So far, I have about 5 people that say 'its too hard, i quit', and 1 that has it solved. Although several of you are frustrated, this is actually what I hoped to accomplish. Wai would get a big in-game bonus for his efforts, and everyone else has to suffer without. A few days later, Wai climbs several spots up the leader boards, and everyone is left wondering how he did it.

Hehe =) That might be a good idea, though it seems (might be wrong here since I don't know the solution) that who would solve it and who wouldn't depends on who would guess or recognize the _method_ with which to solve it. You say yourself it's not supposed to be hard, so the challenge is to find the method. However, unless you post a puzzle to find the method, then it's just guesswork, or depends on who has previously encountered a similar puzzle and recognize it.
Perhaps this is what you're aiming for, and it might not be bad for the game, unless it's required to solve the puzzle to advance towards the ending which would exclude many people from ever finishing it (I don't know what kind of game you're making though).
I personally usually dislike this kind of puzzles however. The challenge should be solving the puzzle, not guessing the method to solve it. I agree with a previous post, about building hints to the method into the game.

I've tried to explain more below, as to why it might frustrate people and be a bad idea to put it into a game. I think it would put many people off. But it depends on your target audience, and how you want people to see the game. Do you want it to appeal to a broad audience?

I might just not be able to see the answer, so this might not be correct, but it's how I view the problem. Consider the following puzzle, one of my favorite game-puzzles, from the game Lufia 2 for SNES:

One should move the pieces to put the chests at the bottom center. Now for your puzzle.. one should turn the clues into a phrase.. but I don't know what method to use. It would be like in the above puzzle, but where I should put all the blocks in the image into some order, where the order isn't specified. It's explained in the game that the chests go to the bottom, and it's obvious the other blocks' positions don't matter, but what if there was no explanation and all the blocks had to be in some unknown positions. It would be impossible to solve without brute-forcing it.

To me your puzzle feels like this, I have no energy to look for the answer, since I have the whole set of possible ways to turn a string into another string, as the possible method. From having each clue be a word, to having the whole thing be an anagram, to substitution cipher, to like.. whatever I can think of. There was this puzzle once that many people wrote about on gamedev.. it's in the most replies section of the statistics.. Hack.net I think.. it was a bunch of numbers.
It turned out that every number corresponded to an index of a prime number in the list of all prime numbers, and that prime number then corresponded to an index in the alphabet, and that turned into a string (if I remember correctly). There were zero clues, other than a sequence of numbers.
People tried everything.. I think many people even thought of prime numbers, but .. what to do with them? =)

It's just too farfetched. Of course if you had this a few hours into the game, and you built up to it with easier puzzles so people got a feel for it, then maybe it would be better. People not liking these puzzles would gradually be put off and sooner or later move on to a different genre of games, where people who like it would stay.
But say you have a point and click adventure, and suddenly the player is hit with this.. I would be so disappointed. =)

Being a member of a team is not really relavant to the puzzle's difficulty.

The way I interpreted the description was that each line provided should be solvable to a word or two words given the assumption that a space can be treated as a space. Each solved word would then be used to construct a phrase which may or may not have the words in the correct order. Wai's post led me to believe his puzzle used the same encryption technique, however I focused more on the original post by Cygnus_X. From Cygnus_X's description of this graveyard level, I would expect the phrase to be a riddle or question to be answered to the shop owner (I believe it highly likely to be a riddle).

I looked at the lines "yr b", "ne k", and "c op" and figure that the single letter words in each line must either be A or I. Since letter substitution gives me no insight to the remaining letters and I presume that the the puzzle designer actually wants me to solve the puzzle so he can show me more puzzles, I suspect that we're looking at rotating letter positions because I've seen it several times before. I put a little effort into converting "yr b" to "zs a" and "fy i" neither of which seem likely solutions. At this point there has been nothing to hook me into the puzzle and I don't feel the need to compete so I'm done. Not frustrated so much as just not interested.

I've played enough RPGs where the designer threw in a puzzle that required knowledge of the designer's favorite movie or where the designer was just showing off how clever he was. And I still expect to find such puzzles. Rather than forcing myself to consume what I see as a bad product I will either look for the shortcut on the internet if I want to try and play the rest of the game or I'll just shut the game off and not waste my time with it.

Why should you care about my apathy? Well I suspect you wouldn't mind making some money off your game. And I have to imagine that it'll be easier to attract more customers from the general public with puzzles they can solve. Of course, if you intend on only attracting an elite puzzle solving audience that's fine but then are they going to enjoy the parts of the game where they're moving a character around a graveyard or are they going to want to get to the meat of the puzzle?

The idea behind a riddle, puzzle, quest, hidden object, etc in any game is to recognize an achievement. My game is not intended to be 100% puzzles or riddles. Rather, this all started when i encountered a dilemma in finding interesting ways to give players a leg-up in an online team-based, text-based rpg. Think of this as an esther egg as opposed an in-game necessity. The side quest/puzzle is not necessary to progress through the game, but yields advantageous results for the few bright people who can figure it out. The main game is much simpler, and mostly involves beating up monsters to protect the world. The reward for completing side quest of this type is some sort of l33t drop that lets you progress through the main quest faster than your rivals.

Quote:

Original post by Cygnus_X Although several of you are frustrated, this is actually what I hoped to accomplish. Wai would get a big in-game bonus for his efforts, and everyone else has to suffer without. A few days later, Wai climbs several spots up the leader boards, and everyone is left wondering how he did it.

If that's what you want :)

If that puzzle showed up in a demo, I would not buy the game (what if this is common gameplay?). If it was after I already paid, you can be sure I wouldn't purchase any of your other games (how can I trust them not to do the same?). And if it is online (leader boards?) then you lost a subscription (why bother if I can't hang with the real cryptographers?).

If there were some sort of hints at least about what type of puzzle it was (ancient language? I can look for clues to that in-game... encryption? I can ask villagers for cyphers and keys commonly used in the game world) I'd put some effort in. Hell, in 1985 I figured out the runic language in Ultima 4 (substitution cypher symbols <-> english) by translating the signs for "north" "south" "east" and "west" and a few of the town names. But just "these jumbled letters are clues and if you don't figure it out you lose or are ranked down" is just lame.

Please understand I am not trying to be a bitch about it. JMHO.

But eventually one of the special people that figure it out will eventually tell someone "as long as they don't say anything to anyone else", and from then on out it will most likely spread like wild fire. The people that will be special will end up being the ones that were told by someone else who was clued into the secret. I guess this is inevitable though huh?

Re: kseh

The puzzle I posted was COMPLETELY different, it has nothing to do with the original puzzle that Cygnus_X posted. I was frustrated so that was my revenge. My puzzle has nothing to do with how his puzzle works. Sorry about the confusion.

In Cygnus_X's original hint (which has now changed) he did not intend to mean that each line can be translated into a word. Although that was what I thought he meant. What I have just said is not something that the player needs to know to solve the puzzle. I am just saying it to offset the disadvantage created by the original hint.

Erik Rufelt: I remember that post. It had a fairly large following. The puzzle did have a prime sequence that related back to letters. It was way too difficult.

Anyways, I got what I needed. Thanks to all who participated. ++ Ratings all around, on me.

I believe I found the solution, it took somewhere between half an hour to an hour to figure out, after trying a number of much too complex cryptography methods. The solution is really quite easy once you see "it", as with most riddles.

I've provided a few hints below that might be of help (or not) for anyone who needs a push in the right direction but still wants to try and solve it themself, with the last one giving the complete(?) solution. &#106avascript is needed for the links to work.

First hint...

Second...

Third...

Fourth...

Fifth...

Sixth...

Finally...


// Edit: Odd, why can't I capitalize "&#106avascript"? Forum software too eager to recognize it as a keyword?

Quote:

Original post by Cygnus_X The idea behind a riddle, puzzle, quest, hidden object, etc in any game is to recognize an achievement. My game is not intended to be 100% puzzles or riddles. Rather, this all started when i encountered a dilemma in finding interesting ways to give players a leg-up in an online team-based, text-based rpg. Think of this as an esther egg as opposed an in-game necessity. The side quest/puzzle is not necessary to progress through the game, but yields advantageous results for the few bright people who can figure it out. The main game is much simpler, and mostly involves beating up monsters to protect the world. The reward for completing side quest of this type is some sort of l33t drop that lets you progress through the main quest faster than your rivals.

In this case I might find it a good puzzle. Are you going for a MUD or something?
I remember playing one called The Two Towers, set in the Lord of the Rings middle earth.. where one walked around and killed enemies and solved puzzles and stuff, could probably play it a hundred hours without finishing everything, a thousand things to do. If at some towns in the world there would be puzzles like this, then it would fit in just fine.