Grapple Swing

No.

let's say someone actually wanted to test this...

Well first we'd need some code that isn't purposefully obfuscated. Secondly, I'd need to be allowed to play with the program. then I'd make a guess and then they'd have to figure out based on what i would have said in general and use it to locate and fix the problem.

In other words... it requires someone that is honest and competent and the likely hood of someone being that when it comes to "testing" me from this community is about as low as you can possibly get.

And it certainly isn't worth it when you can just use the combo mechanic and the change ammo mechanic to get a similar effect.

When the "charge up" power is selected, you get two buttons. A charging button that gives stackable buffs, and a release power that expends the buffs.

Everyone notice how Durakken has changed his tune?

When Arcanaville gives an example of a subtle bug and what the fix was, he was all, that solution was obvious to me. When he's never seen the code.

But when it's suggested that other actual subtle CoH bugs that have been fixed be mentioned so mr "I'm fairly awesome at figuring out where bugs are even if they don't make much sense for most" can demonstrate how awesome he actually is by telling us what he thinks was done to fix the problems, he now wants to impose conditions that don't exist in real life and furthermore insults Arcanaville's and the dev's honesty and competence by implying that there is no one in the community that can be trusted.

So you expect me to come up with a solution to a bug that exists in a non-extant program? I don't think asking that the program exists is all that much of a "restriction". Likewise the asking to be allowed to play it rather than just relying on there is a problem at all is asking for the same conditions as the proposed "You can't guess the problems in this game from playing it" argument.

And the last "restriction" is really the crux of the whole thing. It's guess work of guess work and then trying to rely on someone else to do what your thinking. So you're also guessing on what they're thinking and hoping that their skill level is the same or better than yours in both programming and deduction.

And Why would i ever be naive enough to believe that someone challenging me on this would be honest? It's apparent why I wouldn't and apparent why it can't be discussed by me, but you go right ahead and continue talking as if I don't have a valid reason to believe such a thing. Also I'm not talking about the devs and never have I once said the devs are dishonest in CoH, as far as I know. Unless they are running around on accounts or in other games I've played.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

*What* sounds obvious to you? Tell me what specifically you would have checked as one of the top 5 things you would have checked. Because as it turns out, recharge itself wasn't actually the problem. Range was.

Yes, a problem Castle mitigated by making pets immune to recharge buffs ultimately was a problem with range.

Mu hu ha ha ha ha...



As to whether its possible I'm just making this up, well, I proposed the code fix to Television to address the problem after extensive testing of the problem with pohsyb, so its not like I'm aware of this one second hand.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Oh gee, now I'm really embarrassed... Arcanaville lies and thinks she's proving her point but really just shows exactly what I'm talking about the accuracy of confirming or deconfirming the ability to deduce things. Yup fine job you did ther Arcana. You just keep those lies a rolling and eventually someone other than me will call you on it.

Whatever you need to tell yourself to sleep at night.

Yeah. You seriously keep dreaming that, man.

I think this thread is pretty much done, now.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

it's been done for a while.

She blatantly says she lied, noone including herself seems to realize she said she lied, and I'm the bad guy. Awesome ^.^

Nowhere in this thread did I lie about anything. Nowhere in this thread did I specifically say anything about the game or its functionality that wasn't the unobfuscated truth either.

And the ultimate impossible to fake method of proving you're a cracker-jack code debugger that doesn't need to see the code to find and fix bugs is to find and fix some bugs in a program you are not allowed to see the code in, such as this game. There's lots of them to find, and the task isn't impossible because I've done it about a half dozen times. For someone that is awesome at it, this should present no problem at all.

The problem which everyone else recognizes in this circumstance, is that its easy to make claims on the internet until you just happen to run into the one person out of a thousand that can challenge them directly and unequivocally. And then you go all in thinking everyone's bluffing, and lose your shirt to aces over kings.

No. I asked for an example so I could see what you mean by not obvious as everyone views what is and isn't obvious as different. You decided to not give an example but rather to flat out lie, so that when I said what the solution was obvious you could come back and say "That wasn't the solution so it's not obvious" which entirely missed the point of what was being asked and thus showing why there is no point in even attempting to prove the ability to deduce things around here with people like you.

Either you don't follow that and you are truly incompetent, or you are a liar, and not just any liar but a malicious liar. I find the former to be unlikely while the latter is ever more likely considering this is the 3rd or 4th time you've lied to try to make me look bad. I have to hand it to you in a way, because you've succeeded in making me look bad to those who don't get it, but that's hardly a feet because they already think negatively towards me.

Oh and just to point out, even if you were telling the truth, which you weren't, you're trying to argue that since you couldn't figure out what was wrong with the data that you collected which you didn't present I couldn't figure it out and that I couldn't have or that I wouldn't have collected different data which is part of the reason that I said I'd need to play around with the program, which you did to get that data.

So even though everything supports me in what I say I'm the wrong one. And even though you know that you lied you are still somehow claiming you told the truth. But hey whatever, Live in your fantasy world, I'll be over in reality waiting to see if anyone ever joins me ^.^

Go back and reread her post. She never lied. She truthfully said that the recharge buffs were a big part of the problem.

For someone who claims to be "fairly awesome at figuring out where bugs are even if they don't make much sense for most" without ever having to look at the actual code, you somehow managed to overlook the blatantly obvious fact that she flat out told you that the recharge buffs were only part of the problem.


You could say that some of us also made the same error but that hardly matters since only you and Border_Line were the ones claiming how easy it is to add features and identify problems without ever seeing the actual game code.

Oh and did you also notice that Border_Line stopped responding after he baited you into supporting his ridiculous statements? Maybe he just got tired of this thread, or had RL issues that are preventing him from responding sooner.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

The issue, for those that are curious, is that critters used to factor in how much time it would take for an attack to become available which had a range comparable to how far the critter was from your location, as a factor in whether to attack, move, or wait. Buffing recharge would change the way the critters made decisions which would not necessarily show up in QA testing, and furthermore many issues would only turn up in specific dynamic situations where players and critters were moving around in particular ways.

The fact that there was code that told the critters to take range into consideration when deciding what to do included an algorithm that upon careful analysis was not stable. You could therefore not rely on a critter using the powers you gave it just by looking at the power definitions and checking to see if the powers recharged in a way that allowed them all to be useful. And dynamically changing recharge made things even worse, because critters could get confused by the changing values of time to recharge on their attacks.

Although the bug was often triggered by recharge buffs, its source was the range factoring component of critter AI, something that was changed during I18 development.

To say this was non-obvious would be an understatement. It took weeks of careful testing under a very systematic set of conditions to uncover the range-specific component of the bug, and weeks more testing to confirm that neutralizing it would greatly improve critter functionality if the code were changed, and weeks more testing to determine that a particular algorithmic replacement would be in all cases better or identical to the original if it was changed.


This is not by any stretch an isolated incident. When I discovered that some female characters attacked slower than male characters under certain circumstances even though they had the same power definitions, that would have been opaque to anyone not intimately familiar with how the game engine and game client worked. Why adding some new totally unrelated animations caused Elude to trigger the whirlwind animation when you were falling during activation is not something you can just guess at. The Oil Slick ignition problem was extremely non-trivial to locate. Why we can sometimes with some element of reproducibility unroot ourselves is a subtle flaw in the way the animation system works. Race conditions have created strange bugs. To this day I've never found out what the source of the immortal critter bug was: there was a bug where sometimes a critter would spawn that you could not kill. You could pound on it all you wanted but its health would not move. I actually had Castle yank the logs of me doing that to one of those critters to analyze, and he came up empty. The problem eventually went away, but I never heard what was causing that. Keep in mind the critters were targetable, damageable, but their health didn't move (anyone playing TOR now is having a twitching fit).

I wish there were lots of people capable of being expert black box debuggers. Then the game would be better and I wouldn't have to do it. I love City of Heroes, but one thing I like about playing other MMOs is that I'm an ignorant anonymous nobody.

Are your eyes in the same room as your fingers when you type, or do they sometimes bang out things your brain never gets a chance to audit?

I can' tell if you're leaving out something else or not, because you've shown yourself to be liar, but if that's what happened then again I say that seems like it'd something fairly obvious to me. Maybe a little less so than just the recharge part, but over all that would probably something that I'd be able to find fairly easily.

Also it's not really good form to try to exaggerate how hard something is by people being ignorant of the checks and such that need to happen when programming a game. It's not like they find a problem and implement a solution instantly. It does take time to figure it out, propose a fix, test it, get feed back, and get approval and such for all that which takes up time. Someone who is working more independently would be able to fix it far faster in that case most likely.

Awww you lie, admit it, and now you want to insult me. So cute.

To be honest I already learned how his brain works from the old SGU threads when he'd drop in to criticize episodes he never watched. He was basing his arguments off of what he saw during the commercial teasers for the next weeks episode.

I'm not sure if I should be insulted or impressed with the fact that he's trying to convince people that "critters used to factor in how much time it would take for an attack to become available which had a range comparable to how far the critter was from your location" is obvious to him. That's something you say when you have never seen source code, or for that matter a computer, before.

Its like if someone wanted to convince people he was the bestest pilot in the world by telling people he's one of the only people American Airlines trusts with their Miami to Saturn route.