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Overwatch Sombra ARG - No one is ready for Sombra [Up2: New Model Leaks]

Just went to 4%. My guess is the community has to collectively do or solve something to get it to ramp up. Community Twitter "hacks" seem to confirm it.

I was just going to post this. You internet sleuths get to work, I'll sit back and watch it all unfold.
 
I don't mind the ARG or the waiting.

I just don't know why'd they would go about it like this. It should feel like we are building up to her with every puzzle solved. But every puzzle instead just gives us new puzzles with no new info.

Right: puzzle->solve->little bit of info->repeat until you have 'made' Sombra

Wrong: puzzle->solve->countdown->no info->puzzle and continue until the 'end' where everything is revealed at once.
 
just come back when its ready.

there is obviously a planned out thing going on...when its done, it will be done.

If it stopped being fun for you, then bounce and let it ride.

whining and getting mad won't make it come any faster really.

People are allowed to "whine" if they want to. Blizzard may have weeks of new content left but when we have a pretty damn good idea what's at the end of it then it just gets boring.
 
Yeah, Blizz should totally stop having their fun when their are tons of people enjoying this experience just because a few of you are upset you can't have your birthday gift a few days early.

They had a countdown that spanned two days by the time it was done to reveal—a count-up. Or, at least we think that's what it is, because it was stuck at 3% for hours.

Do people seriously have trouble understanding why others are upset? The ARG stuff was fine, but when you take that step that comes across as leading up to an actual reveal, people are going to expect things. That action of theirs unsurprisingly built up a lot of hype, and the result was squat so far. Don't take that step until you're ready to actually show something.
 
Is that all you got? We need MORE whining!

Seriously though, they've obviously put a lot of work into this, so just enjoy the ride or go do something else and it'll be out in no time, yes?

Eh, you can respect the work they put into it and also raise the criticism that it's overkill and mishandled. People don't want to be greeted with a countdown at the end of a countdown. It's annoying.

They need to hear this. It's especially valuable feedback because they're going to keep adding characters and might want to use an ARG to do so again later. And that's fine. The moment at which they set a countdown clock should be the moment at which they're ready to deliver though.

Yeah, Blizz should totally stop having their fun when their are tons of people enjoying this experience just because a few of you are upset you can't have your birthday gift a few days early.

We don't have any kind of ETA on this, which contributes to the frustration.

It's not waiting, it's thinking the wait is almost over, finding out it's not, and not getting a clear indication of when it will be.

Again, they did the wind up and people expected a swing. I don't see why that's unreasonable.
 
People are allowed to "whine" if they want to. Blizzard may have weeks of new content left but when we have a pretty damn good idea what's at the end of it then it just gets boring.
So leave the thread and go do something else? No one wants to hear your whining, or are you just doing it to annoy people? Clearly there's still people who enjoy the show in here.

Do people seriously have trouble understanding why others are upset? The ARG stuff was fine, but when you take that step that comes across as leading up to an actual reveal, people are going to expect things. That action of theirs unsurprisingly built up a lot of hype, and the result was squat so far. Don't take that step until you're ready to actually show something.
So go cry about on the official forums? Do you expect Blizzard to drop by here and read your posts?

Eh, you can respect the work they put into it and also raise the criticism that it's overkill and mishandled. People don't want to be greeted with a countdown at the end of a countdown. It's annoying.

They need to hear this. It's especially valuable feedback because they're going to keep adding characters and might want to use an ARG to do so again later. And that's fine. The moment at which they set a countdown clock should be the moment at which they're ready to deliver though.
Yeah the countdown was a boner killer, but the fuckin negativity around here sometimes is just killing me. Some of these people. Jesus.
 
So leave the thread and go do something else? No one wants to hear your whining, or are you just doing it to annoy people? Clearly there's still people who enjoy the show in here.


So go cry about on the official forums? Do you expect Blizzard to drop by here and read your posts?


Yeah the countdown was a boner killer, but the fuckin negativity around here sometimes is just killing me. Some of these people. Jesus.

But this is a thread on NeoGAF about the Sombra ARG and the countdown (and now the %) and people have every right to discuss that here, whether they are happy, sad, disappointed, aroused etc. It's a discussion thread, you don't get to decide what gets to be posted here. As long as it is on topic all is good.
 
Eh, you can respect the work they put into it and also raise the criticism that it's overkill and mishandled. People don't want to be greeted with a countdown at the end of a countdown. It's annoying.

They need to hear this. It's especially valuable feedback because they're going to keep adding characters and might want to use an ARG to do so again later. And that's fine. The moment at which they set a countdown clock should be the moment at which they're ready to deliver though.



We don't have any kind of ETA on this, which contributes to the frustration.

It's not waiting, it's thinking the wait is almost over, finding out it's not, and not getting a clear indication of when it will be.

Again, they did the wind up and people expected a swing. I don't see why that's unreasonable.
To be fair... having an ETA on this kind of ARG would actually ruin all the fun and make it pretty much pointless.
 
So leave the thread and go do something else? No one wants to hear your whining, or are you just doing it to annoy people? Clearly there's still people who enjoy the show in here.

This is a discussion forum, you don't get to dictate what others say just because you don't personally like it. "Crying" about the second countdown/percentage thingy after the countdown already led us believe a reveal was imminent is not an offensive, harmful opinion to anyone so therefore it should be allowed if you stay on topic and don't spam.
 
Oh? It went up 4%? Its good to see that its going up completely arbitrarily with no distinct pattern or any real community involvement to up the percentage.

I'm really disappointed in the direction the ARG has suddenly taken. :(
 
Yeah the countdown was a boner killer, but the fuckin negativity around here sometimes is just killing me. Some of these people. Jesus.

Dunno what to tell you, my dude. It'd be one thing if people were calling for Kaplan's head or something. But they're just dmcrustrated and explaining why pretty well. This can only help Blizzard.

To be fair... having an ETA on this kind of ARG would actually ruin all the fun and make it pretty much pointless.

My point though is that we wouldn't even be in this situation if they hadn't made a move that seemed like the last one before a reveal.

As someone else pointed out, the ARG is not doing a great job of feeling like it's actually building to something. We solve clues and get a cheeky phrase in Spanish. That's cute, but it's starting to feel cyclical.
 
So she's a hacker, possibly AI?

Getting excited for the possibilities of a "hacker" character in Overwatch. Ana was slightly disappointing in that at the end of the day she was just another sniper, albeit a mid-rage one that could heal. She just kind of followed the existing archetypes instead of creating a new one.
 
To be fair... having an ETA on this kind of ARG would actually ruin all the fun and make it pretty much pointless.

Correct. Besides, clearly Blizzard has a release date in mind for whatever this is leading towards and that won't change for anything unless internal issues force them to.

This is fun and games and no matter how much they cocktease Sombra, there's always been a plan for it. Giving an ETA would ruin the ARG (who would bother figuring out the puzzles then?), but also not having one (internally) would screw up their release schedule for content.

I'd love to have some more info, too, but ultimately everyone's disappointment is born of their own impatience over something that wasn't intended to be revealed today in the first place.
 
But this is a thread on NeoGAF about the Sombra ARG and the countdown (and now the %) and people have every right to discuss that here, whether they are happy, sad, disappointed, aroused etc. It's a discussion thread, you don't get to decide what gets to be posted here. As long as it is on topic all is good.

but there comes a time in which just whining isn't adding much either. I think most of us are a bit peeved that the ARG continues after what seemed like the end but it is what it is. Whining isn't going to make it come faster and it doesn't make for amazing discussion either since the only response is "yeah I am mad too" or "meh" with the latter leading towards nasty back and fourths about being shills and whatnot...its all just a waste of time. None of us knows what is going on, there is no sign of Blizzard even being aware of this thread, and again won't speed things up....so what is the point.

if you are done with the song and dance, bail out and come back when they have something done finally.
 
To be fair... having an ETA on this kind of ARG would actually ruin all the fun and make it pretty much pointless.

Which is why you save things like countdowns for the very end-- it gives time for the community's attention to focus in on whatever you're planning on revealing, and sets up an expectation that it's over. Setting up a countdown that then leads into another puzzle is baffling.
 
How did you reach this conclusion?

Source?

I was mostly being sarcastic. But I have been keeping a close eye on ARG since percentage has gone up and no one on Reddit or anywhere else can pin down a rhyme or reason as to why or how its gone up. But I very well could be (and hope I am) wrong though.

That being said I still find the ARG's current direction disappointing.
 
So she's a hacker, possibly AI?

Getting excited for the possibilities of a "hacker" character in Overwatch. Ana was slightly disappointing in that at the end of the day she was just another sniper, albeit a mid-rage one that could heal. She just kind of followed the existing archetypes instead of creating a new one.

Well, I'm intrigued, but this would require some elaboration. What would she hack?

Omnics? Kinda limited usage considering there are only two characters?

Anyone with mechanical parts/clothing? Bit situational and requires too much unclear categorization of characters.

Weapons? Disabling, or even SWITCHING of abilities and such? Potentially interesting angle.

Something in the map? Would be interesting but OW maps don't have much by way of interactive elements. There's no minimap...maybe it grants minimaps?

I'd just love for the character to bring in some kind of significantly new game-affecting mechanic/interaction mode.
 
To be fair to Blizzard, I don't think they really planned for this to be a fully-fledged ARG. There were just a few clues in the game that people got obsessed with finding, and they played with it and encouraged it. They probably didn't have it all mapped out in advance, they just wanted to have a fun dialogue with the community.

The "backlash" to fun teasing and "countdown to a countdown" isn't fair.
 
To be fair to Blizzard, I don't think they really planned for this to be a fully-fledged ARG. There were just a few clues in the game that people got obsessed with finding, and they played with it and encouraged it. They probably didn't have it all mapped out in advance, they just wanted to have a fun dialogue with the community.

The "backlash" to fun teasing and "countdown to a countdown" isn't fair.
Yeah, that much has been pretty clear at least to me. The ARG has been evolving with the community and the people participating it are contributing just as much to it as Blizzard. Blizzard has been really good at incorporating stuff the community has come up with as part of it too, like the Skycode stuff and the Reaper message on the glitched forum post yesterday.
 
To be fair to Blizzard, I don't think they really planned for this to be a fully-fledged ARG. There were just a few clues in the game that people got obsessed with finding, and they played with it and encouraged it. They probably didn't have it all mapped out in advance, they just wanted to have a fun dialogue with the community.

The "backlash" to fun teasing and "countdown to a countdown" isn't fair.

Backlash to countdowns to countdowns is always justified.
 
This kind of reminds me of card reveals for the last Hearthstone expansion. People needed to tweet/Facebook something a certain number of times to fill up a progress bar for what many assumed would be card reveals. Filled up faster than excpected and stayed at 100% with Blizzard stating that "Great! It's been reached. Tune in [at our actual planned reveal date] later for the reveal"

So maybe same thing here? Tweet Sombra stuff until progress fills up (or deadline) and then we get reveal.
 
To be fair to Blizzard, I don't think they really planned for this to be a fully-fledged ARG. There were just a few clues in the game that people got obsessed with finding, and they played with it and encouraged it. They probably didn't have it all mapped out in advance, they just wanted to have a fun dialogue with the community.

The "backlash" to fun teasing and "countdown to a countdown" isn't fair.

Pretty much how I feel. Blizzard themselves haven't officially announce anything, they're simply playing a cat and mouse game with the fan base. People hyped themselves up to a character reveal.

Now there's an argument that Blizzard should have known this would happen, but theres always that risk that people will blow certain occurrences out of proportion.
 
Blizzard can you just reveal the design of your next video game character please?

I just can't get excited about these marketing campaigns anymore. I think ilovebees was the last time it actually felt novel.
 
Well, I'm intrigued, but this would require some elaboration. What would she hack?

Omnics? Kinda limited usage considering there are only two characters?

Anyone with mechanical parts/clothing? Bit situational and requires too much unclear categorization of characters.

Weapons? Disabling, or even SWITCHING of abilities and such? Potentially interesting angle.

Something in the map? Would be interesting but OW maps don't have much by way of interactive elements. There's no minimap...maybe it grants minimaps?

I'd just love for the character to bring in some kind of significantly new game-affecting mechanic/interaction mode.

Exactly. It would be cool if she could "hack" things that are integrated into the maps, possibly they would go back and add these elements through maps. That could breathe new life into existing content. If it's character specific it could still be interesting but nothing comes to mind with regards to making a new character that feels different from the rest.

That's the only caveat I'd have to adding new Overwatch characters. New characters are always exciting, but hopefully we don't reach a point of saturation where some characters are just too similar to each other and others don't fill any useful roles (McCree before he got the dmg dropoff buff but after he got his stun/fan nerf was one such instance, there stopped being a place for him in the game for a while).
 
They had a countdown that spanned two days by the time it was done to reveal—a count-up. Or, at least we think that's what it is, because it was stuck at 3% for hours.

Do people seriously have trouble understanding why others are upset? The ARG stuff was fine, but when you take that step that comes across as leading up to an actual reveal, people are going to expect things. That action of theirs unsurprisingly built up a lot of hype, and the result was squat so far. Don't take that step until you're ready to actually show something.

Not at all. I get people can be frustrated (I may not personally understand why in this situation but I get how). But when people throw pity parties of "just reveal this isn't fun" which was about two pages of this thread, it appeared to be much more than just voicing frustration. It was requests for information they felt they deserved and that is the underlying issue that is probably more up for debate than anything: what a consumer feels they deserve.

Chances are there were just a lot of drive bys in that list, but the entitlement was pretty extreme from my perspective. At this time, we still don't even know if this will even be the next character reveal. This could be a long drawn out process.

We don't have any kind of ETA on this, which contributes to the frustration.

It's not waiting, it's thinking the wait is almost over, finding out it's not, and not getting a clear indication of when it will be.

Again, they did the wind up and people expected a swing. I don't see why that's unreasonable.

The difficulty with my comment was it's timeliness. As I said at the beginning of this one, I don't think anyone would argue they can't sympathize with someone who was let down and really excited to get to know another character today (if they were). But there is a reasonable difference between describing the feeling of being disappointed as you both have (those I've quoted) and those I was mocking who were just pouting because they didn't get their way.
 
Not at all. I get people can be frustrated (I may not personally understand why in this situation but I get how). But when people throw pity parties of "just reveal this isn't fun" which was about two pages of this thread, it appeared to be much more than just voicing frustration. It was requests for information they felt they deserved and that is the underlying issue that is probably more up for debate than anything: what a consumer feels they deserve.

Chances are there were just a lot of drive bys in that list, but the entitlement was pretty extreme from my perspective. At this time, we still don't even know if this will even be the next character reveal. This could be a long drawn out process.

You should really look up "pity party" though.
 
They just need more of an "official" countdown of some sort. Like if that percentage thing was going to complete on Friday and we had a bunch of other clues thrown around about who Sombra actually is that might be more fun. Right now it seems to be just a bunch of saying Sombra exists.
 
Not at all. I get people can be frustrated (I may not personally understand why in this situation but I get how). But when people throw pity parties of "just reveal this isn't fun" which was about two pages of this thread, it appeared to be much more than just voicing frustration. It was requests for information they felt they deserved and that is the underlying issue that is probably more up for debate than anything: what a consumer feels they deserve.

Chances are there were just a lot of drive bys in that list, but the entitlement was pretty extreme from my perspective. At this time, we still don't even know if this will even be the next character reveal. This could be a long drawn out process.

The thread was at its 13th or so page at that point, people were anticipating some sort of reveal and what they got instead was something very few would have actually believed might happen. Is every ten-page saga in an E3 thread where people voice their disdain at EA wasting our time with FIFA an indicator of some "underlying issue"? People like to voice their opinions here and often times the majority opinion of a thing can be negative, saying they're "entitled, "whining, and "crying" for wanting a game company to not waste their time just goes to make things worse for everyone. Being negative about something doesn't mean you're being malicious.
 
The people attacking (telling them to get out) those who have expressed their disappointment or annoyance with the countdown should use their brains. Everyone has the right to express their views, and it's extremely petty for you to tell others to get out if they aren't satisfied. Grow up.
 
This thing got me crazy, I'm reading too much into this I went back to amomentincrime.com to view the html source to see if anything has changed... nothing of course changed. But reading the text... what do they mean passcode/key?

This could be nothing... but interestingly enough, the background color has a value set to "black" (yes I know this is common, but hexadecimal could be used). However, the font color is set to hexadecimal (#a939ff)... the question is why? Archive.org shows Aug 23, 2016 as a white background with black text, why this very specific hexadecimal color (you could simply do a color like "purple")? Could this be the passcode/key?

Also, Sombra protocol changed from v1.3 to v1.9 ... again why?

August 24, 2016
Code:
<html>
<p><br>
[B]<body bgcolor="black">
<font face="lucida console" color="a939ff">[/B]
...Estableciendo conexión...<br>
...Protocolo Sombra v1.9 iniciado...<br>
<!-- Bien hecho, ya tienen mi clave. Hackear este programa de televisión no tuvo chiste. Espérense a lo que sigue.-->
<br>
...Transmitiendo información a ómnicos activos... 4% <br>
<br>
...Terminando conexión...
</body>
</font>
</p>
</html>

August 23, 2016
https://web.archive.org/web/20160823235714/http://amomentincrime.com/
Code:
...Estableciendo conexión...<br>
...Protocolo Sombra v1.3 iniciado...<br>
<br>
...Infiltrando la respuesta automática del email de pistas...<br>
<br>
...Terminando conexión...
</p>
</html>
 
Not at all. I get people can be frustrated (I may not personally understand why in this situation but I get how). But when people throw pity parties of "just reveal this isn't fun" which was about two pages of this thread, it appeared to be much more than just voicing frustration. It was requests for information they felt they deserved and that is the underlying issue that is probably more up for debate than anything: what a consumer feels they deserve.

Chances are there were just a lot of drive bys in that list, but the entitlement was pretty extreme from my perspective. At this time, we still don't even know if this will even be the next character reveal. This could be a long drawn out process.

Blizzard: "Heyyy guys, SOMBRA, am I right?"

Fans: "Whoooo! Awesome!"

Blizzard: "Wow, look at this image, could it mean something about SOMBRA I wonder..?!"

Fans: "Oh my god! New character? So hype!"

Blizzard: "Hmmm, is this a COUNTDOWN hidden in plain sight? Could be!"

Fans: "Holy shit! There's a countdown! Here it is, here comes SOMBRA!!"

Blizzard: "Uh oh, the countdown ended...IS THIS ANOTHER COUNTDOWN I SEE?!"

Fans: "Look...can you just reveal Sombra? We all know where this is going, and we already waited through the first countdown."

Blizzard: "Wow, why are you guys so fucking entitled?"
 
The people attacking (telling them to get out) those who have expressed their disappointment or annoyance with the countdown should use their brains. Everyone has the right to express their views, and it's extremely petty for you to tell others to get out if they aren't satisfied. Grow up.

If everyone has the right to express their views, they also have the right to be called on those views.
 
I feel like entertainment these days is a series of endless bulllshit teases. TLOP, Blonde now this shit.

Just release the damn thing without a circus. At this point, I'm just expecting it at Blizzcon.

Agreed. All these teases annoy me. Just set a preview date and release date and be done with it.
 
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