Five on Friday - March 16, 2007
"Any chance of flat out removing cohesion for moongates?"
Short answer is no - the "cohesion" timer is in place to prevent all sorts of interesting nastiness that could occur otherwise.
It is a pretty complicated system, though, and worth explaining a bit. Basically what happens is this: You go through a moongate. There's a flat minimum to how quickly you can go through it again. That minimum increases for each time you pass through a moongate within a certain span of time. If you wait for a little while (around thirty seconds), that minimum drops back down to the initial value.
Hopefully that will clear up some of the confusion when people are mysteriously told "Your spirit lacks cohesion" - that always sounded ominous to me... :)
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"How is the success chance for stealing in town, in a Fel-based ruleset, figured out?"
Here is the formula for stealing when stealing from another player:
First we need to determine a couple of things:
skillModifier = 100 + Stealing Skill Value.
(Example: GM Stealing, 100 + 1000 = 1100).
targetingFactor = 1 for a random steal
targetingFactor = 3 for a planned theft.
itemWeight = the weight of the item (the maximum weight you can steal is 15 stones)
(Example: 7 stones).
Then we calculate the difficulty modifier:
Difficulty = itemWeight * targetingFactor * 2000 / skillModifier.
(Example: if thief has GM stealing, and the stolen object was a planned theft and weighed 7 stones, the difficulty would be:
Difficulty = 7 * 3 * 2000 / 1100.
Difficulty = 38 (all fractions are rounded down).)
Still following? It gets more interesting when witnesses are in the area.
If there are witnesses in the area, the game performs a complicated set of calculations to determine if any of them noticed the crime. The difficulty calculation above factors into it, as well as the monetary value of the stolen item - and each NPC or player in the theft area runs the check, so the more people around, the more likely you are to be noticed. The calculation returns a yes or no value - either there are witnesses or there aren't.
If there are no witnesses, the thief successfully steals the item.
However, if there are witnesses, you're not guaranteed to fail - you just need to pass another difficulty check.
Difficulty = itemWeight * targetingFactor * 30 + 100.
(Sticking to our above example of a stolen item weighing 7 stones and a planned theft, here is the calculation:
Difficulty = 7 * 3 * 30 + 100
Difficulty = 730)
The difficulty is then plugged in to the following calculation:
500 + 2 * (Thief skill - difficulty)) / 10 = percent chance of success
(Example: (500 + 2 * (1000 - 730)) / 10 = 104%, or a guaranteed success.)
Now, stealing rare artifacts in dungeons uses a different set of difficulty calculations (a much, much simpler one, that doesn't take witnesses into account at all - it's just a linear difficulty progression.) Stealing anything else, though, whether from a player, NPC, pack animal, lockbox, etc, uses the above code.
Pardon me a moment while I help Leurocian into his straitjacket - I'm afraid examining this code has finally driven the poor man over the edge. ;)
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More Kingdom Reborn goodness!
Beta is up and chugging along - we will have some New Hotness to show you next week at the Town Hall, but this pic is currently a big fave among the beta testers:
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More Book of Truth news:
While a few Books of Truth may still linger in remote corners of the dungeons, the librarians of the Lycaeum are confident that the vast majority have been discovered. They will still be accepting the Books (and giving out rewards) this weekend, but as of Monday they will no longer do so. Make sure to get to the Lycaeum and turn in the books you've collected - any one of them may be the real Book of Truth.
Be careful, though, because the Lycaeum is rather dangerous right now...
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"When is the guild tool going to be fixed?"
We've identified the problem and have a database analyst working on it - I still don't have an ETA, and I very much apologize for the annoyance. I'll post on the Herald as soon as I can.
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"Elf headwear: hot or not?"
Last week's post about changing elf headwear from circlets to proper helms was received with mixed emotions. We're happy to hear both sides of the helm debate, and are discussing different ways to deal with it internally. If you have an opinion one way or another, this would be a great time to send in feedback. (Actually, it'd be an even BETTER time than usual - see the next item :) )
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Feedback! WANT MORE FEEDBACK! Thanks to everyone who's sent stuff in so far - to encourage everyone to pitch in, we're running a little contest. For the month of March, one feedback form sender (at random) will be selected to receive a beta invite for next month. (Valid feedback only please, spam will be deleted.) Only one feedback form will be counted towards the contest per person - feel free to send in as many forms as you have opinions, though. Got a pet peeve? An awesome suggestion? A question for the FoF? Send it in!
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The Maryland Town Hall is just a week away! Please RSVP and come hang out with us. We'll be giving away beta slots, and for all you game industry hopefuls, we'll also have recruiters there looking for a few good gamers to don the fabled Red Robes.
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Fansite News
UOForums is celebrating the arrival of spring with a Spring home decoration contest.
Grab your holiday décor chests, summon your creative spirit, and join us in bringing the spirit of Spring to your homes!
Read the full announcement and prize listing here.
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This is officially the one-year anniversary of the Five on Friday! Today we're a little heavy on news, a little light on questions - hopefully it's all good news :) And think happy thoughts for Darkscribe, who, last I heard, is stuck in the airport in Virginia, hoping he won't have to spend the night there.
- Jeremy