Guild Wars 2

When going through Scarlet’s little slideshow presentation that she put together for us at her control console, one thing I noticed was this stream of code that runs by on the screen with the drill blueprints on it. At first glance this looks like a bunch of nonsense, which it very well might be; however, since Anet has been known to use substitution ciphers before and actually make their in-game languages translatable to english, I thought it might warrant a second look. On top of that, we’ve got a big code theme going on in this patch, with the chests actually being opened by ciphers that you put together from code pieces from the marionette fight and whatnot. You also pull the “code” for her console out of her journal (OMADD).

So, at first it seems that there are far too many characters for it to possibly be a substitution cipher. However, if you accept that each specific rune represents the same letter no matter what its orientation is (they could be turned any which way), you end up with a far more manageable number of letters. I ended up with about 20 letters depending on whether certain runes could be combined. I’d share my work but it hasn’t led me anywhere yet so if you want to try cracking this code (if it even is a code) you might as well start on your own.

What do you think? Am I way off base? Keep in mind it’s much easier to create a code than to crack it, so if they wanted to put a message in there using those figures it wouldn’t be very hard to do. I could be barking up a holographic tree though. :P At any rate, I’m tired of messing with it so I thought I’d pass the idea along and see if anyone else wanted to try.

i was trying for a while as well! I tossed it out after seeing that even the simple symbols account for 20+ of the total. I didn’t consider collapsing across orientation; but I immediately thing of W/M as the counter to that idea.

On top of the overwhelming variety of symbols, each line contains all unique characters. None of the symbols repeat in a given line.

And the lines don’t produce a longer passage. Each line would have to be its own message. We see this if we compare the two sides of the screen; the lines don’t always show up in the same order.

I think it might be an arbitrary collection. This is definitely something that I’m going to ask during the recap livestream after this season is over.

It wouldn’t surprise me, especially given that it doesn’t look to be a random jumble- the same seven lines are just repeated over and over. I’ve never tried this sort of thing before, but best of luck to you ambitious few!

Right, Psynch. It wasn’t until I was posting that screenshot that I realized that there are 2 lines that are swapped in in one passage that aren’t there in the other. This makes a 7 line set that’s different from the 9 line set. I had been working on a 9 line set the whole time. That’s discouraging but it’s also kind of odd that they would bother to do something like that if they just wanted a wall of meaningless text sliding by.

Can’t resist posting the great solution to this as it appeared on Reddit. That’s no cipher you’re looking at

Haha. That’s awesome.

It kind of resembles sideways braille….
It’s probably not but that was my immediate thought when I saw it – that it looked like braille (you have to think of the dots in braille as all being connected in lines, but it’s not a stretch).

I’m pretty sure it isn’t. But just a thought.