Guild Wars 2

On another thread we started discussing what the code that appears after interacting with the control panel in Scarlet’s Secret Lair means. Since many other subjects where discussed in the same thread I decided to create a new topic to hopefully get some people to join!

So far we have discovered that all of the code is a quite short sequence repeating over and over again (see attachment). It goes RED RED GREEN and then repeats, on both the left and the right side, they’re just slightly displaced relative to eachother. Furthermore, we’ve noticed that the rows marked with A and B are mirror-images of eachother, and so are the rows marked with C and D. Ideas on how to crack it included putting the left and right side on top of eachother and looking at the result, “subtracting” one side from the other and also comparing the signs to some languages such as New Krytan, because they could be simplified letters of one of those languages.
Anyone with any ideas?

Its just a slapped text-like alpha on a texture in a bit random form so it wont look the same on both sides. Its a common for a texture designer to save time in his workflow. I doubt theres more to see in this ;]

Illveran.3514:

Its just a slapped text-like alpha on a texture in a bit random form so it wont look the same on both sides. I doubt theres more to see in this ;]

I’ve been thinking about that, but even though it has a random-like fashion, I think Anet would put more thought into an image that appears completing everything in the lair :P

If New Krytan does not work, maybe Asuran script? She was trained in Rata Sum. Also what if the code is upside down? The “Drill” looks like an inverted “UFO.” Maybe flip the code? Maybe the Subsection A is the Key to B.

Only Josh can help us with this. Where are you Josh Foreman!!!???

First line of A is the mirror of B

*edit → I just realized you said that in the original email.

I was actually working on creating a decent image too and just finished. Nice to see you’ve already started the thread.

I also aligned the code from the console and found the main part that repeats itself and concluded the same as you did.

I found that most characters resemble the Pigpen Cipher. When you look at the attached image you see the 9 grid square and how it works. The problem however is that there are symbols that do not match the 9x grid. However since only 1 dot can be seen it suggest that only 2 letters are put in a single square leaving 8 letters of the alphabet. In the example they use a cross to sort the remaining letters. So a V sign would be a S.
It can be that for this translation another figure must be made that matches the remaining characters found in the cypher. (maybe a symbol found elsewhere in the lair)

Unfortunately I’ve got an exam tomorrow so can’t spend too much time on it now :P but maybe this insight gives any of you an idea?

However. If it is indeed a Pigpen Cipher, we must hope they used the basic letter layout. For example it is usual to begin with a word and then finish the remaining letters of the alphabet in the grid without any double letters.
If this is the case it will be quite impossible to ever crack it. (though I would try putting in “SCARLET” since it might be obvious and doesn’t contain any double letters.

EDIT: Scarlet* xD

I did a bit of research and it turns out that the most common letter in the english language is “e”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency), and the most common word is “the”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English), so assuming that this code translates directly to English, this could prove usefull :)

Kioshi.6597:

However. If it is indeed a Pigpen Cipher, we must hope they used the basic letter layout. For example it is usually to begin with a word and then finish the remaining letters of the alphabet in the grid without any double letters.
If this is the case it will be quite impossible to ever crack it. (though I would try putting in “SKARLET” since it might be obvious and doesn’t contain any double letters.

Btw, it’s spelled “Scarlet” ;)

I KNEW IT! Now I have PROOF!!!

Look at the picture in the OP’s post.

Now squint a little and look at mine.

It IS Robo-Thatcher!!!

Do we even know if its supposed to be some kind of code? It could just be decorative (or ads).

skullmount.1758:

Do we even know if its supposed to be some kind of code? It could just be decorative (or ads).

Well, we can’t know for sure, but it does look like a cypher

skullmount.1758:

Do we even know if its supposed to be some kind of code? It could just be decorative (or ads).

Unless no developer has seen this thread (they seem to read most of them) I’m pretty sure this is a real code. They aren’t sadistic enough to let you guys work on this if it really is nothing.

I thought for a while that this could be a variant of pigpen where the first 9 letters are the same because the backwards L character, which is A in pigpen, appears on its own a couple of times. However there is no square symbol, which is E in pigpen, is nowhere to be seen. Further complicating matters is how letters join up. Given the characters used elsewhere, that shape that looks like a broad T could be one of three combinations that I can think of.

Also, the code doesn’t say Lorem Ipsum, which I was half expecting it to.

i still believe that these are just random symbols put together to confuse the players

I’ll just leave this here :>

Luna.9640:

I’ll just leave this here :>

What letters are those? :O And those symbols on the Asura gate do look strangely familiar…

Ok here are my two cents :

I think the Pigpen cipher is a dead end. There is no symbol obviously linked to the “s” letter (which should appear really often in English/New Krytan).

What I’ll try to do is to create a list of all the different symbols and then perform a frequential analysis. (edit : attachment, I’ll have to decompose the big symbols in two smaller ones to proceed further)

However the more I think about it the more I am convinced that this is just fake text.

Edit : The table below summarizes the number of occurrences of each unique symbol in the paragraph labeled BD in the OP image. It appears we have a candidate symbol for the letter E (i.e the one that appears 8 times)

VodCom.6924:

Ok here are my two cents :

I think the Pigpen cipher is a dead end. There is no symbol obviously linked to the “s” letter (which should appear really often in English/New Krytan).

What I’ll try to do is to create a list of all the different symbols and then perform a frequential analysis. (edit : attachment, I’ll have to decompose the big symbols in two smaller ones to proceed further)

However the more I think about it the more I am convinced that this is just fake text.

Edit : The table below summarizes the number of occurrences of each unique symbol in the paragraph labeled BD in the OP image. It appears we have a candidate symbol for the letter E (i.e the one that appears 8 times)

42 characters is a lot. How many could be junk?

Blazing Rathalos.1904:

skullmount.1758:

Do we even know if its supposed to be some kind of code? It could just be decorative (or ads).

Unless no developer has seen this thread (they seem to read most of them) I’m pretty sure this is a real code. They aren’t sadistic enough to let you guys work on this if it really is nothing.

I don’t know. I wouldn’t put it past them. I mean, just look at Bobby’s comments in the various threads the last few days. He keeps teasing us…

Millillion.5914:

42 characters is a lot. How many could be junk?

Not Junk, just two letters/symbols sticked together. I’ll try to figure out who is what.

VodCom.6924:

Not Junk, just two letters/symbols sticked together. I’ll try to figure out who is what.

I never thought about them as symbols stuck together, that’s really smart, could certainly lead somewhere But I wonder if the symbols are all letters, and if they are supposed to only be read from left to right; they are so far from resembling anything so it can be a bit difficult to really say

Edit: it might be particularily difficult to crack it if they are number. The symbols wouldn’t even have to represent digits, maybe we would have to compare number of vertical lines to the number of horizontal are some other crazy thing

hmm seems to be just a block of letters+ numbers in a font of sci fi flavour, block is without words but just to have a repeating wallpaper illusion of ‘data’ to represent scarlets plan and design being beyond out comprehension. If it were actual readable text relevant to the story it’s be more readily translated and relevant to revealing her plan as part of this update for the players. However as ther eis no quest prompt or NPC asking what it means can we help? then i suspect it is merely decorative in purpose.

My OCDs compel me to solve this riddle. But there’s not enough time in the day to bathe, feed myself, and WvW in addition to deciphering codes. I’ll have to give up one of those so I have more time…

Aajolea.8132:

hmm seems to be just a block of letters+ numbers in a font of sci fi flavour, block is without words but just to have a repeating wallpaper illusion of ‘data’ to represent scarlets plan and design being beyond out comprehension. If it were actual readable text relevant to the story it’s be more readily translated and relevant to revealing her plan as part of this update for the players. However as ther eis no quest prompt or NPC asking what it means can we help? then i suspect it is merely decorative in purpose.

Also my thoughts. However the best way to make sure that this is just false text is to fail to get anything intelligible out of it.

Aajolea.8132:

hmm seems to be just a block of letters+ numbers in a font of sci fi flavour, block is without words but just to have a repeating wallpaper illusion of ‘data’ to represent scarlets plan and design being beyond out comprehension. If it were actual readable text relevant to the story it’s be more readily translated and relevant to revealing her plan as part of this update for the players. However as ther eis no quest prompt or NPC asking what it means can we help? then i suspect it is merely decorative in purpose.

Anet have many times before had coded messages hidden, maybe not of such crucial importance that every player has to decode them to understand the story, but often adding a bit of flavour to the world, such as names on gravestones in new krytan I believe this code might be something of that kind, a little bit of extra info to create some hype, but as I said, probably nothing central

@The Kurt : That’s a first draft. Some symbols have multiple credible decomposition and I let you decide which ones are relevant. The wurm attempt in Augury Rock has failed again (because of dead ppl refusing to waypoint O_o ) and I’m too tired to proceed further for now.

It seems like at least most of the symbols can be described by taking just a few of them, rotating them (or mirroring), putting them together or just removing a little bit of them… I wonder if that can tell us anything about their meaning (or relation to one another), or if it’s simply a method the devs used to create more unqiue symbols.

I don’t think a special meaning can be inferred from mirrorred symbols. Look at 6 and 9 for example. It’s just a cheap way to create more symbols.

True… But if you look at the images that Luna posted earlier, they include an alphabet and a set of numbers. I have no idea where those numbers are from, but if you look at for example 6 and 7, the only difference between them is a little bit added (like a dash or a bit filled in). Maybe the symbols in the cypher work the same, in the image you recenlty posted you clearly show that some symbols only differ from other by a little fragment added or lacking, what if they are proceeding numbers? :D

What a fun topic.

I don’t have any meaningful solution to this puzzle (and, frankly, I kind of tend to believe these patterns have just been there for the sake of “looking cool”) but I want to leave a small pointer that there is also a cryptographic technique called visual cryptography. In a nutshell, the idea behind this technique is that if you lay two seemingly random patterns atop of each other, then the combination of both patterns (or, in a sense, their difference) reveal a hidden message.

I cannot see that this technique is used in the case at hand, but it would certainly be a really cool way to hide something in plain sight, and maybe this view can spawn some ideas on how to decipher the code.

~MRA

The only thing that makes me think there is reasoning behind this is because of the rearrangement of the middle part. Why wouldn’t they just have the exact same running on both side if it were only decoration.

Edit:
I’ve been doing a lot of overlaying in photoshop but nothing gives results.
If you do a basic overlay of both sides you get this.
I’ve also rotated the nonmatching part, this is the only thing that gives letters/numbers but I never expect this to be a solution since there is no reasoning behind doing this.

Has anyone superimposed them over the top of each other?

See my post above, that is what i’ve done. But a big part is exactly the same. Only the indicated part differs. But i’ve taken individual lines and laying them over different lines, Rotated and mirrored the line but never did it yield to anything understandable.

hmm looking more like a pacman maze than a code

Yeah, I did some overlaying as well, didn’t see anything special, some symbols merged together quite nicely, but not really on a large scale. This makes me think that maybe putting them on top of eachother and letting the black parts “cancel out” might be the right way to go, I might try that if I get more time :P

New draft for code cracking. I assumed the symbol that appears the most often is the letter “E”. I also managed to disentangle some symbols.

Rights now we have 24 different symbols to work with althought I believe some of them are punctuation.

Feel free to fill the blanks if you have a good theory in mind.

I spent five minutes staring at the code trying to find the word “mordremoth”, which should be identifiable as it has 3 letters that repeat themselves. I found something that could be “mordremath” (2nd line of that two line phrase) but that was the best I could do.

I just handwrote it so I can look over it at work tomorrow (this site is blocked). Based on writing it out, some observations/suspicions:

- “Spaces” happen in places not required by the cipher. The very first line has a space after the “T” and before the “L”.
- It’s a substitution cipher, not a derivation of the pigpen cipher.
- The open question is where the characters “stop.” Trying to reckon it by contiguous segments does not work (the characters only start occurring twice after 16 symbols), and if this is a single-step cipher that’s highly unlikely under any form of English.
- I also tried “straight left = new character” and came up with only 12 possible characters, and it contradicted itself almost immediately.
- Someone needs to stick this entire thing on actual graph paper, if possible. Somehow I feel that will help, and I’ll be doing it tomorrow when I have some handy (all of my pads at home have gone AWOL).
- The A and B segments are the only ones that matter. Remember that in the Lair the two sides are running in opposite directions. There isn’t a “further cipher” beyond A and B.

This should be a fun little cipher to figure out, no?

TaCktiX.6729:

- It’s a substitution cipher, not a derivation of the pigpen cipher.

I also came to this conclusion. All we have to do is to clearly identify the set of symbols we have.

TaCktiX.6729:

- The open question is where the characters “stop.” Trying to reckon it by contiguous segments does not work (the characters only start occurring twice after 16 symbols), and if this is a single-step cipher that’s highly unlikely under any form of English.

The criteria i use to draw my segments is the space taken by the symbols. It appears that the straight lines have a standardized length. This is also what led me to believe that some symbols were in fact two smaller symbols sticked together. When one splits these longer symbols, the number of available pictograms shrinks to more acceptable levels.

TaCktiX.6729:

- The A and B segments are the only ones that matter. Remember that in the Lair the two sides are running in opposite directions. There isn’t a “further cipher” beyond A and B.

Couldn’t have said better.

I’d love to put more time into this right now, but have a rather huge school project till the end of this week, but after that I’ll start actually being productive with this cypher

Rebound.3409:

Took a while but i think i finally understand what went through the developer’s mind when he created that code in scarlet’s lair. It’s a pretty interesting message and i think it gives us clues about a possible expansion:

http://images.alphacoders.com/207/207111.jpg

lmao

Okay, another observation: the “joined segments” are cases where characters have segments in common. For example, the first character (“|-|_”) is actually “|-|” AND “|_” at the same time. It also explains why there’s random spaces: the segments aren’t in common.

EDIT: Put Photoshop to work, here’s the graph paper version I was mentioning:

CC Danicia.1394:

I love this thread. +1

Danica, don’t just +1 this thread, but also confirm if we’re on the right track or not.

CC Danicia.1394:

I love this thread. +1

i’m picturing you and the artist who made that picture laughing on your chairs, unable to just come and tell these poor fellows that there’s no code :P

I think she wouldn’t pop in to say “+1” if it was wild speculation with absolutely no basis. There’s another thread explicitly for that, and virtually all we’ve talked about in this thread is the aspects of this apparent cipher. I’m doing a frequency analysis right now, and it’s matching up fairly clearly with normal written language.

Guys… The 2 lines that are out of place in the two streams are a left/right reflection of the first 2 lines of the 7 line repeating blocks.

Nike.2631:

Guys… The 2 lines that are out of place in the two streams are a left/right reflection of the first 2 lines of the 7 line repeating blocks.

It’s surprising the number of people who missed this even though it’s been mentioned twice. My view is that it is a clue to tell us that the main message is written backwards.

Luna.9640:

I’ll just leave this here :>

HAD to log on to say I’m glad I’m not the only one that sees Asura gates as Stargates >.> (Technically I call them Stargates too)

Also… I’d +1 if I had written a nonsensical “cipher” and saw people trying to figure out what it (doesn’t) mean lol :P

That’s just me being a nerdy cryptanalyst though; one of the most amusing ciphers is one that isn’t a cipher at all- it could instead be a red herring. I’ve done that many times in my ciphers.