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.
Please see if the clue you are thinking about has already been investigated before opening a conversation about it on the Discord or posting on the subreddit.
| Clue | Discovery Date | Status | Details | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tracer Trail | 2016-08-02 | Live | ||
| Compass Directions | 2016-08-02 | 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 | 2016-08-03 | 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. |
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| Dorado Datamosh | 2016-08-08 | Solved | Led to x | |
| Achievements Code | 2016-08-11 | Solved | Based on the hint yielded from the Dorado Datamosh, the playoverwatch.com achievement pages were investigated. Viewing the source of these pages revealed a commented section of text, including a new cipher. | Led to the following message (English translation):
Damn, not bad. However, I'm getting bored. Let's try something new in the same direction. uczihriwgsxorxwunaarawryqhbrsfmeqrjjmu 5552E494 78T3 4VM9 OPL6 IS8208O913KRlrx Decrypting the string of characters as a Vigenére cipher, using the passphrase from the compass directions clue, ultimately resulted in the discovery of the URL of the Volskaya Datamosh image. |
| Volskaya Datamosh | 2016-08-11 | Solved | ||
| ASCII Skull | 2016-08-11 | Live |
