Locator Puzzle.

[Pixelmage]

I'm posting on Pan because it was linked to his soft places, sorry if it's in the wrong section.
We did get stumped with that puzzle, how much faster did you guys expected us to solve that one?

[Dana]

You'll have to ask Sophie and Bill, but...a bit quicker than you did, I'll leave it at that for now

[Eric Kays]

I can help with this one, actually. Where did you guys get stuck at, exactly? (This one is for my personal reference, it was strange that you guys did seem to have trouble for a while)

we had planned this one to take maybe a few days tops. Like most puzzles, we were afraid you'd just figure it out immediately.

[Pixelmage]

At first we all looked an just went "what the hell?"
No one had any idea what do do with it, preliminary plotting on google maps revealed nothing understandable... And since it didn't locate some people at first (including me) these who didn't get a coordinates set mostly focused on other stuff. And then we had other things to do until you guys nudged us to look at it again... Then the brainstorming commenced and we even debated trying to look at the source code for lack of better ideas.

[Eric Kays]

We had initially hoped you would catch on to the fact that we used "compasses" for the arrow directions. They were designed for a globe and not a flat map. This might have been our undoing with that puzzle. Initially we had the idea of having the distance from the player's computer to the soft spot listed, and nothing else. When you start mixing radiuses together from mulitple locations, theoretically you could find those points, but I think this got scrapped because we couldn't make the distance measurements work right, or something.

[Tom]

This puzzle went through many revisions. I don't know the deets of that, though Soph and Bill do. I remember we even changed what it pointed to, a couple times.

Due to delays in video production, Pan's storyline launched later than we had planned, so we had to scrap what it originally linked to, and figure out something new. Since we were in the middle of graying the morality, we used it to introduce more moral complexity into the game.

[Adell]

We had initially hoped you would catch on to the fact that we used "compasses" for the arrow directions. They were designed for a globe and not a flat map. This might have been our undoing with that puzzle. Initially we had the idea of having the distance from the player's computer to the soft spot listed, and nothing else. When you start mixing radiuses together from mulitple locations, theoretically you could find those points, but I think this got scrapped because we couldn't make the distance measurements work right, or something.

Even when we were using a globe though, we had 7 lines busting out each player. All of them criss-crossed so many times on the globe that it was nearly impossible for us to decide which crossing points mattered and which didn't. Once the actually miles were added though, it was a lot easier to figure it out.

[Eric Kays]

Yeah, I can see how that could cause chaos too. We'd hoped you would have focused on one compass at a time.

[Enlil]

I don't think we ever found out why one of the compasses was gold. I guess the letter was written from the one it pointed to, but did it have any other significance?

[Bill Cohen]

There was a timing element because post-production on the Pan videos forced the storyline back over a week, so you were more on the clock than you knew you were. Some of it came down to expecting more players (and hence being able to potentially derive locations using only distance), some of it came down to the players missing online tools that would have made their lives easier...and some of it came down to me being a Geography teacher with a better-than-average understanding of how maps and globes work - my bad.

[Bill Cohen]

I don't think we ever found out why one of the compasses was gold. I guess the letter was written from the one it pointed to, but did it have any other significance?

It was a little lead-in to the location of the Sydney Wall piece - you'll note in the letter Agent X says that he is 'heading east'.