Sombra ARG/Leads Guide

Sombra ARG Past & Present Leads

This page serves as a comprehensive guide for use in providing knowledge in order to minimize backtracking by those partaking in ongoing evaluation.

Clue	Discovery Date	Status	Details	Outcome
Tracer Trail	2016-08-02	Live
Compass Directions		Solved	Visible in the background of the Summer Games Video. Many attempts were made to apply these directions to other clues. determined that the directions corresponded with specific heroes positioned in the 9x9 grid from the same video (NW = top left, for instance).	Used to create a passphrase to decode the Acheivements Code Vigenére cipher. The passphrase was the names of each of the heroes, in the order the directions appeared in the video.
Skycode / Skymap	2016-08-03	Cold	On the developer livestream that happened on August 3rd, Jeff Kaplan and other members of the dev team were asked about the compass (video) (mirror): "I'm being told to ask you guys about the compass. Are you allowed to make any comments on that?" "The compass." "The compass?" "The compass? That sounds like deep CIA level stuff. Way above our heads." The phrase "above our heads" led solvers to look towards the sky. They found that on the Dorado map, looking directly up at the sky would reveal this image after some editing. Even more visible images are available here, the bottom two pictures have been "unwrapped" to be a square. This pattern was not visible in previous updates.	It is confirmed that the code in the sky is not a regular ShotCode, since a regular ShotCode can only contain 40 bits of data, and the code we are seeing in the sky is atleast 128 bytes big. It is also not an Annular Barcode since those need to have a startpoint, which ours does not. Ongoing investigative focus on this may have triggered Blizzard's creation of the Dorado Datamosh, to put people back on track.
Flight Times Board		Cold	Players also took use of the developer quote of "Way above our heads." as possible hint to the flight board in Numbani. Many attempts to correlate it to usable data have been proven inconclusive. One of the attempts was to try an ADFGVX cipher on the flight number prefixes, to try to see if any pertinent data was available. Nothing has been recovered from the cipher. Another attempt was to map out all of the locations listed on the flight board, but nothing has come out of that yet.
Dorado Datamosh	2016-08-08	Solved		Led to x
Achievements Code	2016-08-11	Solved
Volskaya Datamosh	2016-08-11	Solved
ASCII Skull	2016-08-11	Live

Outdated Content

A Code In the Sky

On the developer livestream that happened on August 3rd, Jeff Kaplan and other members of the dev team were asked about the compass (video) (mirror):

"I'm being told to ask you guys about the compass.  Are you allowed to make any comments on that?"
"The compass."  "The compass?"  "The compass?  That sounds like deep CIA level stuff.  Way above our heads."

The phrase "above our heads" led solvers to look towards the sky. They found that on the Dorado map, looking directly up at the sky would reveal this image after some editing. Even more visible images are available here, the bottom two pictures have been "unwrapped" to be a square. This pattern was not visible in previous updates.

It is confirmed that the code in the sky is not a regular ShotCode, since a regular ShotCode can only contain 40 bits of data, and the code we are seeing in the sky is atleast 128 bytes big. It is also not an Annular Barcode since those need to have a startpoint, which ours does not.

Flight Times Board

Players also took use of the developer quote of "Way above our heads." as possible hint to the flight board in Numbani. Many attempts to correlate it to usable data have been proven inconclusive.

One of the attempts was to try an ADFGVX cipher on the flight number prefixes, to try to see if any pertinent data was available. Nothing has been recovered from the cipher.

Another attempt was to map out all of the locations listed on the flight board, but nothing has come out of that yet.