design problem more than a storytelling problem: as I understand it we are being warned that another civilisation, advanced enough to be a significant threat, is operating in the vaguely-defined region of space known as the Formidine Rift. The game does not provide much for us to discover that would reveal the presence of such a race, without POIs like space stations and alien ships in supercruise, which, as described above, are not what we are looking for, at least not directly, for now. Therefore, we have to depend upon the 'right person' just noticing that something is odd when passing through the right area, be that an unusual concentration of Earth-like/Ammonia Worlds or systems with depleted resources or something else. It is quite possible that, even then, they might just dismiss the discovery as an oddity and move on: even someone who had read Reclamation might not realise it was what Kahina et al. were looking for.
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The end result of the two problems is likely to be that the story moves on without us finding the solution. (Sorry for the pessimism - I just think the odds are stacked against us solving it, as 2 years of searching has found nothing). That does not mean that we need more clues, it just means that the story takes a different branch. Another analogy (from what I've read about another video game story Drew's involved in; I've not played the game itself, though) is like the Lords of Midnight game: you have a realm facing invasion and limited sight over your nation's land, so you have to search out the location and strength of the invading forces; fail to find them and the entire army can suddenly show up on your doorstep and trash your kingdom; find them in time and you have a chance to stop them, or weaken them enough to defeat them later. If we fail to solve this first stage of the Rift mystery then events might move on and we will have other things to look for. If there is another civilisation out there that has designs on our territory, they might be building up their supply lines and as they gradually close in on us we might find these 'signs' in places closer to home than the Rift.
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From the perspective of 2.2 arriving, I think the locations of the Sirius probes in the EAFOTS region and in between EAFOTS and the bubble are going to be noteworthy. Perhaps they may find something before we do...
More clues are definitely required - but equally a clue (or clues) which guarantees that we solve the mystery in a particular timescale is going to need to be particularly obvious.
Look at EAFOTS - we've had that information for a couple of months, large numbers of Cmdrs have invested huge amounts of time and effort in searching that sector and yet, when I stopped by a couple of weeks ago 90% of systems were still untagged. Now sure, there are probably a lot of systems that have been scanned and the Cmdr has not yet sold the information, but we've still barely scratched the surface of just one sector.
Anything less than a set of coordinates (to within a couple of hundred LY) and details of what we're looking for isn't going to get to a solution in the timescales of the book.
Personally, I'd be happy if we DON'T solve in time for the book - or at least, if we do, it's based on the information we have now, not some new 'treasure hunt' clue.
I like that fact this has been in game since the beginning and nobody has found it yet.
TBH, instead of *more* clues, I would be happier for existing clues [both actual and perceived] to simply be listed with 'true', 'false', or 'so obscure as to be akin to numerology, and as deliberately open-ended as prophesy. You can force it to fit twenty different solutions, so you should probably disregard this one because honestly it is opening more possibilities and creating more red herrings than it is actually narrowing things down'.
The problem - as it was after the Berlin Wall came down - is not that we are starved for shreds of intelligence, it is that we are overwhelmed with masses of data which is of questionable meaning and relevance and do not have the capacity to properly eliminate nor confirm anything.
I'm honestly at the point where I'm having more fun creating ridiculous, tinfoil-wrapped red herring theories than actually trying to solve the clues we have now.
Right now I think we need to find a system which has a zoo where there is a giraffe called Eafots, then ride it backwards towards/away from Perseus.
Not sure I am following your thought but in my mind, since the sentence reads "a giraffe", this excludes the first and most obvious choice (Camelopardalis Constellation) in favor of an alternative choice: "a giraffe THAT remembers her daughter's hero". Perhaps another member of the giraffidae family? The Okapi. So EAFOTS (the other clue from her ship) OK-A PI? None of the EAFOTS OK-A systems end in PI but maybe those last two letters indicate something else. Either Pi as in 3.14... or Pi as the 16th letter of the Greek Alphabet? There are indeed 16 EAFOTS OK-A systems but I am not sure which would be considered the 16th one. You don't have to feel bad for me. I am OK with embarrassing myself if there is a chance that it might help in some way
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I would go even one step further: I suspect, that the secrets are known (by Sirius, maybe? or Sirius just doing some serious business for somebody else?) and the probes are not sent to find something, but to secure it from prying eyes ... evil breadcrumps leading the way to the witches' hut ;-)
Not sure I am following your thought but in my mind, since the sentence reads "a giraffe", this excludes the first and most obvious choice (Camelopardalis Constellation) in favor of an alternative choice: "a giraffe THAT remembers her daughter's hero". Perhaps another member of the giraffidae family? The Okapi. So EAFOTS (the other clue from her ship) OK-A PI? None of the EAFOTS OK-A systems end in PI but maybe those last two letters indicate something else. Either Pi as in 3.14... or Pi as the 16th letter of the Greek Alphabet? There are indeed 16 EAFOTS OK-A systems but I am not sure which would be considered the 16th one. You don't have to feel bad about me. I am OK with embarrassing myself if there is a chance that it might help in some way
But if 'giraffe' doesn't equate to Cameleopardalis, that implies that Cassiopeia and Perseus aren't the appropriate interpretations either.
Picking one word in isolation and tying that the EAFOTS leaves us asking what the rest of the clue relates to.
Quite. Nostradamus can predict *anything* by interpreting with hindsight.
I'm personally at the stage of utterly ignoring 90% of clues due to being too easy to read anything into them, and taking more 'solid' clues at absolute face value.
eg: EAFOTS. I'm looking in EAFOTS. If it transpires that EAFOTS is the wrong place because the clue was meant to lead us past there to blindly search the millions of systems on the other side... then that's the clue's failing for being rubbish, not mine for following it!
A bit of a grammatical puzzle isn't it?
On a grammatical technicality it's not the vain queen's daughter but the giraffe's daughter.
But where would that lead?
But wouldn't that be "a giraffe whose daughter remembers her hero" then? Never mind. I am not an English grammar professor and English is not my mother language, so I apologize if this sounds pretentious, that's not my intention. I am just trying to point out that this detail has been nagging me, while at the same time attempting to read between the lines.
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