City of Data Updated!

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

I've got nothing.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Remember, "Real Numbers" aren't always accurate numbers.

E.g., Team Teleport Range 25 feet

(it's really 225, but CoD and in-game Real Numbers say 25)

What the game calls "real numbers" have never been actually real. I raised a number of inaccuracies about them when they were being introduced, and very few of them were addressed. The numbers still lie very frequently, are often ambiguous, confusing or incomplete and generally cannot be trusted very much. Hell, Detonator still does NOTHING as far as real numbers are concerned

But at least City of Data doesn't try to be intentionally misleading. If a power summons a pseudo-pet, City of Data gives you a link to the pet and its powerset. If a power is a toggle, City of Data gives you its tick speed and the duration of its effects. Powers like World of Confusion look VERY different when you compare their in-game "real" numbers to their actual real numbers.

If I had to have a pick, I would choose City of Data over any other numbers source. I'd easily pick it over in-game numbers, and would actually pick it over Mids', as well.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Mids and City of Data get their data from the same set of Excel spreadsheets that we've got kicking around (this is actually why updating it wound up falling on me - I work with these sheets a lot as it is). Theoretically, this means that their data should be the same. In practice, we purposefully obscure non-player data a bit so that Black Pebble doesn't try and convince the Devs to block us off (I've been told directly from the Devs that they use Mids far too much to kill us off, so long as maintain discretion and don't go waving around our sources). City of Data obscures it by restricting what is visible in the dropdown menus (Zombie Man knows how to work around that), and Mids does it by restricting what it imports when I feed it the spreadsheets.

Then there's the fact that CoD has a very generic interface it uses to show all powersets and powers, something that Mids currently lacks. I really want to add a full-on Power Browser that supports linking to pets and other powers, like CoD does, but that's lower on my list than Exemp and PvP DR support (and just slightly above Mono support).

Just curious here, is 25ft/whatever the area of effect for Team Teleport?

Yes.

That's kind of what I mean. I don't so much mind that Mids' condenses some things, like displaying healing in percentages rather than raw hit points, since I at least know how those work. However, let me refer you back to my previous example of World of Confusion. When viewed as a constant effect, World of Confusion seems to be doing a constant low-grade confuse. However, it doesn't. The power has a tick time of four seconds, but the fear only lasts 1.5 seconds, meaning that even with 100% Fear duration enhancement, it still wouldn't be a permanent effect. The game can't tell you this, I'm fairly confident that Mids' doesn't have the interface to tell you this, but this is a crucial element of the power's usage. The confuse effect isn't nearly as consistent as the numbers make it seem.

Or take Detonator, for instance. All Mids' can tell me about it is that it does "GrantPower Bomb to Target" and "GrantPower Time Bomb to Targer". The who of the what now? I don't really blame Mids' for this, though, as that particular power is so contorted I'm not sure what it would take to list it. It grants a temp power to a henchman, and which power it grants depends on the henchman type, and what damage it does depends on the henchman class. If it's a "non-thinking" henchman, he gets a self-destruct power, activates it and explodes. If it's a "thinking" henchman, he gets a SUMMON, which he activates, summoning ANOTHER entity with its own unique stats and powers, and what the damage THAT does depends on I cannot say.

But these are the kinds of powers where an interface like City of Data really helps. It's not trying to give me a reader's digest of only the relevant bits, it just gives me raw power stats so I know what the power is actually doing, rather than what the designers want me to think it's doing. I've personally never seen a problem with letting players know how the game works. I don't need to know how to min-max it and play the system, far from it, but I should at least know what my powers do and what my modifications to them accomplish.

Easy example: Why can I slot Resurgeance for endurance reduction? The power costs no endurance and is used when I'm dead and don't have endurance anyway. But I can slot it for endurance, and its cost goes from 0 to +42.4%. Huh? What did that accomplish?

I generally use Mids' Hero and Villain Designer when I want to make entire builds. But if I need to figure out what a power actually does, City of Data is the place to look. Mids' is the game, City of Data is the user manual. If you can put both of those together, then I may never need to access the Internet ever again

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

No, it's 30.

Effect area: Sphere
Radius: 30 feet


And Mid's is picking up the 25 feet again after having correcting it to 225.

There is a second internal range number that is 225. Don't know why the first range number is there.

Oh bloody hell that's confusing.

Well, the game gives away the store on its own so much so that exposing the internal spreadsheets isn't revealing that much more.

When a critter in game hits you with something, there is a damage report telling you how much damage and what type, and the chance to hit, and even the name of the attack. Debuffs show up as icons on the health bar and clicking them gives detailed real numbers about that power. Then we have access to the powersets that most critters use in the AE.

So, we can meticulously work out what everything does and build a spreadsheet of our own which will be about 95% of what the 'secret' internal spreadsheet says.

Or, the devs can look the other way and enjoy the free labor that comes from about a hundred players that use that numbers and provide extensive QA that their own folks don't have time for.

Winning!


WRT the accuracy of numbers: The Spreadsheet is a report of the numbers that the inner mechanics use. That means the Spreadsheet has to call the correct numbers and format them. Both the calling of the numbers and the formatting can go awry. Importing them into the CoD database can introduce new errors. Real Number reporting in game can also introduce new errors. Importing them into Mids can introduce new errors.

CoD is more comprehensive than in-game Real Numbers. I don't know if I would say it's more accurate.

I think we'd have to ask the Devs that. There's the issue of how close people need to be to be affected (that's the 30 feet), and how far you're allowed to teleport (that's the 225?)... Not sure where the 25 is coming from, except that it's in our sheets which means it's in the game data.

The problem is the issue of things that aren't available in game yet and maybe not even announced, but their code is. Every now and then things get snuck in that aren't there and maybe the devs don't want to let the cat out of the bag (Vet Rewards, for example, are sometimes snuck into the game code and so they show up in Mids before they're announced).

Yes, its 225 range. I tested it in game.


That's not an issue of players seeing things in the Live build they shouldn't see, but Devs not controlling what gets pushed to Live. The things that leak from the Live files are just as likely to show up Live in-game as they are in the files. Thus we have people who find costumes that haven't been released yet, or Vet Rewards being rewarded a few months early. Those things happen precisely because they didn't control the flow to Live and the Live build doesn't have the controls over them to keep them hidden.

And on the subject of Vet Rewards: Remember how they used to announce what they were a year in advance? What appears to be the Devs surprising us is that they rally are procrastinating on planning the rewards with sufficient lead time. The Vet Reward of Assemble the Team was actually late. So... they're not meant to be surprises.

When the Devs do push upcoming content to Live in a pre-download, it should have the right codes and switches to keep it from appearing. And, by that time, what's being pre-downloaded is already known from the Open Beta period.

For example, many of the Incarnate Powers got exposed in advanced through Real Numbers in-game, not because of any file peeking.

And besides, many times the info is rather cryptic as to what it's being used for and that generates buzz. It's been speculated that some (certainly not all) leaks were intentional accidents to create buzz.

Access to the Live Spreadsheet is just the very logical conclusion to Real Numbers.

The things that the Devs really want to keep secret are stored server-side (like figuring out the odds of drops--though, in some cases, they simply told us the odds) and behind P-Strings.

Or to put it another way: There's almost nothing in that spreadsheet that Arcanaville couldn't figure out by in-game testing and Real Numbers reporting.

Awesome, thank you very much.

I do have a bug report for you, however. For some of the newer pseudo-pet based powers the link to the pseudo-pet is still missing from the main power. In particular Traps for Defenders:
http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/power...der_Buff.Traps

The Pseudo Pets are in the database, they just aren't getting linked.

Which ones? They're linked for me. And the link works.

Sweet monkey!!

Thanks to all who put in the time to update all that info.