Kafuuka

[quote name='Liberty4life' date='28 November 2009 - 12:22 PM' timestamp='1259407379' post='48611'] okies... primary point of this topic was inner magic, principals, story mode and scene poems, and similar stuff not creats and al, they are secondary in this topic, i just mentioned them becoz creats arent anymore wot they were a year ago, they are treated completely different than before, and i mentioned al becoz it stagnated for quite some time already i wonder why everyone in this topic stopped talking about primary points of this topic [/quote] [topic='5680']Story mode is being changed.[/topic] For principles I believe you suffer the same problem as last time I mentioned them: the first reply is on the issue that interests that poster most and people then follow the example, forgetting about the other issues. Spell documents is perhaps the easiest to fix. The code to allow people to distribute them existed before, but there's no method to assign new distributors anymore. Three possible solutions: WP shop, hand picked by Mur or a crafter function (Master Scribe?). The WP shop will make it a race to get the license first, if the number of distributors/doc is limited. For quest reward purposes that makes a lot of sense to me. Hand picking is a lot of work for someone who already has a lot of features we want him to work on. A crafterlike role: a player who can change a WP into a spell doc distribution license and write new documents. Sadly this is a huge responsibility for that person, so we need someone incorruptible. The benefits should be obvious: requirements to get a license can be changed when needed. eg. When the only distributor is being too lazy or left the game, the requirements for that license can be lowered; while if it is being spread at light speed, there is no need for someone to have the same license. Once all the existing documents have a distributor, we'll need new ones. Again it makes sense to me that the distributor has a say in what kind of document he wants to be made. We also need someone to approve of the new document: function, levels, description, principles... Which is again a lot of responsibility. Perhaps Mur will get nightmares after reading this, but I am working on the premise that we are supposed to be able to influence the game and if none of us are capable of bearing this responsibility, then the game is too difficult for all of us. It doesn't even have to be one person, it can be a team too. At the cost of possible corruption, we get something that is in many ways useful for quests and will spark (principle) debates once more. *edit* seems that idea got shot down before I even pushed submit

[quote name='de la Rey' date='25 November 2009 - 12:04 AM' timestamp='1259103871' post='48407'] Kafuuka, think of ''cavalry'' or ''infantry'' as concepts and principles, not regular units as we see in movies, men on horses and guys with shields and spears. When I speak of cavalry, I`m referring at the concept of cavalry: speed, mobility, force. You ask about cavalry in MD. Nope, we don`t have it, but the ideas that form up the concept of ''cavalry'' can be used within MD without problem. And there aren`t two different aspects of conflict: in my Way, there`s only one. And that can be applied everywhere, be it a real conflict or a football match. The principles are always the same. [/quote] They are not entirely separate things, but abstract conflict and MD specific conflict might interest different people. The question is on which you want to focus: MD specific conflict and referring to the more abstract when necessary, or explaining theories and occasionally using MD as an example?

Removing the comments yourself gives too much freedom. eg when the dojo existed people got marked with 'dojo violator' in their log and I don't think they should have had the ability to remove that comment themselves. Submitting it on the forum will bring more sad topics and doesn't really solve it. We trust the mods with the forum, so why not with the PL? Of all people, they should know the difference between a negative comment and an offensive comment. It might be a tiny bit more efficient if there was a central 'please remove comment X by player Y from my PL' form; they have no way to see all the new entries like the forum RSS.

[quote name='de la Rey' date='23 November 2009 - 08:03 AM' timestamp='1258959804' post='48155'] As the title goes, the subject of the debate regards strategy, subterfuge and propaganda, all pictured in a (not so) philosophical manner. My final and at the moment so faraway goal is to form up a handbook with different opinions that circulate in the MD universe. And why not - if I`ll be capable of pulling this through - establishing a set of guidelines (not rules) to be used whenever conflicts burst out in the otherwise peaceful lands of Magic Duel. <snip> I want you to take the stand and share your vision and theories on warfare - tactics, the employment, deployment and use of cavalry, infantry, logistics and auxiliaries (scouts, spies, diplomats) [/quote] Do we have cavalry in MD or is that part of the philosophical aspect? I think there are people interested in both the non MD and the MD aspects of conflict and the link between them is also interesting, yet the scope becomes large enough to split the debate in multiple parts. [quote] For now, a rough and simple rundown of the debate would look like this: - Opening - Introduction to warfare - Set one - Head on - conventional warfare; how are we doing it - theory - Set two - In the shadows - the use of ''agents'' or <How can one man win the war>; deceit and treason. - Set three - A mouthful of words - they can`t fight as good as we can speak. - Set four - All still standing go to a pub and drink their minds out while sharing experiences, like the true warriors they are. [/quote] I propose an additional topic: - The origin of conflict (you can see a small article on this in my MW&B papers: on information)

With php? That sounds very insane to me. It's all Turing complete but then again, you're not going to program it in abacus or lolcode either methinks. Dwarffortress runs with wine too, if you're using linux.

Being skeptical: do you know how to program in a decent language, ie c++? If you don't go into the multithreading route, events will never be simultaneous for your program, so you shouldn't worry about it. The scope of your plans is also very large rpg/strategy with the extent of d&d/empire earth? Might be helpful: play dwarffortress for a while, it has a very extensive economy with jobs, items and resources. (And look at how long it's being developed already.) Puzzle Pirates also has a good way of managing supply and demand issues and keeping the player economy going, although the puzzles are very repetitive, but you're not aiming for puzzles.

While posting a walkthrough is worse than people sending answers to only a single person, the situation is similar: it is next to impossible to stop them. Sometimes people send me pm within minutes after my name is put up as one of the people who solved a quest, asking me to give them the solutions. Perhaps in the future I shall list the names and others will do the same, but that is about all I can think off. As for originality: the entrance riddle for my old quest is actually unoriginal. It wasn't supposed to be hard (nor is any part of the quest, it is tagged as easy and fun), I needed an excuse for people to pm me. Somehow it is the part where most people got stuck upon and also what resulted in the most surprising answers. I think I've heard about all elemental metals, as well as some alloys and 'Metal Bunny'. Luckily almost nobody got stuck on my own creations.

@Fernrir: Why mp5 only? And instead of on log-in I think it makes sense to have something like the document dispatcher. It has the same benefit of not needing a 50k query and there could be requirements set before you can get it, plus it might be easier to use the clickies to program it. @Rendril: I imagine having someone else's cube grants you power over that person, if you know how to use it. Power over alts isn't that desirable, but ripping off newbies who might become powerful will be a problem. @Shadowseeker: I used to have a puzzle like that: a set of 1³ cubes in various colors, which you could take apart and put together again, or combine multiple cubes into a bigger structure, eg a cross, a 2³ cube... Now I'll have to go and search boxes of old toys to see if I still have them.

[quote name='Esmerelda' date='15 November 2009 - 12:53 PM' timestamp='1258286001' post='47520'] I used pigpen when I was in 5th grade to pass notes in class. Recognised it instantly. Wierd that you haven't heard bout it. O.o [/quote] I've never felt the need to pass notes in class, perhaps that's why I never heard about pigpen?

Jay a third cleanup topic! While it is nice to see people are concerned about cleaning, I think a scheme to facilitate it in the future is needed first. I don't think it is possible to create something foolproof (lazy-bum-proof). At some point the only method to decide if a script is still valuable will be for someone to manually inspect it, because the creator is beyond reach. While it directly violates privacy/secrecy and ownership, imo creating a script for MD implies that you give up copyright on the script. If someone else were to see the code and expands upon it, it is fair for that person to cite your name, but you can't go and sue them. And if you are gone, what use is it to forbid people to look at it? I assume it is possible to see who wrote a certain script and to determine when that person last logged in? Allowing creators to attach a short comment to their script would help too, but is relying heavily on them not being lazy.

[quote name='AqlBeast' date='13 November 2009 - 01:42 AM' timestamp='1258072971' post='47326'] A good survey when carried out randomly should not need that much number of players. 100 players is a far-fetched amount for MD's population that are online. Both the answer and the problem of a survey lies with the margin of error. A low number of responses from players means a higher margin of error, and a high number of responses from players means a lower margin of error. Based on the population of MD that are online, which is usually between 250 to 300 players. Out of a pool of let's say 300, an acceptable amount to sample may be one tenth of the pool, which average around 30 players. After all, most surveyers only select a random amount of 1000 people out of a population of 100000 people. The margin of error is fairly acceptable for an amount of 30 sample from a pool of 300 players. But certainly unresponse sample may create a problem for the survey as well as stated by Kafuuka. But hopefully the time alloted (possibly a month the same time for MDNP) may compensate for this bias method. (Not done writing going to edit later on) [/quote] Should we really base on the MD population online, which is a small sample of the MD target audience? If we do that, then the true error margin will be bigger, and that might make it seem less a problem to have a large estimated error. However t statistics care not about the ratio of estimator/true value. Furthermore, you cannot rely on large numbers and assume things to be asymptotically normally distributed. We already have three nominal categories: winners, losers and idlers. (ok those might sound a bit bad...) For a lot of quests the winners will be extremely limited in number. It is not impossible to get good conclusions out of that kind of data, but it is a lot more complex than having 100 observations and ignoring the difference between 1/(n-1) and 1/n and such. Can we really expect 30 observations for each quest? What do we want to measure? Difficulty, reward, reward/difficulty, originality, fun? @Cryxus: your quest was fun. If you want puzzles, did you try Cutlers' quest? Or are we talking about a different kind of puzzles? @Master: Dst said she wanted to write this topic for a long time, wouldn't that rule you out as a specific target?

Last time i tried to do a survey, 13 people filled it. I can only hope Mur reached more people with his surveys, although he stopped doing them quite fast as well. For the king elections, 100 votes was the target. 100 is not a large number when talking about statistics. For surveys where there is less possible benefit, should we expect to get 100 observations? Of course you could give a reward for filling the surveys, eg. 1 credit for every 10 quests rated. This however comes at the cost of 1 credit for every 10 quests rated and less accurate ratings: some people will enter random numbers, caring only about the credits. Interpreting statistics is not as easy as people like to think. If you look at the IQ thread, you'll notice people have very funny ideas of statistics. I suspect IAB wanted to fit a bell curve through a three modal sample, ignoring that it should be a t curve. Printing the raw results of small sample statistics will lead to large misunderstandings. Regardless, I think it is feasible to automate this partly, for future quests using MDscript. The keys allow us to verify if people attempted the quest and won. A survey system would only have to be set up once, if enough thought is given to the formulations of questions and what we want to test with them.

I really hope people aren't trying to get the shiny gold Q doc as fast as they can without regard for quest quality. I waited a long time to get it and paid a WP, but that argument isn't going to stop anyone I guess. What about: if your quests are poor, you won't get new WP codes? The essay type I have mixed feelings about. Sometimes I love writing and sometimes I feel like someone is letting me do their research. If the essay is related to MD 'secrets', is the only part of the quest, will be ranked and only the top x will get a reward, I'm not going to write it. Do your own 'research'! Find person x type. The riddle part I get, but if actually finding the people online is the hardest part of the quest, something is very wrong. People live in different timezones.. This counts for the quest creator too. If I can't find you to start the quest, then you'll have one less participant. Back when RPCs could be traced this was both ridiculous and redundant, with people claiming 'it is part of the quest.' Spending one credit or asking a person who had spent that credit, really difficult to do, unless you are a newbie and don't know the feature exists. Codebreakers: I've seen the same letterswitcharoo code used enough times to write a script to assist me when guessing the key. First solver wins, others get nothing: months ago Gargant asked me if I could help him change this into 'person who took least time', unfortunately neither of us had much time to collaborate. But if I am not mistaken the MDscript allows you to track the time taken. @Azreal: if you are lucky, maybe someone with script access wants to assist you? (I currently don't have access: don't need it right now and the rules and price might change still)

[quote name='dst' date='10 November 2009 - 02:22 PM' timestamp='1257859330' post='47140'] It seems MB blew my plan away I did a test: I chose a sensitive subject and I said almost all the bad things I could about it. I knew I will hit egos and I did. You have no idea how much fun I had yesterday writing and then reading your replies. I was a troll and you all took the oportunity to releas your wrath . [/quote] I fail to see much wrath has been released, I think only two persons used anything remotely similar to swearing and one of them was you. It is also hard for you to play the troll, because I assume you will actually read my arguments and try to find a loophole, while trolls only shout. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered answering.

Not using alts to boost one account... but it has been stated before that policing this rule is difficult at best. And it is always better not to tempt people. It is a given that some will try it.

WP thing: this will need a lot of tweaking. Many people don't write their papers in the first ten days and veterans have a better idea of what a WP is worth and what they consider the best use of it. It will also ruin the item creation process if every alt gets 5 WP (+1 from BPP). Why would you ever use one of your own WP for an item again? RP thing: Roleplay happens in the game, the forum only supports the game. Yet it has been mentioned that after a while what happened in the game is gone. I remember a time when the Tree guardians where recording some of their fun adventures into the archives and were asked to stop doing that because it wasn't serious enough. Should we have instead gone towards the MDNP, should there be another site for it? imo MD is decentralized enough already, with the archives, the fora and the game and then yim and the secret fora... and there's room for an irc channel a decent ebay thing for trading and then an MD blog or twitter? Principles: this is actually what made me play the game. MD looked different, and then I browsed the site and stumbled upon the principle descriptions and I really liked it. Maybe that is because I am agnostic and really like mythology and symbolism. Anyway I like them but few things are done with them. So far I've witnessed two lectures and saw a couple of quests that were related to them and that's it. Oh and you can reduce them to numbers and use those as magical bullets... an application I don't care about at all.

Going into semantics: I never said you said it is an FPS, I said IF you claim it to be an FPS... Back to serious business: people stealing your lollipops is way more annoying than getting spanked. And everyone that goes to RP because they can't stand loosing in battle is prone to bunnying/godmodding. Which ends in being ignored, lectured or outgodmodded (yes this can happen, especially if the one doing it actually has the silence spell, but it is not required); they loose in RP, which is a hard thing to do since death can be the most epic roleplay (if never resurrected that is). I doubt those people are the ones who debate on the forum for the very same reason: debates require at least one party to change their views. I also said that at mp3 there were few good rits, before the tokens. I know there are more possibilities at mp4 and now with tokens and changing abilities... but that mostly supports my argument. The fun is in finding counter rituals. A couple of people test the new abilities, make new rituals and counters. If a newer person or one who has less time attacks one of the new rituals, they'll see how good it is and will be prone to copying it. At that point someone who knows the counter is bound to attack them sooner or later and poof free knowledge of the counter is granted. You've had the most fun in months because there are new rituals possible, does that not imply that you already tried all the evident old rituals, and the less evident and even most of the really tricky obscure ones? Your idea about commenting fights is similar to what Tarquinus mentioned with [post='46582']"don't ignore the system".[/post]

One of the things that annoy me, is advertising and begging: "Please become my adept." "Please vote for my friend, whose name I will not specify, to become king of ..." "Please look at my thread where I invented a new creature." "Please look at my trade thread, which is actually an attempt to rip you off." "Please give me free stuff." "Please do my quest." <- guilty of this one At one time, after spending time, effort and silver coins on a quest, the final stage was 'get me three adepts.' I could either demand my coins back or try to solve this simple thing... except that every person I asked already got asked to be someone's adept 10 times, in the last hour! Sometimes people even ask me to become their adept, after noticing that I managed not to fall into the 'free inside information' scam for almost a year, what makes you think I will do so now? Needles to say there are now three very inactive alts adepted to one unfortunate player, so sue me. And the not specifying names, that's not me who invented that, people really assume I know who their 'friend' is. My train of thought was something like: oh look, someone wants a favor... someone needs to learn how to spell, and perhaps include all details, I wonder whose friend he is and if that person knows people spam in their name, without attention to spelling, or details like who I am supposed to vote for, perhaps they are lucky I don't know who they are... oh well, DELETE. Quests... for some reason the quest list doesn't seem to work. The week I announced my quest there I got less players than the other weeks. The shiny golden Q button works marvelous though. Also, what happened to spell documents? They were the inexhaustible reward thingy that was usually tied to relatively easy quests, without the need to be the first and only solver. Quests involving WP are supposed to be the hardest kind, and creatures and coins are limited in supply too.

[quote name='dst' date='09 November 2009 - 02:07 AM' timestamp='1257728833' post='47023'] Cut the cr**! If i read one more time about how MD is a RPG and not a PVP I will delete the entry instantly! Is is THAT hard to understand that it's NOT a RPG? Or at least not the common RPC you are all used with? Hey! I might even call it a FPS! After all i chase players all over MD to get a decent amount of xp these days! Shish...Who are the most known players? I will tell you: the grinders. Except Z and Tarq nobody from the so called "good RPers" are as known as the grinders. And they are know because they were also RPCs. Sorry but as I already said a thousand times: combat system is superior to RP system (which actually almost doesn't even exist). Shish...again... [/quote] MD is not just an RPG. However if you claim it is a FPS you are making the same mistake as people claiming it to be an RPG. MD is a lot of things: roleplaying, creature battling, wish point gathering... The reason good grinders are 'famous', is quite simple: they are good because they know how to beat your rituals and do it regularly, how can you not notice them except if you never do any battling? For roleplaying it is much more difficult. It takes at least two people to roleplay, or one shizo. When both people are good, they will produce an interesting story, which others might notice and participate in. If one is good and the other goes ooc or godmods, then you will most likely see the former person getting angry, going idle or giving advice on RP, none of which is good roleplay. And all of it requires you to read it, which you wont unless you are at least a bit interested in RP. So RPers will notice RPers, while grinders and everybody who at least has a single creature and is level 5 will notice grinders. (which excludes me, jay!). Also: the fighting system doesn't look interesting to me. You all talk about 'tactics' but all i can see is a few creatures with useful skills, which means a limited number of possible useful rituals. For mp3 it didn't even require any thinking at all, since every headscontest you would get attacked with the best ritual that was available at that time. The dozens of people that did train months to win HC at mp3 before I went to mp4 all used the same kind of ritual, so if I wanted to have the best ritual, all I needed to do was copy it. Certainly the RP system is lacking too, but don't be praising the battle system like it's the only thing that is perfect in MD. It is not perfect; nothing will ever be perfect because that would imply Mur wouldn't need to work on it anymore and the concept of the game is that everything is constantly changing.

Proof against what? That picture could easily be interpreted as three robed men having a drinking party. Some of them even mistake books for firewood! Usually one would invoke Ockham's razor here, but if we closely inspect the position of Zleiphneir in the picture we can see he is actually hoovering 0.5 meters in the air. Now, I've seen him do some funny stuff, but levitation?

[quote name='Rendril' date='04 November 2009 - 08:36 PM' timestamp='1257363413' post='46630'] You yourself said this would not be a frequent occurence. Imagine scanning a table of 30k rows just to remove 1 key on a regualr babsis... [/quote] Infrequent as in 'not every hour' yes, but frequent enough if you compare the number of keys purged to the total number of keys. Actually, how long would a query on 30k rows to find all players that have one (or more) keys take? And for deletion (guessing that takes a bit longer).

[quote name='Rendril' date='04 November 2009 - 02:28 PM' timestamp='1257341303' post='46586'] As I showed in the estimate above storing them in tables is likely to cost more then the current method. Our desire to put them in a table at all, coems from the need for efficient key cleanup. We accecpt that the deleting is happen infrequently.[/quote] We do? I never accepted that. And estimates about cost are quite depending on how efficient MD code is. [quote]So while it might save stoing a few unsed keys when it happens (for a large deletion cost) in the tiem that the quest is running, it will be used more resources. There are many quests that runs months without being finished, and some keys might be used for things indefinitely. It just isn't showing itself ot be a good tradeoff. In fact, from what I can see, the best action is to simply start storing the keys in an indexed rather than associative array. At key creation you run a loop inm linear time to detect a duplicate. [/quote] If you really want to optimize it, you could always store a single boolean for each keyname: permanent. Only put the ones that are temporary into a second table that keeps track of uids for keys. Downside: you need two new tables (although a table of booleans is hardly expensive) and everytime a key is given, a check must be made if the keyname exists (if it doesn't you don't know if it is permanent or not) and whether it is permanent. If all key functions are global functions, this isn't difficult to program, but all currently existing keys should be registered, which seems like an annoying thing to do. Anyway, this discussion seems to rely too much on what the current MD code looks like. Which means we'd better persuade Mur to read this.

Same question applies: is there a single function for adding/removing a key or is it hardcoded for every single key? It's hard to believe someone would actually do that.

Yes there is a flaw If you put the keyname into a String variable, no simple reg exp will find it but instead you need something close to an interpreter, which is too much work for sane people. Then again, did Mur ever claim to be sane? You could demand keynames are never put into variables but are always spelled out completely, but that is quite a loss in scripting efficiency. eg. [code]@va = 'keyname'; mds_has_rpcq_keys(@va);[/code] cannot be verified with only 1 regular expression. Enforcing is not a requirement, but it will decrease efficiency because people are inherently lazy and thus liable to ignore labels and the cleaning.

Are you implying each clicky has its own code and changing how clickies work means doing the same job a hundred times?