SGP member Gothi has used his blog to post criticism of our work
here. Please don't view this as the beginning of some wicked feud. His blog entry is dated October 6th, 2009 at 5:05 pm. I'm assuming this is GMT since his site is hosted at a UK domain. This would have placed his post at 12:05 pm EST and he continued his criticism and exploration into the matter here in this
thread at 12:46 EST.
As the producer and poster of the video titled "Glyph Unlock" which stirred the community into more action in this direction, I stand to be the most taken aback by this turn of events. It's true that I wish the glyph connection to the disappearing door in D08 was more definitive... but I go with the facts. Without healthy criticism (and testing!) of others' ideas as well as our own, we won't prove anything.
For the sake of accurate nomenclature, we may wish to rename "Glyph Unlock" to something else. But what? Possible Unsubstantiated Loading Glitch If Indeed Loading Glitches Exist Unlock? Well, we'll needed
something. At the time, the glyph was staring me in the face marking the location where I could stand and begin a walk into D08 to find an open pathway into a previously locked off area. No doubt, the Ghost Chasers will address the naming issue.
Going back to
the facts... it is a fact that the community discovered a disappearing door or perhaps even a door which could be "unlocked". I came along to disprove the idea that brutalizing poor Elite corpses resulted in the "unlock". That's a fact, as shown by my video. Gothi is merely refining the process a little... by reducing the glyphs from the equation. It's no different than what I did in regard to the Elite bashing.
The fact remains that passage into the area previously secured by the door is now possible, whether it is a loading error or intentional game behavior or some other manner of unintentional glitch. The aim of the SGP is primarily to explore the glyphs, and disproving connections is as crucial as proving them. Again, I commend Gothi on his critical approach.
If there is anything about this affair that is even the least bit irksome, it's the notion that Gothi's criticism was spun in a slightly negative manner:
The Secret Glyph Project got on the wagon and produced a video demonstrating the effect and a whole slew of sub-forums were created to track this phenomenon.
What really happened was that the Secret Glyph Project
got on the case and produced a video which demonstrated a repeatable method of causing the behavior. A whole slew of sub-boards (not entire forums) were created and only
one of them (Ghost Chasers) was created to track this phenomenon... among many others.
Those are just the facts.
Gothi's conclusion in his blog post is based on another hypothesis. Namely, that since loading occurs between the districts
it's my belief that this is just fall out to the way the game engine loads the levels
Essentially, he presents no more evidence that it is a loading error than I produced of it being glyph-induced. What we need are more facts. Multiple people are reporting that they can unlock the door without looking at the glyphs. This is quickly approaching fact (we need another video). Assuming these reports are factual, we're left with only the proof that
looking at a glyph is not the cause. There is no extant demonstrable proof that the cause of the behavior is a coding glitch.
For me, the behavior documented in the video was an exciting find. I could have sat around for hours or even days carefully retesting before I posted the video... while the entire thread on Bungie.net unknowingly kept beating up corpses to get blood on them. In retrospect, I probably should have. Instead, I posted what I found and many people stopped their Elite abuse, joined the SGP, and broadened our scope of investigation into other areas. In my excitement, I
may have made the same mistake that the Elite bashers did by associating the wrong trigger with the event. I use the word "may" because all of the facts aren't in yet. Rest assured we'll get to the bottom of this and I'll personally grind my own theory into the dust if it turns out to be misleading.
My initial response in the aforelinked Ghost Chasers thread was to organize three specific efforts in the direction of
disproving my original theory. When the data comes in, we'll simply have more facts to use in our assessment of the game's behavior so that we can get closer to determining a definitive trigger... or at least a hypothesis with a wealth of supporting data.
The lesson learned here is something I have chimed in with many times in SGP circles... expectations are dangerous. Perhaps deep down I
expected the glyphs to be the trigger and not the corpses. If so, then I am my own cautionary tale. It was never my intention to mislead a single person. This should be abundantly clear by now, as I have beaten this subject like a dead Elite.
Now to supper, and then to collect some facts.
Love,
ColdGlider
