A Surprise from the Easter Bunny

[U.N. Owen]

Originally Posted by Zapmeister

and i'd suspected that the token spots had filled up a while back, so less motivation

If April 6th @ 5:36 AM server time is considered a while back, then yes. That was when I submitted the answer to my last remaining puzzle (the Ridiculous one).

[kjwkjw]

Neat, an event token.

I'll take FREEDOM DiVE please!

[TC_Halogen]

Alright, credits have been handed out to everyone except Throwback69, who be receiving a PM shortly on what he has to do to receive his 500 credits.

kjwkjw, I'll have to get in touch with someone that can give you your token, because I don't have the power to do it myself. I already bugged Zageron last night and I feel really bad about having to do it, lol.

[DarkManticoreX2]

Bmah can do it I believe.

[TC_Halogen]

I'm aware of all of the people that can do it, I was just saying that I had to get in touch with someone that could, haha

[qqwref]

Which are the support tokens again? If those are just dendrite/tell/coactive, can I get something instead (e.g. credits)?

[jgano]

Wow, 125k credits!! Part of me was hoping I'd get lucky and win one of the event tokens; I really want to try and fix my The Wisest Were Wrong score. But, what can you do? Still an awesome contest.

BTW, gotta thank qqwref, kjwkjw, ben, Xenorosth, and Guest15397 for helping me along so that I could get all the puzzles right.

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by qqwref

Which are the support tokens again? If those are just dendrite/tell/coactive, can I get something instead (e.g. credits)?

I gave you +25k for the support token, because I saw you had them all. You were supposed to get 118,000, but you got 143,000 for the one you were supposed to win.

[qqwref]

Oh, okay. Thanks!

[namh666]

Now that the event is over, can I (we?) get a detailed answers post? Answer + walkthrough on how the answer was derived. That would be cool. I couldn't get any of the answers in time so I'm curious about what they were and how people derived them.

[blindreper1179]

What Namh said. I'm in the first one, and I wanna know!

[kjwkjw]

These are the approaches I took in solving the puzzles (I put them in the same order as the document):

The Best of the Best
Answer: Veteran

I started off by noticing that all of the users on that list were in the Regional Rankings page. I crossed off the people in the puzzle from the Regional Rankings page and noticed that seven regions had one person remaining, while the other nine regions were left untouched. I figured I had to work with the 7 people, so I tried arranging them in order of the rank in their respective regions. Taking the first letters of their usernames afterwards spells out "veteran." (Also, I don't think this works perfectly now, because some people have moved around in the regional rankings after the puzzles were finalized.)

Music Similarities
Answer: Magnificence

Note that the first letters of the words in the title are in italics. Take all the songs of the artists first. Then take the first letters of the first two words in those songs (ignoring single-word song titles) and find matching pairs. The way the artists are listed in the document tells you which artist needs to be paired with which, and which letter goes where (e.g. a Jihnsius song would need to be paired with a Terminal 11 song, and "12" would be the 12th letter in the final answer):

12 (E) Eien Meikyu - Eight Melodies (M) 1
4 (N) Norfolk Gals - Nothing's Gonna Stop Me (G) 3
5 (I) I Am Robot - In Aisles (A) 2
10 (N) Never Enough - NES-Style Eye of the Tiger (E) 9
6 (F) Falling Into You - Fall into Night (I) 7
8 (C) Cutting Circles - Counter Clockwise Chant Pattern (C) 11

Note: This means the 6 and the 10 probably should've been swapped in the puzzle, like I have in my list. Or you could've just used an anagram solver with the 12 letters, haha.

The Meaning of FFR and Everything
Answer: Files

Hopefully you tried copypasting the blackened out part into somewhere else, or tried downloading the document and changing the text background color. These parts were crucial clues.

The entire "report" is personifying songs in FFR. "Squadron 42" refers to all FFR songs with difficulty 42. This "squadron" has 22 "fighters" total. (I'm guessing "Dif." was referring to "difficulty.") Now that we have a starting point, we need to take a closer look at the report, hint by hint.

"only those who were lucky to have their status over 500 were able to survive"
Songs with level ID 500 or under all "died." Cross off the 6 songs that fit this -- 16 remaining.

"the time of all those that were left were odd at best"
Cross off songs with an even number of seconds in length. 6 "casualties," 10 remaining.

"A later surprise ambush took out what was left of 3 of our sections, leaving only sections A and D unscathed."
The songs left at this point are in 5 different genres, or "sections." Dance, Token, Arcade, Rock, and Misc. Cross off all songs in Token, Rock, and Misc, as only Dance and Arcade songs were "left unscathed." 3 casualties, 7 remaining.

"In fact, the brothers took their lives just yesterday, probably to save their minds from the ordeals yet to come. We celebrate both of their birthdays this month with funerals instead."
This is the part where the date at the top of the letter is important. The letter was written in December. "Birthdays" is referring to the stepchart release date. The "brothers" therefore are Clockwork Genesis and Sunless Daybreak. This leaves just 5 songs.

"All who remain are on a first name basis though. It’s not that hard to remember anymore. What are we anyways?"
Well, let's take the first letters in the "names" of the 5 remaining songs, Frozen Rain, Sly, Lover Reef, Infinity, and Endless Tewi-ma Park - f, s, l, i, e. Shall we do some rearranging? You guys are files.

Is That a Euphemism For Something?
Answer: Innocent Decay

The phrases listed in the puzzle are "euphemisms," or roundabout ways of saying FFR song names. In order of how they fit in the 8 sets of blanks given:

1. Frozen Fire (Icy Conflagration)
2. Straight To Video (Line to TV Medium)
3. Between the Sheets (In the Middle of Bed Covers)
4. Floating Bridge (Hovering Platform Span)
5. Comfort Betrays (Reassuring but Backstabbed)
6. Forgotten Planet (Repressed Memory of Extraterrestrial Body)
7. Silly Symphony (Not Serious Cacophony of Instruments)
8. Enjoyable Fruit (Sweet Seed Container that is Gratifying)

Using the numbers on some of the blanks, you get the final phrase "Guiltless Atrophy." This is yet another euphemism for a song on FFR, Innocent Decay.

Letter to the Manager
Answer: Onoken

The first paragraph is simply a general starting point, referencing the FFR Shop.

"represent where my home is very well with the amount I had"
The ZIP code of Germansville, PA (as given in the address of the sender) is 18053. This was the user's credit count prior to purchase.

"the one item that I wanted went in stock not too long ago, but it was 18.48% of my total credits"
Ring Ring Bang, one of the most recently released purchased songs and costing 3333 credits, is around that much. Note: The percentage hint was slightly off, which threw me off a bit, haha.

"I went on to buy that item, and every item that you had that was 500 credits or less, but accidentally clicked one that I originally thought to be 200, but really was 700, and accidentally bought that as well."
How many credits does it cost to buy all purchased songs costing 500 credits or less, in addition to a 700 credit song? 6613 credits.

In total, he bought 9946 (3333 + 6613) credits worth of things. He is then left with 18053 - 9946 = 8107 credits.

"However, in the end, from what I had left, I was reminded of another couple items, not available in your store"
These two items are K8107 and P8107. These are not available in the FFR shop as K8107 is a secret song and P8107 is a skill token (the 21st one at that, which explains the 21 S. Token Drive section).

"However, going back through my inventory, I had realized that I was even further away from obtaining the songs I was thinking of"
This is because he purchased songs, and the secret songs you have are based on your current credit balance. K8107 requires 25k, and if you don't have K8107, you can't get P8107 either.

"the products I have in mind were imagined by a very good friend of mine"
Both of these songs are by Onoken.

Conversion to Mirror
Answer: Ability

This one was a doozy.

I started out by stepping the entire thing (left column first, then right). Afterwards, I mirrored it, then using the .sm file where it's given in 0's and 1's, converted the "chart" from binary to English.

I messed around with the spacing of the sections (as beats that do not have notes would show up as "0000"), until I started getting actual words. I ended up with 7 sets of palindromes:

llama mall
see bees
solo gigolos
no devil lived on
god saw I was dog
race fast safe car
tangy gnat

Taking the middle letters of each set spells out the word "ability."

Iconic
Answer: Kidnapper

As posted by Dossar in the thread, the pictures are (or were) avatars of FFR users:


The 9 people are all founders/managers of different teams (in order: Unindeed, Blaze, Pokemon, Pony, K120, Dragons_Fury, Raccoon Girl, Fur, and Indeed). Match the team names with the nth letters as provided by the 9 numbers at the bottom (e.g. the number for "Fur," the second one in the third row, is 3. Hence you would take the third letter, "r") to get "eappkdnri." Solving this anagram gives you one legitimate word: kidnapper.

Final
Answer: Victory

Straightforward idea, although answers to at least some of the other puzzles were necessary.

MEBDCGR: difficulties of the other puzzles (Master, Expert, etc.)
1288397: nth letters (of the answers to those puzzles)

The answers to the other 7 puzzles:
Master - [v]eteran
Expert - f[i]les
Brutal - magnifi[c]ence
Difficult - Innocen[t] Decay
Challenging - On[o]ken
Guru - kidnappe[r]
Ridiculous - abilit[y]

U.N. Owen and I actually guessed the word together when we had 5 letters to work with, haha. It seems like some people got it with even fewer letters though!

[reuben_tate]

Originally Posted by jgano

Wow, 125k credits!! Part of me was hoping I'd get lucky and win one of the event tokens; I really want to try and fix my The Wisest Were Wrong score. But, what can you do? Still an awesome contest.

BTW, gotta thank qqwref, kjwkjw, ben, Xenorosth, and Guest15397 for helping me along so that I could get all the puzzles right.

Even the subtlest hints are sometimes enough to keep you motivated Anyways, thanks AJ for the credits! (or at least distributing them) And thanks Yoshl for handling this event, it was quite fun even though I didn't have time to do more of it like I hoped :P

[Xenorosth]

I will be honest. I had the idea down for ??? before anything. That, as I said before with YoshL, was the easiest. However, I didn't constantly check up on it. The MOMENT I saw a VI, I knew it was victory, just because of how fitting it was. However, if I were to get two vowels I'd be impossible. :P

Still. Now I can mind fuck myself with The Wisest Were Wrong.

Also, I do owe Silvuh. I got literally ALL the answers because of him, and he helped show connections that I would have skipped over, and explained what the 42s were and such.

[namh666]

Thanks a ton for that post kjwkjw! Very helpful and now I understand.