The Keyring Problem

[projectyl]

This isn't my recap of the 2011 Hunt. I don't know that I'll have the energy to do a really good full-length one like I did for 2009. For what it's worth, it was definitely an A++ Would Do This Team's Hunts Again sort of Hunt, even more so than S.P.I.E.S. was.

My one major gripe with this Hunt was with two of Zelda's three metas. I may write a post

Comments

[noahspuzzlelj]

Er, what was the problem with Zelda broadly? There was certainly no pattern that we were *consciously* breaking. Mario the meta answers were things that matched their round (a mushroom, a flower, a star). In Megaman, as we told you, all meta answers were weapons. Those are two totally different patterns. The pattern for Zelda metas is that they're all 9 letters long and spelled out letter-by-letter. The pattern for Civ is that they fit into the pure supermeta (which isn't really a pattern at all). The pattern for KD is that they're all objects of the appropriate scale (provided that you interpret Oberon as the moon not the character).

So you must have found something that described the first two patterns but not the others... The best theory I had was "nouns" but two of the three zelda answers are nouns. So I guess your pattern was "singular nouns"? Perhaps the problem was that we miscommunicated and what we said about meta-meta answers was taken to describe meta answers?

Anyway hopefully this illustrates that we weren't consciously breaking any patterns. There's always going to be some red herrings, and we did put a reasonable amount of effort into looking for them (including blindsolving which didn't indicate a problem here).

[projectyl]

The intro skit (which may not have been given to blindsolvers) told us that "Mario will need certain items to break into the location where Peach is being held. The puzzles are the key to finding those items." Which, looking back, could be interpreted as applying only to World 1, but I definitely spent the Hunt under the impression that every normal meta was supposed to give a game-appropriate object and every metameta was supposed to give a star piece location, which caused me to discard both CREATURES and POLLINATE as possibilities.

[noahspuzzlelj]

Ah, ok, so it was a miscommunication about metas vs. metametas. I think you're referring to the intro which says "If you solve enough puzzles in a world, their answers considered together should lead you to one of the objects that Mario needs. If you find the objects from all the worlds, Mario should be able to collect them and use them to rescue the Princess."

This was intended to refer to the *world metas* (whose answers were AIRSHIP, WILY COYOTE, NERF SWORD, ORANGE, and OBERON which are indeed all objects). I can see how we the miscommunication happened here, but the problem was us not being clear in the handout, not with breaking a pattern.

[noahspuzzlelj]

There was various issues with the "World 1" to "Mario World" transition. I wanted the original intro to be clearer about the "world" "level" distinction (that is it's World 1, which has 4 levels in it), but I see that the actual final version of the handout was misleading on that point. Which is to say, I agree with you that we messed up on the handout.