Hello puzzlers of SG, did you miss me? Or are you relatively new to the community and do not know who the heck I am? Either way, welcome to a new signature puzzle by Blue Award. That is me, hi! Haven't created one for a big while and also wasn't solving too much the last few months and an itch has awekened to grace new generation of puzzlers with my creation :P

All things considered, this should be pretty straightforward one and I hope you enjoy it.

Remember this is NOT a group puzzle, you are on your own here. If you played a bit with it and can't find connection between the pieces then that's probably it, give it a rest or let it go completely.

Please don't post anything puzzle-related here. If you're stuck then that's it, I'm sorry. That includes links to any tools, aside from what should be obvious to everybody (the 5-character giveaway code you put after http://steamgifts.com/giveaway/ or the 8 character puzzle code for http://itstoohard.com/puzzle/). No questions/hints/answers should be posted.

Seriously, from my experience if you feel the need to post something puzzle related (other than very general praise or lamentations) then you are running a huge risk that you're going to spoil something even if you think you aren't doing it, and it's very bad for you and everyone else involved. Don't assume something is obvious for others so you are free to post it. Do not f&%#ing do it, okay? I'm serious. Anyway if you're wondering how to start the puzzle, get the anchor part of the url of the timer below, then reverse it and swap the two digits. I hope you do read what I'm writing and aren't a too long, didn't read kid. I try to filter them out as the first step here.

Ends 2013 Dec 17, 2000 ZULU

The amount of time I give you to play with my little puzzle is not indicative of the difficulty, it's just there are some big puzzles still floating around and also many people are busy with exams etc. I consider my little puzzle here not to be too difficult but of course your mileage may vary. I could've complicated it in many, many ways but I rather took the opposite route and made it much easier than it could be.

The giveaway has a token contributor requirement of 1 cent. The prize isn't anything too huge so if you feel like you may be dissapointed by the prize don't f$#&ing do the puzzle. It should be fun on its own, above all.

Good luck!

Solution

All things considered this puzzle required being perceptive more than anything. I really tried to tell you everything is pretty straightforward and put in other hints, but that probably didn't stop people going with some wild angles once they saw a mysterious key, trying to decode it somehow for one reason or another. Surely enough it is something encoded in a specific way, but it was absolutely unnecessary to understand these inner workings. You just had to use The Key on The Gateway (or where it led), exactly what The Gateway's solution told you to do. And then if you didn't know what you were looking at, googling answers on The Key should have given you the proper idea. The Key's description was compelling you to do that.

It mostly hinged on playing with the audiotool and noticing the "copy link to clipboard", at which I was subtly hinting in the description here and on The Gateway quiz (talking about playing with what you've got, connecting pieces, links to tools). And then perhaps trusting me and yourself enough to be 100% sure you know what you are looking at and trying a different reader or something if you couldn't read the giveaway code.

The initial quizzes were more of a guide, puzzle lite at any rate, with rather obvious answers. To make sure you know what a QR code is, and then to know what is the final step. I even didn't use imgur to host images just links that would both explain quite well what is on the picture, at the same time trying to reinforce the idea that nothing is hidden for paranoid people who'd love to poke around imgur for hidden stuff or something.

At the last minute I decided to throw in some tl;dr people filter. From my experience there can be lots of trouble with them. Maybe some people not feeling proficient enough in English were a collateral damage, but eh, what can I say. But I also wanted to instill this idea that reading everything is in fact important. All the subtle things here and there.

Anyway the text hereinabove clearly said what you had to do to even get started with the puzzle, if you didn't know what anchor part of url is, there's always an easy web search that would explain it.

And then, long story short, you had to use "The Key" (0.0.fvs.d0g.f3c.b2g.at4.dt0.d7s.ebg.cf4.a00.c9c.al8.0.0) on The Gate/The Lock from "The Gateway" (figuratively; literally "a qr code"/"qr code"/"quick response code"). The result was the sound that my giveaway code made as interpreted by Data in the Matrix. Or in other words, if you didn't know what you were looking at: data matrix.

So yeah the last step was playing with whatever image manipulation and/or data matrix reader software worked for you and you got the 5 character giveaway code from what was shown in the audiotool.

Gratz to all solvers, especially to Noctis, the winner!