Nice work Kouye, you really kicked it up a notch on this one !
Regarding constructive feedback, I've got two or three observations on where to improve:
+ Too much reliance on knowing lots of forum usernames. Our brain works kinda funny and sometimes, you need to already know the answer to your current problem and just let you brain dig and work out the connections for the answers to surface to consciousness. This process is short-circuited when you're looking for something you never even heard before in your life, and your brain starts to wander and make false positive connections with stuff you are familiar with. In a sense, this is handicap for newer users, who are working with limited knowledge.
+ The "mates" thing basically allowed brute-forcing or similar techniques. Not much more to add here. It wouldn't have been cracked yet if the usernames were not scrambled and that hint given away.
+ Some clues too ambiguous (this one might just be my impression based on where my guesswork took me). For example:
The poem:
"If you strictly focus on the key" meant keeping only 3rd char from each line and discard spaces, you get: "eritwa"
At first I had focused even more strictly, so I applied 3 from general to specific:
I went to the 3rd search result on Google, which was this:
http://www.shmoop.com/there-is-no-frigate-like-a-book/stanza-1-summary.htmlIf you go there, you'll see that the poem is actually broken in its verses and you even have the title "Lines 3 and 4", so naturally, I went for verse 3. This was a coincidental misled.
In verse 3, the 3rd word looked nice and capitalized: Coursers
Now Coursers did not sound to me like any username, but then I see:
"(*)This guy holds the next key. And key has a tail!(**)"
And as you might know, a "courser" is a horse, and they have tails !
and even then:
"(**)For a tail-less confirmation, see riddle #2"
and riddle #2 had the thing about The Three Horsemen, so I naturally took the Horsemen as the tail-less confirmation !
Hahaha, this was such a coincidental mindfuck. Or was it?
Something similar happened with #4 and the timestamp I had to grab.
Also last thing i just remembered is I kept second-guessing myself with the fact that Google gives different results for everyone, and if that was or not taken into account during riddle creation.
But all in all, it was great fun, so grats and thanks for your time and effort (and btc for the winner
)!
