I guessed it would get second because I knew there would be two types of
people: those that understood what was going on and those that didn't.
The ones who understood would probably put it at 1st, and the ones who
didn't would probably put it at 3rd. Therefore...that is what happened.
[warning: major serious spoilers ahead]
As for the paper puzzle, well, the paper was a gift from the tall man.
He had access to the passwords, but, was unable to send messages that
were too long without being detected. (and of course, the paper gets
detected later anyway) So he had simply put something that pointed
to the memory location of the door password and hoped you would
understand.
The loop puzzle was tricky, but if you can restore the cube's voice
before you decompose and ask the cube about the spider I figured the
word "maintenance" would be good enough a clue. And after touching the
rock (probably done by TAKE ROCK) I hoped players would work out that
controls in the virtualspace are activated by touching, and then try
touch various items of interest to see if anything useful happened.
Asking the cube about the boxes, well, I don't know how to give any
more explanation for that one. I figured someone would try
'ASK CUBE ABOUT BOXES' and get the response that indicated that there
was something special about them, and then think 'hey, why not try
asking it about a SPECIFIC box?'.
You should be thankful I was a little merciful; the original error
message of the spider barely indicated anything about a HELP command, and
one of my beta testers had suggested having the duplicator object w/o
instructions but I decided against it. (since logically speaking, knowledge
of how a duplicator operates is one thing not erased in loyalty transfers
since both Kaden and Souden use it)
But a suggestion to those who didn't understand: read _Snow Crash_ by
Neil Stephenson.
-- Jason Dyer - jdyer@indirect.com