I suspect #2 but #1 is certainly possible.
The devs have ruled out #3 by their comments:
So I took a moment tonight to go back and once again try and "Unlock the other obelisks" so to speak. No dice.
Truth is, with everything commanders have been doing in solo, and the number of things I've tried across innumerate hours, it's beyond belief that there's something we could've missed. By all means, people can maintain that we still haven't done something right, but the chance that belief is reality is becoming inexplicably small, with the real contender being the activity is simply outright broken.
- First and foremost reason is the adjudication server errors. I can't find the reference at the moment, believe it came from Dav's livestream... it's such a highly reported error it's hard to google-fu that though. This is not a connectivity error between the user and FD... it's most commonly seen when people stack Massacre missions, you get one kill and it sends off 20 mission updates to this server. Slight paraphrasing but pretty close to gospel, this makes the adjudication server very unhappy and why the chance of seeing this error massively increases with stacked missions. Every scan you do at the ruins is obviously causing a similar effect. Despite this, the one or two times out of the literally hundreds I've managed to "survive" and scan everything it's been with A) 5-10 minute gaps between scans, and B) still had no effect.
tl;dr Problem #1; you literally can't interact with 100% of the puzzle.
- BUT. Some people don't seem to have this issue much, NFI why, and they still haven't found any way to unlock new obelisks, despite this puzzle being what, four weeks old, with literally thousands of commanders probably attempting it daily?
- So tell us, what, Jmanis, have you actually tried?
Honestly, nothing that likely hasn't already been tried by many even just trying to find new ruin sites with their hatter-hypotheses. My attempts to unlock other obelisks have included:
1. Scanning every obelisk correctly (this took close to three hours in my attempt to avoid adjudication errors, which happened still)
2. Scanning obelisks in a block correctly, with no pillars surfaced
3. Scanning obelisks in a block correctly, with combinations of different pillars surfaced
4. Scanning obelisks in a block correctly, with all pillars surfaced
5. Scanning obelisks in a block correctly, with some/all/no/various combinations of pillars surfaced and some/all/no/various combinations of protectors shot out
6. Scanning obelisks in a block correctly, with some/all/no/various combinations of relics shot out
Now go through 1-6 again, and replace the words "Scanning obelisks in a block correctly" with:
- Scanning obelisks in a block with incorrect items in the hold
- Scanning obelisks in a block with no items in the hold
- Scanning obelisks in a block with half-correct items (so, a good item for that block, but another item not known to cause a valid combination)
- Scanning obelisks in a block with a correct block item and a relic
- Scanning obelisks in a block with an incorrect block item and a relic
- Scanning obelisks in a block with 1 relic
- Scanning obelisks in a block with 2 relics
And lastly, throw the following on the end of each sentence
- Moving instantly between sites to look for obelisk changes
- Waiting 5-10 minutes before looking for changes
- Waiting 30+ minutes before looking for changes
... Create every permutation of the above possible, and that's what I've tried.
The only thing I *haven't* tried to-date is all of the above on every single set and all possible permutations... that's an impossibly huge amount of work. But as you could appreciate, this is all done at different times of the day, with different phases of the moon of saturn and blah blah blah.
But on balance of probabilities, I *probably* should've found something at this point. I haven't. That's fine, maybe I've literally cut down every tree in the forest except the one I need, but again, balance of probabilities is that someone else *should've* cut that tree down before me, and they haven't.
The idea that there's some way to unlock additional obelisks (and reading MB's post again, I now realise it's vague enough to be interpreted as "If all you're doing is scanning the available obelisks with the correct combinations, yes, that's all you should see, but Open/PG arbitrarily showing other obelisks as active sounds bugged, because people should be doing particular activities to achieve this state") is getting infinitely smaller and beyond belief.
FD probably don't notice that, if there is meant to be a way to "unlock" more obelisks, that it's broken. If they've got no stats on this activity, they won't know. But if they've got stats, they'll see people getting all the different types of decoded entries because Open/PG glitches to give access to the additional obelisks, so it would look like "everything's working as expected".
If we really are "missing the obvious", then it's so obtuse that it's not actually a solution. "A man asks for the cheque, and a woman screams, why?"