Showing Highly Rated Posts By Draco.2806:

Was it Really a Good Trade?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Draco.2806

Draco.2806

I would much rather pay for an expansion than for a few transmutation stones.

At this point is anyone even surprised?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Draco.2806

Draco.2806

On the plus side, it’ll all be worth it if the new hairstyles float above their owner’s bald head.

Why does RNG even exist?

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Draco.2806

Draco.2806

Because creators of D&D knew that asking players to perform calculations with decimal places was absurd.

The idea was that random rolls average out over time, meaning player skill and actions were ultimately more important than will of the dice. This is still the way and reason it’s used by game designers today. It isn’t there to make things random (although that is also a valid approach, and it’s also part of D&D). The problem there is, if you spread the luck too thin, it will never average out.

If you see where I’m going with this, go ahead and read on. (If not, please direct your attention to the section below the break.)

So what happens when you want your loot to drop after killing lots and lots and lots of things? Or if you want your on-crit effect to only trigger for 0,1 of its effectiveness? Well, what happens is that it now takes few centuries for the numbers to average out. You’ve successfully introduced gambling where there should be none. Well-done!

You know what I’m talking about. The Mystic Toilet. T6 mats. Exotic drops. Ascended drops. Even Rare drops. Chest drops. Black Lion chests. Dyes. Precursors. Mystic Clovers. Those silly on-crit effects that only trigger once every blue moon. The list goes on… It shouldn’t happen. It’s a mistake in design.

But you know what the punchline is? No, really? Remember WoW? Its developers know about this. They’ve seen no end to unlucky players being unable to collect 6 Wolf Pelts in the beginning zone for a month straight. And they fixed it. In WoW, the longer you go without collecting a random reward, the higher your chance that you’ll get it next time. So while an extremely lucky player can still get 10 Epic Loots from a Big Boss, there’s no situation where someone will slay it ten times over and walk away without a single Epic Sword of Rat-Slaying.

There goes you throwing 400G worth of exotics into the Mystic Toilet and getting nothing in return. There goes you farming the champ train instead of running dungeons or whatever else. There go your Exotic and Ascended drops which most players will brush off as a fairy-tale. There go the amazingly underwhelming wonders of Black Lion Chest. There goes that Luck meter – that you spent 50G on – doing seemingly nothing at all.

There’s your problem, ArenaNet.

fixplz.


Okay, a bit more explanation.

Please direct your attention to this article.

More specifically, the graph to the right. It shows how many times you have to roll a 6-sided die before it turns out you might as well be rolling a die with “3.5” on each side. And that number is about 400 times, to be generous. So, it takes 400 rolls with a one-in-six chance for luck to vanish as a factor. Everyone on the same page here? Okay, good.

So. Gaming. How exactly do you award your player 0,01 pieces of Epic Loot because you only want them to have it after killing 100 Epic Rats? Well, you can’t. Okay, you can introduce crafting, but shut up. Traditionally this problem has been solved by having each Epic Rat have a small chance to drop said loot wholesale, because with certain probability in place it WILL drop after killing close to 100 rats for most players.

Same applies to combat. There’s a big difference between your lowest and highest damage, a crit and a non-crit, right? Well guess what. After delivering your 1,xxx,th strike, it will average out.

Or at least it should if you’ve made your game with the basic knowledge of what the heck you’re doing. And ANet know what they’re doing, right?..

(edited by Draco.2806)

An easy solution to the Ascended controversy

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Draco.2806

Draco.2806

I’m a big fan of being able to switch stats on any weapon/armor piece out-of-combat. Be it Legendary, Ascended, Exotic or lower, it’s just a plain good idea.

In the game where you can switch out skills, traits and whole trait lines at will out-of-combat, being forever bound to a set of gear with fixed stats seems oddly out of place.

And, yes, Ascended never should have had ANY better stats in the first place. No. Just NO.

Steam OS

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Draco.2806

Draco.2806

I think you give the devs too much credit.

There’s still no Mac support (meaning no OpenGL support, which is what Linux typically uses), and the game barely even supports its Windows build (horrid performance and no 64-bit client).

That said, if they do round up the MacOS port, they can probably do Linux/SteamOS right after considering most of the hard work will be done by then.