Niobe Labs, rumored and hyped up as a dungeon and then debunked into something different. Puzzles aren't a major problem for people, including me. These thinks take time and wit, but once completed you feel great. However, Niobe Labs has "Puzzles". For the most part, they're terrible. The Puzzles currently in the lab: 1 - French phrase talking about knowledge in the dark. The Solution Being found on a Forge Matchmaking splash screen, hidden in a dark corner behind the "Guardians Matched" circle. 2 - Odd coding using strings of 2 or 3 numbers connected by dashes. Solution found by decrypting it. 3 - Cipher with a key. Deciphered using said key and solution was worked out from there. 4 - Pair of Wings with the word FLY spaced out by dots. Solution was found just by spelling FLY while jumping. 5 - An unstructured maze. Completed by layering the mazes over each other. 6 - Gems that spelled out the name of a forest. Found by HOURS of guessing. 7 - Three swords from each family and elements tied to them. Still unknown. The problem with the puzzles - 6 and 7 were guessing games. Nothing was concrete and nothing properly lead anywhere. All the other ones had solutions that could be mapped out properly. 6 and 7 did not. It took a dev hinting about Forest on twitter before anyone got it. Streamers normally dedicated towards world's first, especially those willing to go 24 straight hours to do it, QUIT AT 6. 7 is a problem within itself, currently unsolved. Not enough substance there, nothing to work off of. It's just a guessing game. Puzzles aren't meant to be guessing games by design, you give them enough clues towards the solution. Even if the clues are tough, you don't force them to use a microscope or to just keep shooting until one sticks. Next part is checkpoints and generally these codes being broken as sin. If you fail, you go straight to the beginning. Normally not a huge deal, but if we're stuck with Guessing game puzzles it becomes a tedious chore. Some people are waiting for someone else to finish it because it takes ~15 MINUTES TO GET TO WAVE 6, and 7 is even longer. Top that off, the codes sometimes don't work. Too fast? Code failed, wipe. Too Slow? Can't input everything, wipe. Mistakes should be punished, but if it's a bug where a skilled player that knows what to do punishes them harshly with a wipe, it needs to be addressed. And if it's intentional, it's a terrible way to prevent brute forcing. Finally, is what this has done to the community as a whole, and comparisons to other events. Vault took a couple hours, but to know what to do just took some simple data and a little brute force for it to stick. Outbreak prime took almost 2 days, but nothing was a guessing game in the end, as for it was just found out to be math and an ARG. The community right now is furious, as you can mostly tell. People who wanted Niobe labs open before the last forge are either angry because their work can be interpreted as for nothing, since most people's goal was to just unlock the forge, not do the event. So, the hardcore crowd is also mad because they made it extremely simple and just made something hard become irrelevant. People still attempting it aren't happy because now there's people doing forges rather than help solve the puzzles. Overall, next to no one is happy. How to fix it: 1 - Bungie should have scheduled "Push alongs" instead of an all out "We messed up, forge unlocked". It would have made things a lot smoother with helpful hints, rather than just make their work invalidated /harder because people are working on the forge first. 2 - Test it. This looks like it was not tested or lightly tested. If it takes 10 hours for a QA team to find out a solution, dumb it down a bit. The maximum for something like this should be at least 24. Once past 24 at the community, help them out. TL;DR Bungie released something that seemed to be barely/not tested with a good premise, but with bugs, no actual checkpoint system, and terrible guessing game style puzzles with a wipe timer, it was executed poorly. On top of that, the community is split and unhappy. Some people previously helping with the Labs don't care/are going to wait until after they're done with the forge activities. Especially compared to other events, this is taking too long and has too little going for it reward wise. If this were tested and if Bungie were to give out Hints/Solutions to the puzzles rather than pushing the forge out immediately (Which they were forced to for the most part, as the Key Mold requires something only available every 3 weeks.). Overall it was a cool idea, executed horrendously.