Drew Reese

I was almost one of those people. The quiz was when it went from being a fun puzzle to a no-as-fun trivia hunt.

@Ginger I feel for the 3 that made it to the quiz and didn't save Sparkles.

Oy, I see now.

@SPArcheon Curious... what was the other page you were mentioning?

GG this year

I made the same assumption as Cody, but went the other way in guessing since it looked like it was only just very recently a few more SO users broached 1M rep. I was thinking maybe it was a caching issue.

^^^^ That's how I did it and I thought it was the "hard" way.

I documented more than 10 questions.

Hmm, guess I'll be saving my documentation in prep for next year's hat dash.

Odd. 2y7m on CodeReview, 5y3m on SO. Unless you are saying the first non-SO site I joined?

@Catija Ah, that explains why/how I somehow earned the ChatterBox hat a second time from CodeReview from chatting here. Have no idea how my chat got parented there.

right, totally agree there

Oh.... I think I get what Cody is saying here now... the official chat system name was inspired by that other system.

Same.... even after finally finding Cajita's post I went back to search and it's literally not mentioned at all.

I guess all X stages leave a bit for everyone to enjoy.

😂 I enjoy problem solving.

It was like either "Ah, yeah I already know this!" or "Hmm.... hopefully I stumble across this thing I've literally never heard of in 5+ years."

I suppose I found the quiz to be less intellectually stimulating. I wasn't solving anything, just spelunking through this chat and a bunch of MSO/MSE posts hoping I had correct search terms.

Yeah, the "digging for trivia quiz" is where it became not fun for me. I eventually pushed through though.

Yes, took some digging through this chat to find a link to answers by Cajita where it is mentioned.

Good luck trivia hunting o7

@SPArcheon Are you strictly referring to puzzle 1b, to get the location for puzzle 2? The quiz is after all this.

I don't think I tried more than a handful of keys

@NikeDattani If you "translate" the text on the stones, take the clue from the instructions, apply some math, you'll find the need to brute force is quickly unnecessary.

All URLs are "winterbash2022.stackexchange.com/xxxx" AFAIK

A final clue I suppose is that you need to solve a maximization problem.

I don't know if I say much more without giving anything away. The "translated" text on the stones is a huge clue, IMO, and directly related to the riddle.

And what does the riddle in puzzle 2 say is the key?

^^^ Same.

It might narrow down the pool of keys you need to brute force, if you even need to still do that.

You could brute force it. Have you decoded the texts? There could be more useful information in the "translations".

I too only had one unscrambled result from the letter pool.

@NikeDattani You made it to puzzle 2?

That's a strong indication you have a good "alphabet list"

@NikeDattani 🤔 hmmm :)

Oh my, how terrible

@SPArcheon Yes, first puzzle. Puzzle 1a? 🤷🏻‍♂️

It isn't a literal character from the line of text.

Yeah, that part had me stumped for a while too. Buried in this chat is a good hint.... probably really buried at this point though.

@NikeDattani I meant you know what you need, you have the parts, just need the how part.

The cipher used per line may be handy for mapping to a letter.

It seems you know what to use to get to the next step.

Congratulations @U12-Forward I guess you won the internet?

Yeah, the decrypted message provides the hint for the next part.

I found it extremely helpful to document my findings along the way.

There you go :)

A good hint is to recall what cipher was used per line.

I think that would be frowned upon

What does the translation say about that?

No, finding the words gets you to puzzle 2.