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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#51

Post by bob1029 »

loganc2342 wrote: post #41
hesdeadjim wrote: post #37

Some of my fondest gaming memories are from this game. There was nothing ever quite like it, and the allegiance system created a special type of community bond that I haven’t seen repeated. At one point I had 10 “vassals” sworn to me, and in our allegiance that came with the expectation that you assist and mentor those under you. Stakes were higher when our allegiance committed to being red dot PKs on a white server…

MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. You either make a WoW-like or you die (and many times you die anyway). They really don’t make MMOs like they used to.

> MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead.

I look at this differently. I think the extreme cost of an MMO should force innovation. Take the constraints for what they are and run with them. Accepting that you can't do it the "traditional" way is the first step to figuring out a better way.

There is nothing that says a high-quality WoW killer absolutely must cost 10 figures to produce.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#53

Post by nluken »

I love hearing about bugs like this one. It's a nice reminder of the problem solving that made me fall in love with computer programming, which sometimes gets obscured in the day-to-day processes of working on software.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#55

Post by LelouBil »

veilrap wrote: post #5

I love the "lore" that this sort of bug creates, especially in these sorts of large scale multiplayer environments. Players claiming to be cursed, and the curse was real! A very different sort of event that it reminds me of is the old World of Warcraft plague: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

Great read, thanks for sharing !

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#56

Post by jedberg »

Goronmon wrote: post #26

Strange to see this exact topic come up twice in two days (the other on Reddit). But as a huge fan of the original AC, it's always fun to see it come up still.

Most likely someone saw it on reddit and posted it here. :)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#57

Post by bscphil »

anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

> I wrote up exactly this in a short email to the company that made the Yahtzee game. They did not reply and just silently fixed the bug, right after my email. I was disappointed and stopped playing.

I love this. It's one of those things that's entirely intelligible to me but I imagine would be next to impossible to explain to a Martian.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#58

Post by nmca »

shadowgovt wrote: post #36
EarthLaunch wrote: post #10

Why does weighted randomness seem so difficult for games? Are there any libraries that simplify this? I couldn't find any for JS. So I created my own "algorithms" for things like randomly choosing which type of plants spawn in the world. It weighs them by the local frequency of each land-type. Eg if there's more swamp nearby, it's more likely to spawn cattails. It's awful. Not intuitive. Weights have to be passed in…

Statistics is actually pretty hard to get right, and it is the nature of the problem space that errors aren't immediately apparent unless one actually runs analytical regression on the algorithm to confirm it has the right "shape," which (a) can be time-consuming given the complexity of the algorithm and (b) doesn't tend to be part of unit tests because unit test doctrine is pathologically opposed to nondeterminism.…

On occasion I have written a seeded large n statistical test that passes & the submitted with the seed fixed. I think this is the soundest approach, although it has a "your random number is 7" feel to it.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#60

Post by lucasmullens »

anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

Interestingly that Yahtzee version was rigged in the player's favor since they're more likely to get X-of-a-kind if the same numbers appear more often. Average scores probably dropped a decent bit after that fix.
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