Enmity Testing (Part II)

[kanican]

Overview

I realize the first post on this was rather dry and boring; however, I think it provided a number of controls which I needed to do more unique testing.  For those bored by the first post, I encourage you to read this one more carefully, as I assure you it will have unique and profound implications on the game - this post goes over testing

Comments

[anonymous]

You have not definitively proven that Dispel has a Non-Decay hate loss property. As you stated in Test #5, it could have a slow decaying hate lose. Several variables could account for why it only took at most 32 dispels from player 2 to take hate back and secure it, such as dispel having a slow hate-decay but by the time player #1 finishes casting his or hers 50 dispels and the player #2 cast his or hers 32 dispels they are now even in hate. One way to test this is by having player #1 cast say 10 dispels, then have player #1 and #2 start casting at the same time to see if at dispel 32 for player #2 they take the hate. Note: Player #1 does not stop casting dispel. If player #2 does not take hate on their 32nd dispel, then what does this mean about dispel and its hate loss property

[kanican]

Regarding the question of Dispel's Decaying Hate: you are right, there are many ways to prove it. The ways I would recommend trying to see for yourself is to try it with 10 Dispels, then try with 20, then with 5, etc. You can vary the amount of time as well. Dispel is the main spell we're using to test so far so any questions about the nature of it's hate is an important one

[anonymous]

You are right about the digital clock using only a portion of the numbers it could use and I did not think of that. So if SE did have a hard cut off that is not 2^x, the had their reasons. However, no matter how they choose to code (i.e. C++, Java, or any other higher level language), eventually it gets coded to machine level which is binary (1 = switch on, 0 = switch off) which is how the 1/4 bits work though it has been 5 years since I have coded on machine level and I could be wrong.

- Eamon (Lakshmi)

[kanican]

Oh I don't doubt it's going to be 1s and 0s at the machine code level. I don't think anyone with any experience in computers would doubt that.

My argument is that just because you got say 4 bits to work with, doesn't mean you HAVE TO use all possible alotted slots - it would certainly be most efficient to do so, but you don't have to do it. To those who say it is "impossible" to use a system that works on a 0-10,000 scale, I think they are mistaken. I think the better word is it was "probable" that the system worked on 0-(2^X-1).

Again, I thought it was going to be on a power of 2 scale, but that's not what the results showed. I'm not so biased towards that power of 2 scale as to refute any evidence that says otherwise. I'm still very confidence in the scale we have right now, despite it no being a power of 2.

[anonymous]

Just noticed that if u take 2048 + 8192 (which is 2^11 + 2^13) you'll end up with exactly 10240. So, it could be that CE and VE have separate caps.

[kanican]

I posted this at another comment. I'll repost it here in case you don't want to fumble through comments. This is a way to test if Dispel decays at all. If you think this test is flawed as well feel free to give your thoughts. This is a really important thing to nail down, so I appreciate anyone willing to be nit-picky.

Easiest way I have found to test Dispel's Decay without taking a long time...

1) Puller Pulls with Silence
2) Player 1 casts Dispel and takes hate
3) Player 1 casts Cure1 for 0 HP on himself

Player 1 is now at Dispel Hate + 1 base unit

4) Player 2 now casts Dispel...

If Player 1 maintain's hate, that means he has not even decayed 1 base unit of hate. This implies no hate was lost, not even 1 unit.

If player 2 takes hate, that means at least 1 unit of hate had been shed from Dispel. This means Dispel does shed hate, albeit only a tiny amount.

If you run this, I think you'll see that Player1 keeps hate. This implies that not even a single unit of hate has been shed by Dispel's hate.

[kanican]

Oh I actually just ran this test and you're right, Dispel does have some decay hate lol... Nice catch.

The use of Dispel in our experiements still do not matter though. The decay ends so quickly. We always waited 2 minutes between action types, so the decay was well finished.

This explains why during test 8, the hate cap, the mob turns to player 2 on move 31 but then back to player 1. Then sticks to player 2 fully after 32. Thate cap resides somewhere above 31 Dispel nondecay units (32x31) and below 31 Dispel nondecay units + the decay units of decay (32x31 + decay of dispelx1).

I'll reform the post. Thanks a lot for posting.

[kanican]

I've updated the post to change the wording to be more exact to specify that we are working with only the non-decay portion of Dispel and ignoring the decay portion by waiting out the decay duration (which is only a couple of seconds - we waited 2 minutes). Fortunately, most of the results remain valid despite this mistake.

I've also added test 5B, which is the test I gave you just above this. That was the test that didn't quite go like I thought it would and proves that there is some decaying hate to Dispel.

I've made "EDIT" changes at the top of the post and cited you as the first to call out the mistake. Thanks for nit-picking! If you see anything else that's fishy, please feel free to poke at it.

[anonymous]

So this small but rapid decay explains why the 2nd person gets hate after casting. Interesting, thanks for looking into it.

- Eamon (Lakshmi)