Award, I both love and despise you, you magnificent bastard.
[EDIT] I have a feeling I'm over-complicating things and that I'm going to want to kill myself when I see the solution.
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Got first step. But my puzzle solving days are done. Bump.
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Wait what? The first step was supposed to be the trickiest, as it's pretty much a guess, although can be an informed one. The rest should be pretty straightforward. Though yes, I hear peeps had some crazy ideas about the second step, but that was just overcomplicating things.
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This giveaway
has ended
0:00:01:01
Day Hr Min Sec
Please...put me out of my misery! :/
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I feel slightly less like killing myself now that I know it's for a game I already had.
Once I'd decoded the message and saw the "sieve of eratosthenes" bit, I:
NOW...here's where I went from SIMPLE, to WAY TOO FREAKIN' COMPLICATED...skipping the step where I consider removing the valid giveaway links...
wrote a quick implementation of the sieve of eratosthenes to give me the order in which non primes are marked on the list, combined those strings, reversed it and tried to decode
gave up.
It never occurred to me to filter out the links that led to the real, closed giveaways...
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You don't have to leave this page.
(TODO: Learn to encode/decode base64 with pen & paper. Why is it always the innocent looking parts that make things complicated?)
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Pen & paper maybe not, although possible.. But there are also offline tools, one or two lines of python script etc. No need to go to xlate or wherever. Even opening other browser window. Like I said it was about not going after these fake links. If someone wanted to look too deeply into this then ultimately, even getting to the actual giveaway one may consider to count as leaving the page.
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And I don't mean
1111
in binary, which would be 15 (BTW I did not use binary encoding in this puzzle!)So I'm here since the faithful Faerie Solitaire giveaway and managed to win 20 times, mostly thanks to wonderful people creating puzzles, combined with me being able to solve them of course.
This calls for a small celebration! With a puzzle, or w/e you want to call it :)
Yes this is one of those evil puzzles, where you have to guess what I did there, but I promise it is actually a pretty simple, although a little twisted idea. However, the more convoluted your idea for the first step is, the more likely it is wrong. You will see when you did the first step right - there is going to be an explanation of what to do next, which should be pretty straightforward. The "fun" part is trying to get the first step right. You don't have to leave this page.
The duration is kinda short: the timer
No hinting, no sharing of ideas, do it yourself or skip it.
(That's by default by the way, but seems you gotta remind people about this)
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Good luck in seeing what I did there!
Update: Final tally - (at least) 22 solvers with 16 entries. Seems good, so no hints will be added.
Solution
The gist of it was that this was a base64 encoded message, just split in 5 character groups faking as giveaway codes. With some actual finished public Skyrim giveaways as a monument to those fine people who made them, and as a red herring, too. Though I clearly did say that you don't have to leave this page, meaning there was no point in following the links. I also hinted that I didn't use binary encoding, trying to put your mind into thinking I did use some other encoding. Also telling SrgColman to taste her own medicine, as she loves them various encodings.
Anyway, the message read to use the sieve of Eratosthenes, which is an ancient algorithm of finding prime numbers, and then reverse. So, take only the fragments from the fake giveaway links that had prime number on them on my 10x10 table, put them together, reverse, and that's a base64 encoded full giveaway link leading to my Sniper Elite giveaway (yes, not Skyrim I'm afraid).
As an added touch, the first message had skyrimz dated from older to newer ones, and then the order reversed. Totally not important, just an added finishing move, since that part was reversed.
Congratulations to the solvers, and especially to the winner!
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