Hi all.

I don't usually like to post threads of this kind, and I'm not going to put that much effort into it. However, I thought that with recent events happening, this is more or less a necessity to clear things up. There shouldn't be any bad blood between the members of this peace-loving community. Although this post is mainly directed at BaRa, feel free to chip in here and there.

To BaRa -

With reference to your recent outburst at our (matrixman, theAnswer and yours truly) teamwork to solve Confession to Life, we would also like to express our views with regards to this issue. I hope you put all personal grudges (if any) aside and read through this message objectively. We do not expect you to conform to our ideals but hopefully you will understand our actions and be less agitated by it.

Firstly, I would like to clarify what we mean by "teamwork". By the term, we refer to our constant exchange of possible ideas, with each person trying out his own and giving a somewhat positive / negative comment and further analysing each others' methods. Through this, we do not reveal hints at the different stages until we're all on par at that stage (e.g. everyone had successfully identified the anomaly in the text in CTL), nor reveal many details of what we are trying (i.e. many occurrences of "Wait, I'm trying something", followed by "Ah, it didn't work and it's probably quite far off because... What I did was... Maybe we should try to look at it from another angle."), nor give answers when we've finally made it (we say, "Yes, that idea which we discussed was on the right track... Try a few possibilities.").

Having said that, I would like to make a rebuttal to your extreme objection towards teamwork.
Argument:
I've put valuable time in and and seeing it crunched by a team is very energy draining.

Rebuttal:
First off, perhaps you might have gotten a wrong impression of what our "teamwork" meant. Certainly, in the case where, one person who says the keyword to solving the challenge, tries it, then says it works, and everyone else in the team follows (i.e. being leechers instead of working as a team), I would strongly agree with you. However, it was definitely not the case. I surely hope you didn't see teamwork as trading, especially so in this challenge. With a push to theAnswer, we discussed a few possibilities, before coming to the method of solving the challenge. Even then, it wasn't clear at all how to extract the information. From there, the teamwork stopped until matrixman finally solved it and told us that our idea was on the right track. theAnswer and I subsequently solved it without anymore help. From this example, we see that "crunched by a team" is hardly a good phrase to describe what we did. We merely shared many ideas with each other and finally arrived at a plausible one, thereby solving it one after another, enjoying the challenge thoroughly in the process, not crunching it like some gargantuan monster.

I hope this clears things up and makes your impression of us and teamwork not as bad as it was.

Cheers,
theAnswer, matrixman, alt3rn4tiv3