4
$\begingroup$

I apologize if this isn't appropriate here, but it's been driving me insane. Essentially, a puzzle was recently introduced in the video game World of Warcraft, which no one has been able to solve. Interestingly enough, players in the Chinese zone were given a different version of this puzzle (out of necessity, I assume, due to character set differences.) They were able to solve their version (an endeavor chronicled here. The answer they divined works on (at least) North American and European servers as well as Chinese, meaning I think I have both the puzzle and its answer - I just can't for the life of me get from Point A to Point B.

The relevant part of the puzzle appears to be a sequence of binary numbers, each number consisting of either 5, 8, or 24 digits:

01110111 00100 10010110 10101
11110111 01100 01111111 01000
011010111001011010010110 10111101
11001 00111111 10010 01001001
10000 011010010110100111010110
01011011 11110 11110001 11111
11100000 00010 11111111 01000
10110111 10101 01111111 00001
10101110 11111 00110000 01000
101101010010101110010110

With formatting cleaned up a bit:

01110111 00100
10010110 10101
11110111 01100
01111111 01000
011010111001011010010110
10111101 11001
00111111 10010
01001001 10000
011010010110100111010110
01011011 11110
11110001 11111
11100000 00010
11111111 01000
10110111 10101
01111111 00001
10101110 11111
00110000 01000
101101010010101110010110

The answer to the puzzle consists of 3 separate "attacks" from the game:

Falling Murloc
Mighty Charge
Eye Beam

I assume, but can't be sure, that each of the 24-digit numbers must somehow map to the 3 answers, using a transformation described by the preceding 8 and 5-digit number sequences. I attempted to apply a basic compression algorithm of a sort (search for each 8-bit number in the 24-bit number, replace any instance with the corresponding 5-bit number, repeat until nothing more can be done,) but this didn't seem to yield anything that looked mappable to, for example, an ASCII character set. Of course, I also tried replacing instances of 5-bit numbers with their 8-bit counterparts, to no avail.

Improve this question
$\endgroup$
3
  • $\begingroup$ Well I think this is appropriate here - but I just want to check that this isn't a competition is it? And also what do you think the answer is? $\endgroup$
    – Beastly Gerbil
    Commented Sep 3, 2017 at 19:49
  • $\begingroup$ It WAS a competition until, I believe, late yesterday, when the entire sequence of puzzles was finished (this one is only one step in a chain.) The chain is called "Lucid Nightmare," and the answers to all steps are now freely available. The above puzzle has only been solved using a separate starting point which was given to players in China. Since their answer ("Falling Murloc, Mighty Charge, Eye Beam") also works on North American servers, I assume that must be the correct answer to the version posted above, but I can't figure out how to get there. $\endgroup$
    – Kevin
    Commented Sep 3, 2017 at 19:57
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Check the explanation here. $\endgroup$
    – JS1
    Commented Sep 4, 2017 at 10:53

0

Reset to default