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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#151

Post by jdk »

PolyphonyReq wrote: post #148
jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

I was in from beta until about 2004. Lots of fond memories! Closest I've come to feeling the same way I felt playing AC in recent memory is actually Valheim. Can't quite put a finger on why, but there are very few games that hold such an important place in my heart. I was a high schooler when it came out. Some days I regret not going into game design, especially with the current wave of VR games. Some days I'm tempte…

Yay! The first time an MMO lands for someone, it definitely makes an outsized impression. The combination of social outlet with a huge amount of free time is a recipe for something great.

It's funny you mention Valheim - one of my groups in had a core of people who I met back in the AC days and their friends. We got to some real old man gaming that probably annoyed their friends with all of the "back in our day..." stories while we were running around the landscape, running from trolls, etc.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#153

Post by jdk »

PolyphonyReq wrote: post #149
jdk wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the last 15 years or so, coworkers ask when I'm going to make a new allegiance system but "less broken". So many good social behaviors came from its structure that it really deserves another attempt. And yeah, Ash Gromnies were the bane of so so so many players.

What do you see as the major flaws and what do you think you would do differently?

The biggest problem was the degeneracy once it was "solved", instead of organizing around social circles. It led to people feeling like cogs in the machine and skewed play patterns and motivations.

I haven't really given it any serious thought but I'd likely start with trying to more strongly codify the good parts (incentivizing smaller circles inside of the larger structure, making systems for patrons/vassals to play together in more meaningful ways, etc) while highlighting the positive actions that players could do / benefit from. I don't want to say AC was TOO opaque but a lot of it definitely suffered from being over designed for a very hardcore market.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#154

Post by celdon25 »

thomasskis wrote: post #112
thomasskis wrote: post #110

The bugs in this game lead to some of the greatest gameplay of all time. I think the best bug was the movement possibilities during spell casting from breaking animations. It created one of the most complex and amazing PK (PvP) dynamics of any MMO to exist. The complexity of being able to move only so much to still get your cast off, and being able to slightly fast-cast or hold long delay-casts to "outplay" your oppo…

If anyone remembers the days when guys like "Rookie" or the UD's figured this out and mastered it, what a time to be alive! Good ol' AB wars... :)

The late Anti Parazi (Reckful) figured it out way ahead of his time, before Rookie. He’s still considered to be the best of all time.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#155

Post by stefan_ »

jdk wrote: post #126
jdwithit wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Asheron's Call, played it a lot back in the day. My friends and I were in high school at the time so we had absolutely no idea what we were doing, but that didn't stop us from running around the world goofing off. My hobby was making characters with totally insane Run and Jump skills. Once you leveled up enough you could literally leap from one end of a town to the other like Superman, it was extremely funny.…

Thanks! Always nice to hear people who "grew up" play it. AC having server-side physics and actually making use of them led to lots of ridiculous and emergent gameplay. I don't know how many hours I just spend idling in towns jumping from rooftop to rooftop or seeing how high I could climb up massive structures. Everytime I try to play again though, the old "you can't go home again" hits too hard and I just quietly c…

Ironically I think WoW had a bunch of these bugs too, with mechanics prioritizing "oldest account id" first..

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#156

Post by thaumasiotes »

I don't understand the math. They are very clear about what they want their algorithm to achieve:

> 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

That couldn't be more explicit. In the example model, where distance is danger, player D is twice as far away as player A, and has twice the chance of being attacked.

To invert that, in the game, where proximity is danger, when player A is twice as close as player D, he should have twice the chance of being attacked.

The game's algorithm does not attempt to do this. In the worked example, player A is 50% more likely to be attacked than player D is.

The correct algorithm is not difficult to write or to execute:

1. Assign all players equal odds of being attacked.

2. Weight the odds by the ratio of (distance_to_furthest_targetable_player / distance_to_me).

To make the example easier to follow, assign player D [distance: 10] 60 units of probability space. Then player A [distance: 5] should receive 60*(10/5) = 120 units, player B [distance: 2] should receive 300 units, and player C [distance: 3] should receive 200 units. Generate a real number (or, heck, an integer) in the range [0, 680) and you have your selection. Or, if you prefer, normalize all the odds and then generate something in the range [0, 1). But how did they pick the crazy algorithm they're actually using?

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#157

Post by thaumasiotes »

jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

> IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point

Any idea how the targeting algorithm was chosen? It does not behave the way this letter says that it should.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#158

Post by hesdeadjim »

jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

Any insight you could share on why the server didn’t end up being provided to the community for self-hosting?

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#159

Post by Danieru »

kvark wrote: post #89
anyfoo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After I (happily!) did their work for them, a simple "thank you", or even an acknowledgment through a closed ticket, would have entirely sufficed to make my day.

Or maybe the bug was closed as a duplicate of one they were already aware of? Still impolite of them, of course, but we shouldn’t assume the worst.

Protip for other gamedevs: when a player reports a bug you already know about say "thanks for the report, the fix will be in the next patch".

It is not the players fault patches take time to get through QA. Nor should there be an implicit valuation curve to free bug reports from players.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#160

Post by thaumasiotes »

Aloisius wrote: post #68
ok_dad wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was waiting for them to say something like "then we take the random variable and multiply it by 3 to correct for this" and then explain some other, more subtle, bug. Looks like we all make stupid mistakes like this sometimes. I made a bug where I tried to get the month number for the next month, so you had to wrap at 12, but I just did "(current_month + 1) % 12" and left it at that, thinking for some reason that mo…

I must be missing something. That is how modulo works. Well as long as January is month 0.

You want (current_month % 12) + 1.
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