Rifleman Archive
Thread: A Discussion of Armor Piercing, with 3-part Harmony and Full Orchestration
The "Floaty/Battle" ratio comparison negates the need for great sampling (if the dev does not beleave this, I can direct him to a few books about statistics 
). My guess for the (slight) disparity in the numbers is rounding error thet programmed in. If certain parts of the formulae were truncated this would be the case.
As a recovering Computer and Electrical Engineer I am quite inmpressed . After my "revilation" about resists and vunerabilities I have again been "kicking arse" finally, now that I know what was going on. To be honest, I did not consider reverse-engineering the game to figure it out.
meeuki wrote:
yeah, but just because it negates the need for great sampling doesn't mean the developer still won't say he needs it.
I will be happy to show him how statistically improbable it is for random noise in the Devs' formula to generate 6 separate randomly selected Floaty Damage/Base Damage pairs which so closely match the the predictions of the Armor Guide.
But that's a lot of ugly math.
Trust me when I say: "It's pretty darned unlikely."
meeuki wrote:
yeah, but just because it negates the need for great sampling doesn't mean the developer still won't say he needs it.
I wrote this in a similar thread on the WS forum. I will repeat it here because it annoys me so much. Sorry if it's inappropriate.
I am so sick of this. The devs screw up. Apparently, the system works not as they think it does. Well, this can happen. They are only Human. This is a big project. I can accept that errors are made and that bugs show up.
I can not accept that the devs abuse paying customers as their QA department. The data in this thread is proof enough that it is NOT working as intended. So why should players waste their time to create even more data?
At this point, a DEV and a QA guy from SOE should sit down and actually play their game. I'm doing software development. There are tools for this. They can make themselves weapons with a 100-100 damage. They can make themselves any MOB with any armor/resist combi they want. They can make it so the mob will just stand there and not attack back. They can have much more logging, info and data from 5 minutes tests than we could gather in a day, because they have access to all debug and server-side data. Hell, they can run ONE SINGLE SHOT in a development tool called DEBUGGER, and see what part of the code gets used. To see which one one the two formulas is used, it takes 1 shot, maybe 5 and writing down the numbers.
I'm sorry, but even though it may seem complicated, the damage system will be based on a series of IF THEN ELSE structures and some pretty basic calculations. I do not see how the guy who designed the system and the guy who developed it are unable to see if the code works like we describe or how they describe. This just does not make any sense. If they were so incompetent that they can't figure out what which of two completely different formulas is used, they would not have gotten so far in this game. So what is left as explanations for this? Are they too lazy? Do they just not care?
I'm sorry for ranting in an otherwise so constructive thread. But at this point, the players have done much more than they should be supposed to do. Now the devs have to do a tiny little bit of work and tell us what they find out. Asking us to provide more data when the facts are clear and we won't get any new data just more data is a bit insulting in my opinion.
Two questions that have already been asked and yet the answers are still a mystery.
1. Why is Volsted not our correspondent?
2. How stupid and/or stuborn do you need to be to claim that black is white?
YarKi wrote:***edit***2. How stupid and/or stuborn do you need to be to claim that black is white?
the thing is people get personally invested in an issue and slapping them with proof after proof that they are wrong just entrenches them more. they get "married" to an idea and refuse to accept fact. it is just human nature.
a really good example of putting personal beliefs and being invested in an ideal ahead of doing what is obviously right is the issue of taxes in real life. time after time it has been proven that reducing the federal tax rates to a lower reasonable level stimulates the economy and raising them to unreasonable levels puts the brakes on. yet we still have about half the country that thinks tax cuts are a bad deal... this sort of mentality is no different than the devs investing themselves in their mistaken belief of how AP works.
they have invested themselves personally into their argument and it is going to take proof after proof to get them to actually open their eyes. and even then it may not happen because it will mean a personal insult to their psychies. point being that their belief is "it is not possible that a mere player know our game better than we do" anything that threatens this ideal is met with hostility and disbelief.
until the issue is brought to them by someone on their side of the fence and in a non-threatening manner, nothing will get through to the type of person that invests themselves in their arguments in such a fashion.
fortunately for us not all the devs deal with the players in such a fashion, but there are enough that will and do.
CaLVines wrote:
I'm sorry, but even though it may seem complicated, the damage system will be based on a series of IF THEN ELSE structures and some pretty basic calculations. I do not see how the guy who designed the system and the guy who developed it are unable to see if the code works like we describe or how they describe. This just does not make any sense. If they were so incompetent that they can't figure out what which of two completely different formulas is used, they would not have gotten so far in this game. So what is left as explanations for this? Are they too lazy? Do they just not care?
Between the things they (by which I mean, all MMORPG companies) don't catch for months (if not years, in the case of Alchemy) and the frequency their Customer Relations people claim various thingsyou'ld think (as a pogrammer yourself) should be relatively easy are infeasible due to technical reasons, I've been tempted to think that all MMORPGs are outlandishly horrible spaghetti code.
There are, after all, people who write absolutely brilliant code thats aboslutely horrible from a modern architectural standpoint. After the 10th time you find yourself scratching your head at something the PR lead says would require far too much work and saying "but if they designed this thing right in the first place, it should be trivial ..." you start to wonder.
Having been on some massive projects ... with that large a project, and that large a time-to-market pressure ... its easy to picture these games starting to get hacky not far into the development process.
Be interesting to see the code for a core combat aspect, like making a to-hit roll, or determining damage, for one of these games. I haven't played EQ in years, but I'ld still love to see the code that produced the spikes at 1+bonus and 2*base+bonus in their melee damage.
As always, Volstead, amazing work. Thank you.
First, let me say L - Freakin' - OL
However, I must disagree with your conclusions.
*Takes Volstead aside and mentions that if it "broken" according to the way they think it should work then they may try to "fix" it according to the way they think it should work, the way we do not want it to work*
So I think you can see that you must have made a mistake, and they are right that gathering a larger sample would prove it works the way they say it should, so they do not need to fix anything.
Sotaudi wrote:
*Takes Volstead aside and mentions that if it "broken" according to the way they think it should work then they may try to "fix" it according to the way they think it should work, the way we do not want it to work*
So I think you can see that you must have made a mistake, and they are right that gathering a larger sample would prove it works the way they say it should, so they do not need to fix anything.
In other words:
<Waves his hand>
"This is not the AP system you are looking for"
And you weren't made correspondent why?
No disrespect to Kwal, but god **edit**!
Khyras, On Bria.
Master Doctor/ Novice Rifleman
Rifleman for life. No pets, no spice.