Linkin Park Planning "Exciting Things" for 2023 - Meteora 20th Celebration

[AJ93]

ok, time to take a break from this depressing riddles

Edited February 4, 2023 by AJ93

[HybridSuns]

33 minutes ago, rqthomazini said:

the Meteora site is a sidequest? so what would be the main quest?

That wouldn't make much sense, I think the "borowoods" hint is the side quest, as in something else other than the main focus right now (M20).

 

35 minutes ago, AJ93 said:

I don't see any sidequest on the website. and what is "borowoods"?

It's the hint Mike gave regarding his "side quest". The main guess is that it has something to do with Scream VI (borowoods = woodsboro, where Scream 1, 4 and 5 take place) which comes out March 10

[JZLP-Benningstrong]

I'm starting to hate this thing.

 

There's better ways to create hype.

[IWillWalkAway]

I wanna hear Lost really badly mannn. The site thing is dope but there’s nothing else to do now but wait. Those unreleased tracks hold so much value to me, and I feel like i gotta just keep being patient but there’s a difference between being impatient and having literal anxiety.

[Coizu]

9 hours ago, LPLStaff said:

No update today, maybe something broke. Seems weird to take a day off.

 

My theory is that the whole thing is delayed, but future spoilers ahead so don't read on if you don't want to don't read spoilers:

 

Spoiler

I think that the whole thing got finished way too late and they delayed the whole thing and if they would have pushed out an update yesterday (Friday), it would have been confusing and caused anger in some people.

 

When the whole thing started on Wednesday, one of the already uploaded files that looked like one of the final hints said something like "Thanks for the help, I'll meet you at the warehouse Friday 6 AM" (I didn't save that image, so I don't have the exact wording). When they updated the website on Thursday the file for that "Friday 6 AM" hint disappeared and a new one that is very similar got added, it just got the "6 AM" part removed. My first reaction was that they don't want to commit to a specific time (or maybe they figured out that using one specific time without any timezone clue might be confusing) but maybe they were simply not done in time for that. Within the first 24 hours they also pushed out a couple of changes to the clues as well (mostly technical and typo changes as far as I can tell, nothing that changes the game). During the HT20 thing I don't remember that happening at any point. To me that looks like it was rushed and that they had to clean it up after it was technically out already.

 

So next look at how much game we have left. For that we need to get a little bit technical for a second:

The game loads two things from the server. The first thing is what they call "homeicons". A homeicon is the base state of the game for a specific step of the game (i.e. after each update, there is a new homeicon resource that defines how the game looks like when you start it). The other thing are "blocks". A block is the result of an interaction you do in the game. I.e. you press on a photo, then the game loads the block that belongs to that interaction from the server and then displays you the result of that block on your screen. That way they can control server side what parts of the game are accessible and what not, basically their way of timegating the content. There are some exceptions to this whole thing, but that's mainly how the system worked in HT20 and now.

So why is this interesting? Even though the blocks are locked server side, it is already possible to figure out which possible homeicons and blocks potentially exist, we just can't see the content yet, and therefore we can figure out how many interactions are yet to be unlocked. I created a list of all possible resources on the first day of the game and put down notes which one belongs to which interaction once they got unlocked, click here to see an image of it. As you can see on that image, we used up most of them already. There are only 9 left, where at least one has to be used for a homeicon resource and that would leave us with 8 block resources. If we look at previous days, on average (not sure if you can call it average after 2 days) they used 1 homeicon resource and 6 blocks per day.

So what does that mean? With the resources we seem to have left, we most probably only get one more update, two at most I would say.

 

If we assume there is only one update left and they would have pushed it out yesterday, it would have basically said "Meet you Friday" on a Friday which would have been very confusing. Would they mean the same day or the next Friday? Imagine how people would behave if they figure out that the last clue tells them to wait a week again.

 

In addition to all that the whole thing just seems scrambled together real quick and buggy. If you haven't encountered any bugs yet, I invite you to open the game in a private browser session and play around with the combo lock for a while. It probably won't take you long to figure out how badly it behaves if you for example want to delete the previous number with your keyboard.

 

So my theory is that the game was supposed to be released a couple of days earlier in January and we would have gotten the "Friday 6 AM" clue a couple of days earlier. Maybe something like Wednesday. For some reason that might not have worked out as planned and they delayed the whole thing into February and since they announced something for January, they squeezed in the countdown (or made it longer than originally planned). With my current knowledge, I assume we get the first substantial thing next Friday, so that puts a wait time of 15 days between the start of the countdown and whatever will happen on that day. I can't imagine that they planned the whole thing to drag along for so long. Especially since we got an announcement for an announcement for an announcement at this point (Newsletter -> Countdown -> Final clue that points towards Friday). I mean it is possible that that's how it was supposed to go from the start and everything I thought about is just totally wrong, obviously I have no proper insight on what they are doing, but it sounds a little bit ridiculous at that point.

Also everything that I gathered so far can change at any moment. They can upload a whole different set of images, add blocks etc. Maybe they added dummy items as red herrings. I don't know.

So take everything I said with a grain of salt and think for yourself.

 

Edited February 4, 2023 by Coizu

[thigolpbr]

 

8 hours ago, IWillWalkAway said:

I wanna hear Lost really badly mannn. The site thing is dope but there’s nothing else to do now but wait. Those unreleased tracks hold so much value to me, and I feel like i gotta just keep being patient but there’s a difference between being impatient and having literal anxiety.

I was very anxious these days of the count and it was a shower of cold water what happened afterwards.
so I made the decision not to worry too much about it now, and try to be patient and wait for the announcement, some demo etc...

when something finally comes out I'll be notified by the band's IG, Twitter, FB or YT.

[martinez]

Spoiler

3 hours ago, Coizu said:

 

My theory is that the whole thing is delayed, but future spoilers ahead so don't read on if you don't want to don't read spoilers:

 

  Hide contents

So my theory is that the game was supposed to be released a couple of days earlier in January and we would have gotten the "Friday 6 AM" clue a couple of days earlier. Maybe something like Wednesday. For some reason that might not have worked out as planned and they delayed the whole thing into February and since they announced something for January, they squeezed in the countdown (or made it longer than originally planned).

 

 

That's actually what i was saying on the chat, some time ago even two times. And I even think that the site and the whole puzzle was meant to take a longer time and that the very first thing of it supposed to be out on december. that's why we know what we know.

 

There are pluses of revealing stuff out and minuses. The minuses are that they can provide the new stuff, which might or might not causing more delays.

 

 

[LPLStaff]

Something seems to have changed or got messed up timing-wise because Warner released all of the Meteora 20 box sets on the one day, the info is STILL up on their site over a week (two weeks now?) later, and Hot Topic has Meteora 20 merch out. Wonder why Warner didn't take the info down if they leaked it early.

[AJ93]

10 minutes ago, LPLStaff said:

Something definitely changed or got messed up because Warner released all of the Meteora 20 box sets on the one day, the info is STILL up on their site over a week (two weeks now?) later, and Hot Topic has Meteora 20 merch out. Yikes.

whoever was that employee posted the Meteora|20 Box Set on warner website, he or she might get demoted or sacked. And I think the users from reddit, youtube, and discord have really gone too far on spreading the meteora|20 misnformation. They really need to have patience.

 

 

 

[Hybrider]

22 minutes ago, LPLStaff said:

Something seems to have changed or got messed up timing-wise because Warner released all of the Meteora 20 box sets on the one day, the info is STILL up on their site over a week (two weeks now?) later, and Hot Topic has Meteora 20 merch out. Wonder why Warner didn't take the info down if they leaked it early.

That Hot Topic M20 merch is out maybe since a week if not more. I think it's not official M20 merch. They just used leaked cover to make merch.

Edited February 4, 2023 by Hybrider

[Coizu]

3 minutes ago, AJ93 said:

whoever was that employee posted the Meteora|20 Box Set on warner website, he or she might get demoted or sacked.

We know nothing about what happened. What if when the product listing went up, it was supposed to go up, but it got delayed but the listing was forgotten? What if it was a technical error? There are so many reasons that wouldn't warrant firing anyone.

[leftshoe18]

1 hour ago, Hybrider said:

That Hot Topic M20 merch is out maybe since a week if not more. I think it's not official M20 merch. They just used leaked cover to make merch.

No chance in hell Hot Topic is selling Bootleg merch.

[solidss]

28 minutes ago, leftshoe18 said:

No chance in hell Hot Topic is selling Bootleg merch.

yeah they definitely can get sued for that. a store like that follows regulations so they were most likely told they can release the merch on this date.

[jopevc]

Jesus what a mess this has been

[AJ93]

18 hours ago, HybridSuns said:

Mike's on Discord rn

 

The prevalent theory is that Mike is doing something for Scream VI.

 

 

 

It's Live!!!! The PC completed the reboot!

 

 

Edited February 4, 2023 by AJ93

[Coizu]

Very small update. You can listen to the voice mail on the computer, click on the polaroid pictures and open the rolls of papers on the desk that contain the sneak peak of the M20 cover I mentioned yesterday

[solidss]

now im getting a DeliveryApp your package has been lost voicemail and says wait 24 hours for a new update. Is this as far as we get today?

Edited February 4, 2023 by solidss

[AJ93]

Just now, Coizu said:

Very small update. You can listen to the voice mail on the computer, click on the polaroid pictures and open the rolls of papers on the desk that contain the sneak peak of the M20 cover I mentioned yesterday

the voicemail is so distorted and static. Be advised, do not volume up as it can hurt your ears

[Hybrider]

Voicemail hints "LOST".

[AJ93]

2 minutes ago, Hybrider said:

Voicemail hints "LOST".

can you record the voicemail? I can't hear anything from the voicemail due to being static. Also, faint242 is gone.

Edited February 4, 2023 by AJ93

[Hybrider]

4 minutes ago, AJ93 said:

can you record the voicemail? I can't hear anything from the voicemail due to being static. Also, faint242 is gone.

Here

[Coizu]

Link to the voice mail: https://d2cstorage-a.akamaihd.net/wr/linkinpark/LP-Modal/ylmGvR6694.mp3

 

There is also a trash folder on the desktop, but you can only open it if you haven't opened the DeliveryApp before. This whole thing gets buggier each day which adds to the theory that this was rushed.

[jopevc]

So, tomorrow we get an update from the package?

[IWillWalkAway]

Hmmm, “your package has been (pause) LOST (pause again)”. Some correlation here 🤔🤔🤔. 3PM tomorrow, I’ll be back.

Edited February 4, 2023 by IWillWalkAway

[LPxDBZ]

Maybe the "lost" package will be a cassette tape for the recorder? We still have to "Call M about the old spot" too, whatever that means. Still several updates left, I imagine.