World Of Warcraft Players Solve Secret Spanning All Of Azeroth

Some secrets stay hidden for years. Others stay hidden for a couple weeks, but only because people collectively poured hundreds of hours into solving them.

As part of World of Warcraft’s most recent major update, Tomb of Sargeras, Blizzard added a secret so deviously obtuse that no single player had much hope of solving it. So players banded together via WoW’s Secret Finding Discord Community and started sleuthing.

What they uncovered was a series of pages scattered across Azeroth, each marked with an infuriatingly vague clue. Some, like “the first of lords to fall”—which points to Ragnaros’ lair—weren’t so bad, but others, like “in snow, sand, and stone” could’ve applied to just about anything. They had to be collected by individual players in a specific order that was inspired, oddly enough, by the cosmology chart from real-life book World of Warcraft Chronicle Volume 1. As WoWhead points out (via PCGamesN), the page numbers even spell out the the book’s ISBN: 9781616558451.

In this wonderless year of 2017, it’s rare that secrets stay secret for long, often thanks to dark arts like datamining. This secret hunt was particularly clever in that it couldn’t be datamined. Apparently, pages only appeared in the game’s database after players interacted with them. I’m not 100 percent sure how Blizzard achieved that, but it’s damn cool.

As members of the Secret Finding Discord Community sleuthed themselves into oblivion, WoW senior game designer and riddle master Jeremy ‘Muffinus’ Feasel lurked—secretly, of course—in the Discord channel, taunting players and occasionally dropping hints via Twitter.

https://twitter.com/embed/status/850492338673598464

https://twitter.com/embed/status/847948269338599424

https://twitter.com/embed/status/851573212739534848

Two weeks after the Tomb of Sargeras update dropped, players finally solved the puzzle. For their troubles, they were rewarded with a special mount, Riddler’s Mind-Worm. It might not seem like much given all the trouble people went through, but something something the journey not the destination or whatever. Also, some WoW players just go fucking batty for special mounts. It’s a thing!

Once it was clear that the puzzle was solved, Blizzard’s Feasel signed off with one last tweet:

https://twitter.com/embed/status/852032218692075520