OK, I've made a new topic for this debate.
conga line members aside, i see it as less of a coordinated conspiracy than as individual liars. liars whose duplicate clues are kept to a minimum due to space constraints -- the same sort of constraints that make 3 houses and 5 townspeople constitute an average "town" in this game. no town is actually meant to be that small; the kid with the blonde hair, the lady in the red dress, the old man in the hat, the brown-haired guy in the shirt, and the old woman with the ponytail are a sampling of what's understood to be a more populated area. sometimes, there are repeats in the sampling, and you'll get the mind-blowing occurrence of two old guys in hats in a single town. likewise, Zozo had a repeat slip through.
i don't see redundant Zozo clues as any more of an assault on logic, no closer to a rip in the time-space continuum, than two old men in hats living in the same municipality.
Here's what I think is happening: I'm saying that the clue is wrong because it provides an unnecessary redundancy while simultaneously making it impossible to solve the puzzle on logic alone, and you're saying, maybe I'm right, but you don't care. Here's my perspective: if the developers didn't want the final answer to be a coin-flip guess, they shouldn't have put in the wrong clue. I can understand if it's a typo, but it still breaks the puzzle because, obviously, it's still a coin-flip guess. If the developers DID intend to have it come down to a coin flip, then they shouldn't have even put that NPC there in the first place because it's a waste of space. I do realize that there are plenty of NPCs that say stuff that mean absolutely nothing, but they're inserted for reasons of humour, whereas this guy is trying to give you information (or misinformation, depending on your POV), but it's redundant because someone else gives you the same information. It's a waste.
So then we get into your argument about him repeating someone else's clue because he's "human". Are you saying, maybe he should've said "two" but he slipped and said "four" instead? Are we really going with the "to err is human" argument here? Would you have said the same thing if he'd said "ten", which is actually the RIGHT answer? Or, going back to the whole "separate buildings" argument, what if, instead of the seconds clue, he'd repeated one of the hours clues? Would you still believe this to be intentional?
How about you read the WHOLE paragraph before jumping to conclusions? My point is, if you can't expect two people in neighbouring buildings to know to give different clues, how can you expect the same from all the other thieves in separate buildings?
i don't. which is why having some repetition seems more realistic to me. more repetition yet would be even more realistic, but there's no rule that having one duplicate means you need to have at least two for the first to be intentional.
Look, I can understand your point about repetition adding credence to the "they're lying" aspect of this. I would be inclined to agree with your opinion about this redundant clue -- IF it didn't leave an omission. If you want to argue that maybe the developers intended for there to be some repetition, I'd be more inclined to believe you if there were several NPCs repeating each other's clues, but...only one? And there's an omission in the clues BECAUSE of it? That tells me it's NOT an intentional repetition, it's a mistake.
You can't change the other guys' lines to add more repetition because that removes clues, making the solution require more quesswork. You could add NPCs to repeat each other, but it still wouldn't excuse the omission in the clues; if anything, it would make the omission LESS excusable. So what you'd really have to do, in your ideal scenario, is to put in more NPCs that repeat each other AND put in NPCs that remove the omission so the puzzle is now solvable. But in my mind, why would you go to all that trouble when all you really have to do is change two little bytes in the dialogue?
nope. you're equating the Chainsaw puzzle giving you feedback with having to flip to the back of a puzzle book for Sudoku answers. this is a flawed comparison, because the latter divulges the whole answer, while the former only tells the solver whether they plugged in the correct answer. vastly different.
why does it matter whether the feedback occurs after a single hand? bottom line: you have to input a whopping three numbers twice. how hard is that to do? how time-consuming? if someone is that short on time, maybe they should be checking off items on a bucket list and saying heartfelt farewells to family members, rather than playing some old video game.
OK, you're right in the sense that puzzle books have the solutions printed and easily accessible, whereas this puzzle doesn't. But the flaw in that argument is, it's not wrong, but doing that in this game would make the puzzle way too easy. If you could purposefully enter a wrong code into the clock, and telling you it's wrong includes simultaneously giving away the right answer, then that negates the whole purpose of the NPC clues. When I'm solving a Sudoku, I don't write random numbers into the boxes and then look at the solution. Because one, there'd be no point to writing random numbers in the first place, and two, it would defeat the whole purpose of the puzzle.
I could make the argument that this puzzle is here to encourage logical thinking. Obviously one could access the Chain Saw by trying 150 different combinations, but that would be a huge waste of time. Instead, the player will choose to go around and gather clues from the locals. If, even then, there's still guesswork needed to solve it, then what has the player really learned? If you're an 8-14 year old player doing this for the first time, and you could narrow this puzzle down to one solution based on logic alone, then not only do you get the Chain Saw, but you actually prove you deserve to have it, and you get the satisfaction of knowing you solved this logic puzzle all on your own, and that you know that your ability to logic your way to a solution is applicable to virtually ALL real-life problems. But if an omission in the clues means you can't solve the puzzle without guessing, that feeling of satisfaction goes right out the window.
8-14 year-olds were likely a good chunk of this game's target demographic. many people in that group will not immediately discern that a hand "pointing at 4" is a subset of "divisible by 20". so identifying the former clue as redundant is in and of itself a form of puzzle solving to some children.
Are you saying there are 8-14 year olds that can't do basic math? Or that can't tell time?
(Don't bother bringing up the fact that some kids can't get a formal education, that's still no reason for them not to have this elementary-level knowledge.)
Like I said, I can understand your point about having extra NPCs in the game that redundantly repeat clues. But with that being said, if you're going to do that, you have to be careful not to make it look like the game is holding your hand. There's no difficulty in figuring out the solution by process of elimination merely because all the clues say "it's not this" or "it's not that". If you add variety, that strengthens the puzzle aspect of this section by encouraging logical reasoning.
we must define "fair" differently. bringing 150 combinations down to 2 seems _extremely_ accommodating to me. geometrically, that's a factor of 75; arithmetically, that's a reduction of 148. you apparently consider anything short of the answer wrapped up in a big, tidy bow to be "unfair".
I guess we do define "fair" differently. The way I see it, there's a difference between making a puzzle easy enough to solve by logic alone, and handholding (see above). There's also a difference between making a puzzle somewhat esoteric and making it unsolvable.
