Five on Friday - August 10, 2007
"Why did you randomize resource spawn in this publish?"
This change is getting more debate right now than the PvP changes, so here's Wilki with the scoop:
"The resource change was made for several reasons, but mostly because of the obvious one: "Rare" resources aren’t very rare if you can recall to a runebook full of them and collect as many as you want on demand. Besides just not making a whole lot of sense, we felt that this would limit any future systems that might rely on certain resources being more rare than others.
That said, there seems to be a little confusion about what we actually changed in Pub46. We didn’t just do a one-time randomization of resource spots so that players have to create new runebooks of rare resource spawns; instead, as a resource is mined, it has a chance to respawn as something else when it restocks. The actual odds of finding a particular resource type has not been changed, with the exception of the 4 rarest wood types, which will now spawn much more frequently as follows:
- Frostwood has increased from 0.1% to 1%
- Bloodwood has increased from 0.2% to 2%
- Heartwood has increased from 0.3% to 3%
- Yew has increased from 1% to 5%
Some things that we’re considering for the future:
- Making the rarer resources spawn more often in the more dangerous locations
- Adding some chance to get better resources from lower end resource spots (perhaps based on skill)
- Increasing the amount you can get from a resource spot for the rarer resources (for example, if you found a valorite spot, it’d give considerably more ore than an iron spot)"
--
"With the changes to mining, have the chances of mining up gems changed at all? What *are* the chances for mining gems, anyway?"
Mining for gems is not affected by this change at all, nor is lumberjacking for the special items (bark, amber, etc).
Gems have a flat chance of being mined up on each successful mining attempt. The gem type is totally random - it's not affected by the underlying ore type. You have a 0.6% chance of mining up a gem, with an equal chance of getting any of the six gem types.
--
"What's the catch with Spirit of Totem, why it cannot be repaired with a tailor repair deed?"
This one came up yesterday during the chat, and I said we'd look it up. So... we looked it up, and the Spirit of the Totem doesn't have durability. Therefore it can't be damaged... and can't be repaired.
However, Wilki is deeply suspicious of this question, so if we missed something, send in feedback!
Edit: "What's the catch with Spirit of Totem, why it cannot be repaired with a tailor repair deed?"
It cannot be repaired because... well, there is no good reason other than that it's not on the list of things that are allowed to be repaired. We'll get that bugged and fixed in a future publish.
--
"Some of the snowmen have already their correct colour back. They are white and just the scarf and a part of the hat is coloured. But some are still completely pink/blue... Why are only some of them correctly coloured?"
This one is entirely CatHat's doing...
"That N/S Snowman is the first deco item I did my initial test on with the new KR coloring system. Plants, Equipment, Furniture and various deco items will be getting some love soon... So just consider the E/W and N/S snowmen, "before and after" shots of what’s to come."
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"Draconi said we could have commas in our checks! Where are our commas?"
I chased the man down and he says:
"Adding commas! Yes, commas are a wonderful thing. In fact, we'd already written a quick hack for Checks so that they'd display their values in a nice, comma-rific format.
Seeing the fix in action made us realize that we really needed to extend this to the other parts of the UI to make numbers easier to read. So, rather than a hack, this has become a formal task for our team, which explains why it's taking longer.
Now, an added bonus to doing this consistently is that we may be able to localize the number formatting as well (for those of us who would find commas even more confusing)!"
--
It's been an eventful week, what with a patch, a publish, another publish (coming tonight to fix the icky house-sign issues), a House of Commons Chat... and we fixed PvP! (Just kidding. Well, sort of kidding. It's much better now, anyway :) ) Anyway, I'm wiped - have a good one!
- Jeremy