Real Numbers: When they're wrong
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2010-12-20 15:01 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
UberGuy, you make a very good point. I'd tend to view failure to show accurate information about how powers work as a bug, on the grounds that the documented "feature" is to show players what happens when they use their powers. Obviously, not having that at all was not a "bug" in the same sense -- the system was working as intended before that.
There's a second sense in which a "bad design" might be considered a bug -- the entire concept of hiding the numbers from players is just plain a bad idea, so it shouldn't have been done, but that's a different, and broader, sense.
One of the problems we face is that when a specification suddenly changes, it can expose a lot of vagueness in the original spec. When we suddenly say "we should show the players numbers", it's not always totally obvious what numbers they want. But in general, it seems like the purpose of the feature is to show the player how their powers will actually work, so showing data which have no effect on any game mechanic is probably a "bug" meaningfully. So the 2.00 accuracy on Rain of Fire is the wrong data to show because that 2.00 accuracy never does anything, that we know of. Or for Teleport Other, showing the 25' range instead of the 225' range is probably wrong because that doesn't actually seem to be the range of anything.
Quote:
Also, the tendency for tanker attacks to claim to be AoE when the actual attack itself isn't, just the taunt.
|
Originally Posted by Wonderslug
I'm assuming that's a relic of Issue 0 design, since there are plenty of multiple-radius powers now. Come to think of it, that's another category of things the real numbers display handles poorly.
|
Quote:
Actually, tanker attacks are the most prominent example of what I was talking about. In a technical sense they really ARE AoEs, just with the radius of the damage portion set to something minuscule or possibly even zero. |
Originally Posted by seebs
Also, the tendency for tanker attacks to claim to be AoE when the actual attack itself isn't, just the taunt.
|
At least, that's how they were implemented with the introduction of Gauntlet (or Punchvoke as we called it back in the day before every consarned AT up and demanded some highfalutin' so-called "inherent")--we know because for a good long while it was possible to abuse map geometry to convince mobs to violate physics by jumping into the same place at the same time, and tankers could hit them all with their allegedly single-target attacks. (Using Energy Transfer in such a situation was a bad, albeit hilarious, idea). There was also at least one occasion where a build made it to the test server where all the tanker attacks had their damage radius set to the taunt radius.
Unless there's been new tech introduced that is presumably how they still function. Fixing that display issue would either mean displaying the radius of each effect separately (which could get ugly) or telling the display that powers with a radius should show it, except when they shouldn't (likewise).
I'm assuming that's a relic of Issue 0 design, since there are plenty of multiple-radius powers now. Come to think of it, that's another category of things the real numbers display handles poorly.