I do not agree. I find this cheating despicable. Consider yourself punished. All progress is reset.
Not at all. Basically hacking the puzzle was a poor way to engage in a game that was supposed to be fun for everyone. Cheating and then whining when you got caught is pretty lame, honestly.
Hi. I'm a regular on the Dream Theater Discord server (I use a different name there, but activation of the account is taking longer than I expected). I think that this treasure hunt is a fantastic idea and I'm excited that it's brought many fans across the forums, reddit, Discord, etc together to collaborate. We've seen a surge in people joining Discord thanks to it.
I came here to say that we (Discord members and Dream Theater fans all around) would rather not go down in history as cheaters, hackers, or as having maliciously ruined the hunt. This was an accident where the community and "Freddy Jacobi" can share the blame. And we all can learn from this.
When the first level of this treasure hunt was brought to the Discord server, I immediately considered it to be similar to the "notpron" puzzle (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notpron,
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Notpron). In this puzzle, you have to solve riddles to advanced to the next web page. Many of the riddles involve checking the page source and/or modifying URLs to advance. This is exactly what happened here. An ambitious treasure hunter found and modified URLs without knowing that this was out the bounds. I tried to do it too, but I wasn't as successful. To us, this seemed to be a normal part of the hunt, especially since Mr. Jacobi said "This puzzle will rely on logical skills, computer skills, and social skills." In fact, the first thing I did to contribute to the hunt was check the page source to discover that a Gronsfeld Cipher is involved; the clue was hidden as #FFFFFF colored text. No one said that this was hacking or cheating.
The person who crawled the website to find the URLs may or may not respond here. Either way, they apologize for what happened and assure us that it was a misunderstanding.
The exposure of the URLs was an oversight on Jacobi's part, and the discovery of the URLs was a result of our having no knowledge of what "computer skills" were or were not out of bounds. Jacobi learned a lesson about WordPress sites. We learned a lesson about the boundries of the hunt. Don't shame anyone for what they did not understand. Don't call us cheaters. We are just as eager as anyone else to discover the treasure.
Thank you.