The City of Heroes Search the words, save the world Contest - February 15th, 2010

Submissions open every Monday only from 10 AM Pacific Time (1 PM Eastern Time / 6PM GMT / 19:00 Central European Time) until 5:00 PM Pacific Time (8:00 PM Eastern Time / 1:00 AM GMT / 2:00 Central European Time) between January 11, 2010 and July 26, 2010).

Welcome to our "Search the words, save the world" forum mission!

Last week's challenge came to a rather abrupt ending with 3 words still being hunted today. Ebil-o could have gotten away with it but he didn't. We were safe for another week but don't expect this week's word block to be that much easier.

(This time, I have taken the time to make sure all original and correctly spelt words have been used to make up this word block, just in case! Also, there is no bent words, only diagonal, vertical or horizontal in one direction or the other.)


Your opportunity to save us all is through a word block located at the bottom of this post.

The goal is to be the first one to find the words based on the theme (without being told what they are), circle them in the word block (using Paint or an equivalent program) and then list them below it.

If you are the first one to answer with the correct words, you win and only then will we be able to input the words into Ebil-o's matrix, thus delaying our impending doom. As a token of our gratitude, we'll give you the "Ebil-o FTL [date]" forum title as well as 1 (one) costume code amongst the following ones:

• Carnival of Shadows Harlequin
• Freakshow Tank Boss
• Paragon Police Department Hardsuit
• Carnival of Shadows Ring Mistress
• Knives of Artemis Lt.
• Praetorian Clockwork

If you win the City of Heroes® Search the words, save the world Contest one week, you are not eligible to do so again for the next 8 weeks. This is to allow other people the opportunity to win. Please be courteous to others and refrain from participating during the weeks you are not eligible to win.

Monday, February 15th, 2010 - Word Block



This week, you are looking to find 10 Enhancements.

Good luck all, and don't forget that the fate of the world is in your hands!

If I am a winner, I permit NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Limited to use my name, likeness, photograph, hometown, and any comments that I may make about myself or this contest that I provide for advertising and promotional activities. I also certify that I am at least 13 years of age and am eligible to participate in this contest.




Ragnarok
Soaring
Bonesnap
Aegis
Perplex
Triage
Salvo
Horror
Paralytic
Ruin

nevermind.

If I am a winner, I permit NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Limited to use my name, likeness, photograph, hometown, and any comments that I may make about myself or this contest that I provide for advertising and promotional activities. I also certify that I am at least 13 years of age and am eligible to participate in this contest.

/image redacted following contest/


Words:
salvo
ruin
kismet (twice)
aegis (twice)
paralytic
ragnarok
soaring
bonesnap
horror
triage
perplex

Salvo
Ruin
Kismet
Perplex
Paralytic
Ragnarok
Soaring
Triage
Horror
Bonesnap

If I am a winner, I permit NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Limited to use my name, likeness, photograph, hometown, and any comments that I may make about myself or this contest that I provide for advertising and promotional activities. I also certify that I am at least 13 years of age and am eligible to participate in this contest.

Edit: Looking at it now, I suspect that Ruin might be a false positive, being the shortest word on the list.

salvo
bonesnap
aegis
paralytic
soaring
horror
triage
perplex
kismet
ragnarok

If I am a winner, I permit NC Interactive, Inc. and NCsoft Europe Limited to use my name, likeness, photograph, hometown, and any comments that I may make about myself or this contest that I provide for advertising and promotional activities. I also certify that I am at least 13 years of age and am eligible to participate in this contest.

And we do indeed have a winner. Well done Graevity! The 10 Enhancements were indeed:

• Salvo
• Bonesnap
• Aegis
• Paralytic
• Soaring
• Horror
• Triage
• Perplex
• Kismet
• Ragnarok

For mentioning that Ruin probably was a false positive? She mentioned it at 12:24pm and Graevity posted his participation at 12:29pm though.

I have every faith in Ms. Mesmer winning at this game soon

Just a request for clarification:
When you say we're looking for the right ten, we also should not include any extras or duplicates?

So my entry was incorrect even though it included the correct 10 for the following reasons:
(1) it included 'ruin' as an 11th
(2) 'soaring' was found in a different place than winning response
(3) it included both incidents of 'kismet'
(4) it included both incidents of 'aegis'

I look forward to playing again next week!

Congrats, Graevity!

You're right Dark Quill, I'll make sure to clarify that in the rules! I'm already updating them actually. I was tempted to hint at it but it could have been construed as "favouritism".

Also, I need to make sure nobody edits their response after posting their participation, to avoid potential issues.

Damn, this is becoming serious!

Avatea,

You need to find a new contest or a new puzzle generator. There's been problems with the puzzle every week now except maybe the first week. I wasted two hours last week on an unsolvable puzzle which you have yet to apologize for.

Unless you're willing and able to edit your puzzle making sure there are no false positives or willing to be flexible enough to recognize correct, alternative solutions; then you shouldn't be running this particular contest.

Thanks, Avatea! I'm sure you'll get the kinks worked out!

ZM: Please remember it's supposed to be fun!

If you can avoid having duplicate entries of the correct words, that'd be great. With 3 known sets of duplicates in this one, that makes eight possible solutions with the 10 correct words, of which only one would be valid.

I enjoyed the near-'bonesnap's. I was like, "Bonesnap!" No! Darn! That's 'Boensnap'!

Zombie Man, I understand your concerns and I apologize for not having had enough time to look into last week's puzzle. If more problems arise next week, I'll take this forum game down and will think of a suitable replacement. The tool I use is extremely simple but I do indeed suspect that something's amiss but I can't be spending my whole time looking through a word block if I want it to be hard enough not to be deciphered in 5 minutes.

My sincerest apologies if I've managed to turn this into a not very fun experience for some of you.

Avatea: If you want to eliminate some of the technical difficulties, you can just relax some of the rules. You could announce, for example,

(a) A solution that has exactly X correct words from the stated category, whether or not they are the originally intended X words (or in the location intended), will be deemed correct.
(b) No words in the list will be less than five letters long.

This would have given the same winning solution this week, while eliminating difficulties with duplicate correct words.

Sure you don't want to take me up on that offer to write a generator that will guarantee no duplicates for costume code? I can even make it a javascript generator, so that you can download it to your own computer and guarantee that my server won't be watching over your shoulder to give me the answers or anything.

First off, even though there're still problems, this week's puzzle was a vast improvement over the previous 2 weeks... IMHO.

Not gonna sit there and do calculations, but I expect the chance of getting a false positive drops off exponentially as the number of letters in the word increases. You would expect that it is very improbable for an unintended word appearing in a word search to fit the weekly theme as well, but alas we've seen some 2 out of the last 3 weeks. So setting a minimum number of letters for words on the word list (5 or higher) could be a good solution to the problems that has been plaguing this contest.

One thing I think that's taking the fun out of these contests (talking about the Wednesday and Friday ones too) is that many people are taking them way too seriously. For some, it's just how they perceive contests. For others, it's the lure of getting costume codes. I imagine you'll get a lot less people n-raging about these contests if the CCs are taken out of the equation. I also know that, that was the entire point of these contests: to give players a mean of getting these codes alternative to going to Comic-Con, PAX, Hero-Con. So the CC prizes are here to stay. With that said, if Avatea does choose to "close down" the word searches, I hope she would consider instead keeping this contest alive, minus the CCs, and do a separate contest for the CCs.

One other thought: the community has been coming up with solutions for problems for this contest and I think progress is being made. Starting a replacement contest means starting over with a potentially new set of problems. Enough of my ranting for now. Thanks for reading.

Thanks all for your comments. The aim of this little game was and still is to make it a fun experience for all participants and while I've tried to find a way to address some of the issues raised, it seems there are a few things I cannot fix myself due to how the words and randomised letters are processed by the tool.

I'll make extra efforts for next week's word block and hopefully the measures taken will make it a fun game again.

Thank you all for your patience!