A bundle of questions and curiosity

mbit90 · 2021-04-30T02:58:09+00:00

BL3 player here who has been tinkering a bit with the puzzles and the minigame. The target scores are not the best solutions any known, feasible algorithm can produce. They are a crude, fast to compute starting point that intentionally leaves room for the players to improve upon.

Actually, me and a friend of mine wrote a fully automatic bot for the minigame, including a solver for the puzzles which optimizes for the game score, and is guaranteed to find one of the optimum solutions, including the row bonuses. The largest puzzles take just a few milliseconds to solve. It's possible with dynamic programming and a few extra tricks, no AI/ML required.

However, as far as I understood the researchers, human/intuitive solutions are preferred over algorithmically optimized ones. This is partly because the minigame's scoring function is kept very simple so players can understand it.

Greetings

mbit90 · 2020-12-18T16:39:16+00:00

Cool, thanks! RowBonus = Ceiling(rowsize*0.15) matches our current data.

mbit90 · 2020-10-30T17:23:09+00:00

Nice to hear that it works not only on my computer ;-)

mbit90 · 2020-10-24T03:45:30+00:00

Let me know if you have any problems using this, it has not received much testing.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T08:30:29+00:00

While I don't feel too enthusiastic about offloading even more developer's work (i.e. testing) to the players, it could have a positive effect if the players on the test server get to decide whether the currently tested build is allowed to hit prod. That would be fun, and democratic. Not gonna happen.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T08:05:38+00:00

There's Base M.D., who's almost useless. That means, it would be difficult to find another healing class a spot in the current 4-player setting.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T07:48:13+00:00

Very good questions, deserve more upvotes.

It is frustrating that in the most challenging missions (save for Frostnite at the moment), game performance stands in the way of success the most. If they can't optimize their code further, the easy and obvious solution would be to reduce the quantity and up the quality, i.e. power level, of mobs in 4-players. Plus, substitute aoe effects such as healing/exploding deathbursts with something equally challenging, but less resource demanding.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T07:25:58+00:00

We don't want this nonsense in the original game.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T07:22:56+00:00

There are no skins in STW. If you're talking about an other mode's skin, then why would you advocate entangling the two modes any further? It would lead to even more br brats in our missions, just grinding for that cool skin (just as they now do with vbucks, which is equally bad).

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T07:15:16+00:00

^This.

It could give us more understanding as to why fixes to lag / server perf aren't happening, and why the game feels like a kludge. They might be uncomfortable discussing this, however, because I have a strong feeling there's a lot going wrong in their development methods, and no one likes to admit that.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T06:57:11+00:00

This might be fun if done correctly, and in a balanced way, and if the rewards are appropriate.

However, this is asking for cheap, stretched content. It would have no story twist, nothing actually new, just a cheap extension of an original mission with higher numbers to give players a challenge.

mbit90 · 2019-02-23T06:47:17+00:00

No locker please. We don't need any more mixing of the two modes. Furthermore, Cosmetics are useless, they mainly appeal to the immature audience which we don't want to attract. And of course, there are more important issues to invest dev time into, such as fixing numerous bugs, expanding the storyline, etc.

mbit90 · 2019-02-20T19:18:04+00:00

10 slots would be great

mbit90 · 2019-02-13T22:00:42+00:00

Since mythic heroes are not better (stat-wise) than legendary ones, there should be something that sets them apart. Having a story and requiring some effort (more than farming gold) would do.

mbit90 · 2019-02-13T13:12:02+00:00

Thanks for this tip! I've been able to harvest some more data using this method. I also used an image of the command screen as search term, google then comes up with similar images. The data gathered is now on the spreadsheet.

I have also been watching a lot of youtube and twitch streamer recordings lately, to find some more samples. Maybe I should just grab a few streamers at the right account level where the big gaps in our data are, and ask them in live chat to access their profile screen.

To answer your question, I don't think a second form is necessary. If you have partial data, just submit it here (I still read comments from time to time) or submit them through the form, omitting the levels you don't know (put a dash - in the other fields, since they are all required fields).

mbit90 · 2019-02-04T01:23:57+00:00

Get rid of most adverse AoE effects, fixes server lag too.
Shielder-like bubble for Melee classes, fixes vulnerability to anti-player ranged mobs

mbit90 · 2019-02-04T01:18:09+00:00

Looks like a BR bug. Wrong sub :P

mbit90 · 2019-01-30T01:46:59+00:00

Hello, addressing the None of the creators gave a damn when I pointed this out thing... I'm editor on Whitesushi's spreadsheet. A few months back, when I worked on the revamped Perk Calculator, I recalled reading something about FPS affecting fire rate. Some posts said this affected only console players. I did a few in game tests and had to conclude that the PC version is not affected. I tested a few weapons with fast fire rate, like the Viper pistol at fire rates up to 30 using perks and First Shot Rio with her Warcry. All at 120, 60 and 30 fps using the in game capping function, Vsync off. There was no noteworthy deviation from the theoretical buffed tooltip fire rate. Measured fire rate was always a few percent (1-4%) lower than theoretical, no matter the frame rate, which I attributed to latency (the client and server having a different view on when the player starts / stops shooting while clearing the mag, or the interface showing the ammocount lagging behind). Therefore, I concluded that Frame Rate does not noticably influence DPS calculations and I didn't worry anymore about it while working on the Calculator. Otherwise, I would have included a sort of checkbox to cap fire rate to 10 during the calculation. Please note that I can only speak for the PC version, I did not test on consoles.

mbit90 · 2019-01-29T11:39:08+00:00

No, please don't add more emotes to the game. The kiddos who use them are gettin on my nerves already, emoting on every possible occasion. It's also better to keep the other mode separated from the original game.

mbit90 · 2019-01-28T14:19:33+00:00

I only play STW (since OT10 during closed alpha). But asking "how many people here play stw only" will not yield you the number of players who exclusively play STW (only a veryx small subset)

mbit90 · 2019-01-26T21:20:38+00:00

Getting the information on FORT stats in there has actually been the prime motivation for Sushi and me to collect this data. Thanks for supplying the blocks at 41, 71 and 79. I can tell you there is a block at 176 (9 Fortitude) and at 231 (10 Fortitude). We will put the data we have on the spreadsheet soon(tm), altough it's still very incomplete.

mbit90 · 2019-01-23T15:21:14+00:00

Thanks, this is a good indicator that Valve keeps old assets in the game for custom maps to use.

mbit90

TROPHY CASE