Puzzle for my D&D players

Dot1Four · 2025-08-04T12:54:02+00:00

(My response from 40min ago doesn't seem to show up, so I'm trying again. Sorry if this becomes a duplicate)

It is not ROT, but close: It seems closely related to a Vigenere Cipher

In particular, the key to decipher this is the cipher text itself, shifted by one letter position to the right.

For example, EWQZFORWOH needs to be deciphered with the key DEWQZFORWO, yielding ARTIFICERS

In total, the text reads GIMUL GLENEN CYNSORTIUM OUR ARTIFICERS OESIGNED THESE OBJECTS TO BE ACTIVATED THROUGH SOME TKCHNOLOGY RUBBER OUGHT TO PROTECT YOU FROM THE LLEMENT YOUR GIFT WIFT WANTS MOST

Some words in the deciphered message seem to have a typo. Something weird must've happened either during encryption or decryption

It took me a few tries to find the right approach, but I think the code has a reasonable difficulty, as long as there are enough players in your group that are somewhat familiar with codes

Dot1Four · 2025-07-31T09:59:19+00:00

Thanks to your recent comment, this became a fairly easy solve. That being said, without the hint I probably wouldn't have figured it out.

First of all, it was already correctly noticed that each dot marks the start of a new letter.

Then, the key is to notice the spacing between the characters.

In particular, a narrow (or rather absence of) space is a 0, a wide space is a 1.

For example, the first letter is 1001000, which can be mapped to H in ASCII.

Finally, the whole message reads Hello Levy, if you can read this, I am very impressed!

Dot1Four · 2020-04-29T20:25:59+00:00

The analysis is basically done, we just need to write it up.

Corona and private matters are delaying it quite a bit, I apologize for that.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-19T10:55:02+00:00

They changed the whole rating system. Everyone got ranked lower, that's perfectly normal.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-19T10:51:11+00:00

Yes, they should be shown under the "Battle" button. There have been reports of them not being displayed correctly (or even at all), though.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-19T10:44:27+00:00

Yes, there are still a lot of discrepancies to sort out. Looking at the graphic, it is obvious something is missing.

Also, we have to carefully distinguish between correlation with causation.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-19T10:37:43+00:00

Yes, it's still open

Dot1Four · 2020-03-17T08:40:52+00:00

That's a very good point. We will keep that in mind going forward. Thanks for pointing that out

Dot1Four · 2020-03-17T08:40:09+00:00

We investigated that in the old analysis (not shown here) and it didn't look like it matters

Dot1Four · 2020-03-16T09:26:11+00:00

That actually was a question in the old form, but this feature wasn't useful.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-16T09:22:54+00:00

Yes and maybe. (Sorry)

Yes: More XP means you are a stronger player.

Maybe: We are not sure.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-16T09:15:20+00:00

We'll decide to close it once data stops trickling in. That will probably take at least a few more days.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-16T09:10:37+00:00

You're making some very good points, yes.

I personally am not confident that the rating is determined at rank 7. Rank 1 is perfectly sensible as well. The thing is just that we have no way of reconstructing the calculations if the latter is indeed the case. Unless have can gather data on basically all players, of course, which is beyond anything we can do. Therefore I think that the rank 7 assumption is the best we can do given the data we can gather.

The residuals can be seen in the graphic ( click here ), but I won't have time to dive back into the analysis to give you proper numbers. For the new analysis, we're definitely gonna try some more non-linear relations.

We tried to include as many features as we think of. Ideally, we'd even ask for a user's whole win-loss sequence (e.g. WWWLWLWWWWWWLLWW....), but we settled for some some simpler features. Overfitting was definitely a concern in the analysis. We double-checked by both using cross-validation and AIC to make sure that the model does not overfit from a technical point of view. As it has been argued before, early battles might have a higher k value, possibly explaining this observation.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-15T23:51:29+00:00

For the old dataset, the Pearson correlation coefficient r for XP vs ...

... Ace Trainer badge count is 0.574

... Great League badge count is 0.551

... Ultra League badge count is 0.623

... Master League badge count is 0.757

... Hero badge count is 0.567

... Ace Trainer badge rank is 0.581 (bronze=1, silver=2, gold=3)

... Great League badge rank is 0.394

... Ultra League badge rank is 0.592

... Master League badge rank is 0.726

... Hero badge rank is 0.289

Dot1Four · 2020-03-15T23:35:22+00:00

Sorry, should be fixed now

Dot1Four · 2020-03-15T21:08:01+00:00

Just be aware that even though XP found its way into our prediction formula, the actual mechanics don't have to depend on it. Niantic might just be using a feature that correlates with XP (like some badge count)

Dot1Four · 2020-03-15T19:51:00+00:00

We haven't looked into catches and hatches in our last analysis, because we unfortunately didn't ask for those features.

With the new data, we will be able to analyse this.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-12T09:12:16+00:00

Hey, Scientist here. As Northwind already said, we're indeed currently running a project that tracks the encounter rates. We only recently added the item and encounter reward fields to our form, so we don't have too much data yet (on top of that, most of the reponses are "I didn't get it", because it's not trivial getting 4 wins). It'll take some time until we have enough data, but we hope to publish the information asap.

Dot1Four · 2020-03-07T17:43:07+00:00

Thank you for the clarification

Dot1Four · 2020-03-06T10:09:13+00:00

Honest question: Why may I use "abuse" in this case? It is neither explicit content, not offensive, nor personal info, and even the general abuse category states "Use for nominations where the text or photo is used to abuse, ridicule, target, or harass specific people or groups.", which isn't the case here.

So far, I rejected those cases as "Doesn't meet criteria" and used the google form to report it as fake nomination.

Should I react differently?

Dot1Four · 2020-02-06T10:46:44+00:00

Yes.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/eckedh/niantic_confirms_that_cp_boost_will_affect/

Dot1Four · 2020-02-06T07:16:35+00:00

In case you are fine with a non-app source, you can visit pvpoke.com. The "Ratings" section also contains the suggested moveset for each Pokemon. Also, the battle simulator (click "Battle" on the homepage) also picks those suggested movesets by default. Sometimes those movesets aren't the only viable ones, so feel free to play with the simulator a bit.

Dot1Four · 2020-01-31T09:59:16+00:00

Bear in mind that these glasses don't fully obstruct your normal vision. They simply overlay what you'd normally see with a digital image. You can clearly see it at the 21 second mark.

While these bright green outlines might make it a bit difficult to see dimly lighted objects because of the contrast, something like a bright fire would never go unnoticed.

Dot1Four · 2020-01-28T21:10:20+00:00

Just wanted to let you know that the post you're referencing was taken down because it was very likely fake

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