New efforts!

[LaughingAlex]

Adds is because of how easy it is type mid battle before people were using things like Vent or TS, that's why is has been around since the birth of MMO's.  Its the lingo of the MMO world so naturally it is going to spread.  I am sure as hell am not going to stop mid battle so I can type out "Oh no!  Everyone be aware reinforcements are coming" when "adds" suits just fine as more enemies have been "added" to the battle.  Especially in older MMO's like EQ when someone trains a butt-ton of enemies through the dungeon and you get jumped by a dungeon worth of enemies.  Its amazing people were able to even get "adds" out.

I don't see how adds is anyway related to a person who thinks they should be compensated for their bad luck.  One is entitlement because RNG hates them,  while the other is short, simple, off hand lingo used to quickly indicate more enemies are here to rumble without interrupting the flow of battle.

In a quick situation sure, although I'd have expected a different acronym, like "RI"(Reinforcements incoming) or "IB"(Incoming boss") ect or "HIF"(Hostile Incoming Fodder").  But I sometimes see people use "adds" when describing situations which don't require any urgency.  In those situations I just cannot help but feel "something sounds a little foolish about this guy".  Like that one person who seems to deliberate swear for the sake of it, trying to sound cool but ultimately just sounding stupid(and yes, I read somewhere people who are willing to swear are usually more intelligent, but I think that applies to those of us who swear once in a while rather than "swear for effect 24/7").

The fact though that the guy could complain about a game "it's not luck, it's a game of chance!" though kind of speaks volumes about people in some games.  He either had to have been trying to sound like a fool, or was just really stupid in his word choice.  OR he thought luck meant something other than "based on chance" thanks to games also having a stat called "luck" to manipulate the odds of things like drop rates or chances of winning blackjack in new vegas ect.

As I said though, many mmorpg players don't really ever think.  They use guides for there character builds(often out of fear of being banned from teams for not using the FoTM), use guides for raids, use the same strategy over and over again across every game ect.  There is no thought anymore at that point, just, as I said some time ago, it's following a check list, not actually using actual strategy or thought.  Even FPS games make players use more strategy then that :/.

[LadyVamp]

Inexplicable MMO complaint of the day:

"It's not luck, i[t]s a game of chance."

- Complaint by a player who felt that the fact that he did not get any of the rare rewards from a game event meant he did not get any luck, so the game developer should compensate him for failing to give him any luck.


Yes, you heard me right.

Oh I don't know.  I sometimes felt the game would pick on my toons a little bit more after filing bug reports.  Usually seemed to last maybe 1 or 2 days then the game would go back to the usual play.  Never complained about it.  Probably just my imagination though it's hard not to miss the boss that avoids the taunting tank to bash my head in.  Got old after about 2 missions of me successfully pulling the boss from every mob.  One could say bad tanking but at least one of those tanks was a good friend who'd pull the mob.  Make the mob stack on him.  Then call us in after he had control of it.

Truthfully, I'd take that every mob of every mission of every day if we could have our game back.

[Angel Phoenix77]

I sooo wish I could play City of. again :).
Question about tickets from the AE. I remember they made the limit of getting tickets to a max of 1500, and depending on how big someone made their arcs, the last mission was to give people the missing tickets that might have not gotten during the mission arc. My question is, has anyone gotten the max amount during or after the final mission? The reason I ask is because, from my memory I never gotten them. Which caused me to not play AE arcs again.

[Vee]

The 1500 ticket limit was per mission iirc (You'd hit that very quickly in farm missions, but given that farmers kept making their farms bigger and bigger they presumably weren't too worried about tickets). Not sure why anyone would add a mission just to get to the 1500 plateau for the whole arc. You sound like you were in a smaller part of the Venn diagram if you cared about tickets, but not enough just to farm for them and cared about story, but not enough to run them without worrying how much reward you got.

Also I remember reading an explanation somewhere for the origin of the use of 'adds' that was more elaborate than just that they're added mobs, but seeing as I couldn't find it in three googles I'm forced to believe I dreamed it.

[Angel Phoenix77]

The 1500 ticket limit was per mission iirc (You'd hit that very quickly in farm missions, but given that farmers kept making their farms bigger and bigger they presumably weren't too worried about tickets). Not sure why anyone would add a mission just to get to the 1500 plateau for the whole arc. You sound like you were in a smaller part of the Venn diagram if you cared about tickets, but not enough just to farm for them and cared about story, but not enough to run them without worrying how much reward you got.

Also I remember reading an explanation somewhere for the origin of the use of 'adds' that was more elaborate than just that they're added mobs, but seeing as I couldn't find it in three googles I'm forced to believe I dreamed it.

Actually, I really did not care about the tickets. I just thought that as you stated the limit was 1500 per mission (which I had truly forgotten) was just odd that if you did not reach the limit, at the limit, you were suppose to receive the missing tickets to hit the 1500 max.
How I played was enjoy what the arc had (even if I had to play my own and ask my friends to play them with me). Also I have never farmed a arc or mission, I saw no point in doing so. However, if something was enjoyable, I would rerun the whole arc again. Either from the vanilla game to AE, there were some truly good arcs, which I would replay.

[Sinistar]

The 1500 ticket limit was per mission iirc (You'd hit that very quickly in farm missions, but given that farmers kept making their farms bigger and bigger they presumably weren't too worried about tickets). Not sure why anyone would add a mission just to get to the 1500 plateau for the whole arc. You sound like you were in a smaller part of the Venn diagram if you cared about tickets, but not enough just to farm for them and cared about story, but not enough to run them without worrying how much reward you got.

Also I remember reading an explanation somewhere for the origin of the use of 'adds' that was more elaborate than just that they're added mobs, but seeing as I couldn't find it in three googles I'm forced to believe I dreamed it.

The ticket limit was per mission.   I had an arc of 5 missions, all with the Troll Caves map, loaded with mobs and ambushes.  Easy to reach the ticket cap, but as I told people that ran it with me it wasn't about the tickets it was about XP/inf.

[ivanhedgehog]

Oh I don't know.  I sometimes felt the game would pick on my toons a little bit more after filing bug reports.  Usually seemed to last maybe 1 or 2 days then the game would go back to the usual play.  Never complained about it.  Probably just my imagination though it's hard not to miss the boss that avoids the taunting tank to bash my head in.  Got old after about 2 missions of me successfully pulling the boss from every mob.  One could say bad tanking but at least one of those tanks was a good friend who'd pull the mob.  Make the mob stack on him.  Then call us in after he had control of it.

Truthfully, I'd take that every mob of every mission of every day if we could have our game back.

when crafting was introduced, I played every night for hours and never got a single wing recipe drop for the entire expansion. not 1. I never got a respec recipe drop. not 1. do I see that as a problem? yes. the people I was playing with got them, not me though. That is an ungodly large number of attempts. I watched someone in SWTOR reverse engineering a hilt to get the upgraded schematic. 20% chance. they re'd 123 of them before getting it. Admittedly bioware has a crappy track record for bugs and the not fixing of them. but the odds of needing 123 attempts are pretty large. and I know of people with even more attempts. People see these events and begin to wonder if there isnt a mistake in the implementation of the rng roll.

[Vee]

Actually, I really did not care about the tickets. I just thought that as you stated the limit was 1500 per mission (which I had truly forgotten) was just odd that if you did not reach the limit, at the limit, you were suppose to receive the missing tickets to hit the 1500 max.

Ah, I get you now. It doesn't sound like the devs to specifically weight an end mission reward toward you hitting a specific number rather than its being based on mission size and difficulty. It certainly could have been that way for AE after the ticket cap implementation, but that sounds like a /summon Arcana kind of question.

[Arcana]

Also I remember reading an explanation somewhere for the origin of the use of 'adds' that was more elaborate than just that they're added mobs, but seeing as I couldn't find it in three googles I'm forced to believe I dreamed it.

My recollection is that "adds" refers to the fact that in MMO-type games there were usually two kinds of NPC (combatants) in encounter maps, the kind that are there from the start, and the kind that are spawned based on a triggering effect.  The term "adds" used to refer very specifically to boss fights where the boss would spawn additional stuff to throw at the players at critical moments of the fight.  Basically, the boss fights starts like this, and then stuff gets added under certain circumstances.

In actual practice, modern implementations blur the distinction by often employing "just in time" spawning, so in a sense all spawns are "adds" but the separate element - namely that adds are not part of the original spawn but added later in a way that can alter the balance of the fight - remains mostly operative.  The modern usage has drifted from the original specific, and now refers to any mobs that are, well, added.  Triggered spawns, ambushes, sometimes even separate spawns that are pulled to the players are considered (situational) adds.

[Arcana]

I watched someone in SWTOR reverse engineering a hilt to get the upgraded schematic. 20% chance. they re'd 123 of them before getting it. Admittedly bioware has a crappy track record for bugs and the not fixing of them. but the odds of needing 123 attempts are pretty large. and I know of people with even more attempts. People see these events and begin to wonder if there isnt a mistake in the implementation of the rng roll.

That's probably a mistake in the implementation of the RNG, or the situation isn't what you thought it was.  The odds against someone failing to succeed at something that has an independent 20% chance of success one hundred twenty-three times in a row is eight hundred thirty-one billion six hundred thirty-two million seven hundred eighty-one thousand two hundred fifty-one to one.  Against.

To put that in perspective, the odds of winning powerball after buying a single ticket is about two hundred ninety-two million to one.  If the RNG was operating correctly and the odds were what you think they were, your friend was about three thousand times unluckier than the last powerball winner was lucky.  Not impossible.  But unlikely.

[Arcana]

Also, how was this not a thing back when the game was running I'll never know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClYoiv338Uk

[AmberOfDzu]

It's much more likely that a reporter would have miscounted, omitted a few interruptions, exaggerated, or deliberately misreported their results than an astronomically unlikely streak actually occurred.

I think the possibilities the RNG in use has serious issues or is being misused by the programmer are somewhere in-between.

[Yoru-hime]

Whenever people start talking about bugged/screwy RNG, I think back to this:

http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag

I was never Wi flagged, but in this one case, it turns out that those people who thought the game was out to get them were absolutely right.

[AmberOfDzu]

Whenever people start talking about bugged/screwy RNG, I think back to this:

http://asheron.wikia.com/wiki/Wi_Flag

I was never Wi flagged, but in this one case, it turns out that those people who thought the game was out to get them were absolutely right.

Yes, that's an excellent example of the programmers using the RNG very badly.

[Twisted Toon]

  The modern usage has drifted from the original specific, and now refers to any mobs that are, well, added.  Triggered spawns, ambushes, sometimes even separate spawns that are pulled to the players are considered (situational) adds.

I need the game back so I can have my Thugs MasterMind say, "How do you like these adds, CENSORED!!!" when I use Gangwar.

[Arcana]

Yes, that's an excellent example of the programmers using the RNG very badly.

I wouldn't say that exactly.  Its true they did not properly use the RNG, but the WI flag problem is actually a very good example of what I consider to be two more general and very common programming problems: the normalization/partitioning problem and the "its only broken if its broken" problem.

The first problem is a class of problems that happen a lot in mathematical code.  Sometimes you are dealing with functions that operate between zero and one.  Sometimes you are dealing with functions that operate between an arbitrary range of alpha and beta.  Sometimes that range is inclusive.  Sometimes that range is exclusive.  Even City of Heroes' tohit rolls had a subtle (and ultimately not very impactful) error of this kind.  As a programmer, you should live by one of two rules: either assume all ranges must be normalized, or assume none ever are.  Either all functions explicitly scale all ranges, or all partitions (or both).  Never assume they match, ever.  So when you see code that has partitions and they are not being normalized, and you see a range (i.e. the output of an RNG) and it is not being scaled, assume that's an error, period.

The second problem is probably THE single most pernicious problem in all of programming.  Someone wrote the aggro code for Asheron's Call.  They ran it.  It didn't crash.  It never generated an invalid result.  The game always worked with it.  Ergo, it must be okay.  That's how that bug persisted for as long as it did.  City of Heroes had those kinds of bugs-a-plenty.  The presumption a lot of programmers operate on either explicitly or implicitly is that if their code doesn't kill the program, its probably okay.  Much of iterative programming implicitly follows this rule.  Keep editing the code until it compiles, then keep editing until it runs, then keep editing until it generates a sane result, then you're done.  No one checks for correctness these days.

[GamingGlen]

  No one checks for correctness these days.

That makes this retired programmer very sad. 

[Codewalker]

No one checks for correctness these days.

FreeBSD committers care very much about both correctness and having a clean and well-engineered architecture. That's why BSD > Linux.  ;D

[LaughingAlex]

The wi-flag makes me think of Diablo 3, and how it does the opposite of what the wi-flag did in regards to it's random drops.  Basically, the longer you go without getting a legendary quality drop, the higher your chances of getting one automatically even if it's a mere stone you'd kicked over.  In fact one time I kicked over, well, a rock in a desert and suddenly I got a high quality legendary weapon.  Litterally.  But it happened because I'd just started playing for the first time in a long time.

I think back to the days of Diablo 2..and a more deliberate misuse of RNG: The runes.  The most imfamous of all, the "Zod" rune, which had such an infinitesimally small drop chance, that only about one in every 2 or 3 million players would ever see it in there entire lives.  Players instead found ways to hack and cheat the system to get them to show up through item duplication ect, that eventually zods became common but, odds were it was a cheated rune.

The situation got so bad that blizzard removed zod from every rune word in the game, and did not re-introduce it until 1.10, and even then I don't think they let the item be particularly useful.  Zod would be one of the ultimate examples of an awesome but impractical piece of junk, purely due to the dependency on RNG and  drop rate of 1 in a few trillion.

Edit: Of course, thinking on it I think blizzard did up the drop rate a ton for the rune and others of it's rarity, since it was so useless thanks to that rarity.

[darkgob]

The second problem is probably THE single most pernicious problem in all of programming.  Someone wrote the aggro code for Asheron's Call.  They ran it.  It didn't crash.  It never generated an invalid result.  The game always worked with it.  Ergo, it must be okay.  That's how that bug persisted for as long as it did.  City of Heroes had those kinds of bugs-a-plenty.  The presumption a lot of programmers operate on either explicitly or implicitly is that if their code doesn't kill the program, its probably okay.  Much of iterative programming implicitly follows this rule.  Keep editing the code until it compiles, then keep editing until it runs, then keep editing until it generates a sane result, then you're done.  No one checks for correctness these days.

beep boop what are unit tests