Editing Announcements - 2002/07 - Repercussions (section)

== Letter to the Players ==

{{Microsoft Zone
 |  Link = <nowiki>http://www.zone.com/asheronscall/news/ASHEletter0702.asp</nowiki>
 |  Date = July 18, 2002
 | Title = Letter to the Players
 |  Text =
As we enter into our July Event, Repercussions, we have a number of things to discuss:
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Life Magic Changes'''</font>
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We appreciate the feedback from players over these last few weeks with regard to our life magic changes. From your feedback and that of playtest groups, we have made a few changes to our initial proposed system:

* The drain range on the higher level Drain spells has been increased.
** Drain 4 Range(Initially Proposed):11 (New):15
** Drain 5 Range(Initially Proposed):13 (New):20
** Drain 6 Range(Initially Proposed):15 (New):25
** Drain 7 Range(Initially Proposed):20 (New):35
* The mana cost for the higher level Drain spells has been reduced.
** Drain 5 Mana Cost (Old): 60 (New): 55
** Drain 6 Mana Cost (Old): 70 (New): 60
** Drain 7 Mana Cost (Old): 70 (New): 60
* The damage multiplier on the Life Bolt spells has been increased.
** Lifebolt 1 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):.50 (New):.75
** Lifebolt 2 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):.65 (New):.90
** Lifebolt 3 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):.80 (New):1.05
** Lifebolt 4 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):.95 (New):1.25
** Lifebolt 5 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):1.10 (New):1.50
** Lifebolt 6 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):1.25 (New):1.75
** Lifebolt 7 Damage Multiplier (Initial Proposed):1.40 (New):2.00

Refer to the original Transfer Spell Changes Letter to the Players for more details.

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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Tinkering Changes'''</font>

The mid-month Tinkering Letter to the Players, and the bullet points in the dev notes give an overview of what the Tinkering system is and how to use it. We're really excited about this system, and we hope you enjoy it. Characters can find the Ust Tinkering tool and a book which explains the Tinkering system in the nine newbie towns and the capital cities (Zaikhal, Cragstone, and Hebian-To).
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Treasure System Changes'''</font>

This month, we implement the final major step to our treasure system revamping begun back in January. (There will be some minor tweaks and additions in August or September.)
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One change which may not be immediately obvious is the elimination of such treasure system oddities as a 6-11 sword with a 250 wield requirement on it. The existence of this type of weapon occurred because we had to use one type of treasure system to generate the basic weapon, and a different system to determine whether the weapon carried a damage bonus that demanded a wield requirement. We have now combined these systems so that all weapons have logical parameters for when they require a wield requirement.
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Another result of this change will be the more frequent appearance of higher-damage weapons in all levels of the treasure system.
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We also took this opportunity to increase the maximum damage of all weapons, and introduce a new discrete level for the wield requirement. Weapons which now reach their maximum damage potential will have a wield requirement of 325. Each weapon will still have a range of damage that produces a wield requirement of 250. The maximum damage potential (and variance ranges) are listed below.
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Please keep in mind that these numbers represent the ranges for treasure found at high levels (e.g., from SIK chests and certain monsters such as Umbris Shadows), and the very highest levels of treasures, such as Singularity Chests and Crystal Lords. Generally, both of these levels of treasure have the same maximum limit when it comes to damage, but you will be more likely to find quality items from Singularity Chests then you will from SIK chests.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Weapons:'''</font>

* Melee weapons now have a maximum attack and defense bonus of 15% (but only through Singularity Chests. SIK Chest-type loot can only reach a maximum of 12%).
* Swords now have a max damage capacity of 40. Their variance can shrink to .40.
* Axes have a max damage capacity of 36. Their variance can shrink to .40.
* Maces have a max damage capacity of 33. Their variance can shrink to .30 (and in some extremely rare cases, .25).
* Spears have a max damage capacity of 28. Their variance can shrink to .45. (These numbers really only apply to tridents.)
* Unarmed Weapons have a max damage capacity of 14. Rarely, their variance can shrink to .60 (and in some very rare cases, .50).
* Staves have a max damage capacity of 15. Their variance can shrink to .30 (and in some extremely rare cases, .25).
* Daggers remain unchanged for now.
* Bows and Royal Atlatls now have a max damage bonus of 130%. 130% and 120% bows/atlatls have a wield requirement of 250. 150% crossbows now also exist, along with a wield requirement of 250. As mentioned in the bottom section of this letter, missile launchers no longer have attack bonuses, but instead have defense bonuses.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Armor:'''</font>
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Generally, armor has the potential to have higher armor levels for each type of armor.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Housing'''</font>

This month, we're releasing another 150 Cottages, 40 Villas, and 10 Mansions. We also released another 500 Residential Quarters. For at least the next few months, we will see how much housing demand we can meet with the Residential Quarters, as we are quickly running out of room to put in new landscape dwellings.
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Next Month and Beyond'''</font>
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Next month will see additional Tinkering interactions, additional Residential Quarters, a lot of exciting new content, the addition of a skill-based bonus for War spells, and more! We'll see you next month.

--The AC Team

P.S. As promised last month, following is our shocking expose of AC secrets. Enjoy!
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<font color=#FFFFFF>'''Two Secrets'''</font>

As we mentioned in last month's Letter to the Players, there are two secrets about which we feel it is time for us to come clean. One we've suspected for a long time, but the issue proved ever elusive to track down (so elusive, in fact, that we wondered whether it ever existed, our own anecdotal evidence to the contrary). The other we've known about for awhile, but we were unsure what to do about it.
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Now the truth will be revealed.
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First, the Wi Flag. For those of you who don't know what the Wi Flag means, a little history. From the beginning of AC, some players have complained about unbelievably bad luck. When the swarm of Lugians spawn in the citadel, they will go after certain players--every time. The player's level doesn't seem to matter, nor does the number of other players in the room. What does seem to matter is that this player is cursed with that most unfortunate of distinctions: the Wi Flag.
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For some players, the flag came and went. For others, it was a perpetual nightmare, present in nearly every monster experience. To live a Wi-Flagged life meant to be hunted at every turn. Perhaps other adventurers could know peace in a BSD or a Citadel, but there was no rest nor respite for one under Wi.
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Our developers at Turbine initially answered these complaints by saying that they could find no such bug. Occasionally, a senior Turbine engineer could be found who would admit that perhaps there was something "not quite right" with the system, but they still could not identify a cause, if one even existed. Easy culprits, such as a malfunctioning random-number generator, were eventually dismissed.
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But our search went on. For there were people even at Turbine convinced that the Wi Flag existed, and that they had it in spades.
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And then one day, long after most people had learned to either forget or ignore the Wi Flag, the answer was found. Here in the report from Sandra Powers, AC Live's Lead Engineer, on the nature of the Wi Flag. We warn you in advance that it is a very technical explanation, but we hope it is of some interest to those of you who have long been afflicted with this terrible burden.
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"Many of our players have complained for a long time that their character are `Wi-Flagged'--that is, that creatures attack them a much greater proportion of the time than random chance or distance should dictate. After looking at the code in depth, I believe I have found out why this might happen.
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Generally, a creature chooses whom to attack based on who it was last attacking, who attacked it last, or who caused it damage last. When players first enter the creature's detection radius, however, none of these things are useful yet, so the creature chooses a target randomly, weighted by distance. Players within the creature's detection sphere are weighted by how close they are to the creature -- the closer you are, the more chance you have to be selected to be attacked.
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The actual algorithm for selection looks like this: We roll a random number within a certain range--say between 0 and 1. Each player is given a portion of the range based on how close they are to the creature. The closer you are, the larger a portion you get. The player who owns the portion into which the random number falls is selected to be attacked.
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This algorithm is sound. The problem comes up when we are assigning portions of the range to various players. If we wanted distance from the creature to be proportional to your chance to be selected--that is, if the closer you are the *less* chance you have of being attacked--then we would assign this range by taking your distance from the creature over the total distance--the distances of everybody under consideration added together. But we really want the inverse of this ratio--so that the closer you are, the *more* chance you have of being selected. So we invert this ratio by subtracting it from 1 to assign you the size of your portion.
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An example:

:A is 5 meters from the creature.

:B is 2 meters from the creature.

:C is 3 meters from the creature.

:D is 10 meters from the creature.

:Total distance is 20.

:The size of A's portion is 1 - 5/20, or 0.75.

:The size of B's portion is 1 - 2/20, or 0.90.

:The size of C's portion is 1 - 3/20, or 0.85.

:The size of D's portion is 1 - 10/20, or 0.50.

:So we assign these people these portions of the total range:

:A has between 0.00 and 0.75.

:B has between 0.75 and 1.65.

:C has between 1.65 and 2.50.

:D has between 2.50 and 3.00.

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Notice, however, that while the original ratios added to 1 (.25 + .1 + .15 + .5 = 1.0) that the inverted ratios -- and thus the total range from which we should have rolled the random number -- no longer add to 1. Instead, they add to 3. (Some algebra will convince you that the assigned portions always add to n-1, where n is the number of people under consideration.) So in order to randomly select some portion of this total range, we should roll a number between 0 and 3.
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But in the existing AC code, we always roll a number between 0 and 1.
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You can easily see in this example that if the random number is always been 0 and 1, only A and B have any chance at all of being selected, and A has the majority of the chance. And the reason that these two have all the chance is simply because they are first in the list, and so were assigned the low parts of the range. Normally--if we had rolled between 0 and 3 in the example--your order in the list should have no effect on how likely you are to be chosen. But because we only rolled between 0 and 1, the earlier you appear in the list, the more skewed your chance of selection is. And as it happens, in AC code, your position in this list is determined by the InstanceID of your character, which is assigned when you create the character and never changed. (Note that the InstanceID is hashed--mutated by the system into another number--to determine position. So it's not a simple relationship like the older the character, the earlier in the list they will be. It is, however, a static relationship--an ID that hashes to an early position will always hash to an early position, although it's exact position will depend on what other ID's are also under consideration.)
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So what does this mean? The way this random targeting algorithm is implemented right now, if you happen to have an InstanceID that hashes to an early position, you will tend to be attacked more than your fair share when the creature is using random targeting, regardless of your distance from the creature. In other words, you are Wi-Flagged."
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We're glad we were finally able to fix this bug. With the July Event, may you know peace in the fast-spawning dungeon of your choice!
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The second issue will, in some ways, be both more troubling and more inconsequential for players. HeartSeeker does not affect missile launchers. It never has. Bows, crossbows, and atlatls get no benefit from the HeartSeeker spell or from innate attack bonuses (such as those found on the Singularity Bow). The only variables that determine whether a missile character hits their target is their bow/xbow/tw skill, the missile defense of the target, and where they set their accuracy meter while they are attacking. However, the Defender spell, as well as innate defensive bonuses, do work on missile launchers.
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The AC Live team has been aware of this for the last several months. Once we knew the situation, the question became what to do about it. Should we "fix" an issue that probably isn't broken?
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Almost no archer/atlatler complains about not being able to hit their target. They have a built in "HeartSeeker" all the time. If anything, most monsters' missile defense scores have historically been so low that many players regard archery as the fastest way to level a character up through the first 30-40 levels. We did not feel that "fixing" such a system would improve the game balance for anyone in Asheron's Call, archer or no.
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Ultimately, we decided to resolve the situation through our changes to the treasure system this month. From now on, missile launchers will have a chance of having an innate defensive bonus, but not an offensive one. While many old quest weapons still retain their (useless) attack bonus, we will not be putting any new ones into the system.
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As we said, this news may seem inconsequential to many players; however, once we determined the proper solution, we did want everyone to know why we were making these changes.
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[[Category:Event Announcements]]