Good vs bad engineering

Good:

if (already_reset) {
    say "sorry, you've already reset before";
    exit;
}
if (have_cart || weight > 0 ...) {
    say "i can't reset your skills if you have a falcon, cart, ...";
    exit;
}

Bad:

if (have_cart || weight > 0 ...) {
    say "i can't reset your skills if you have a falcon, cart, ...";
    exit;
}
if (already_reset) {
    say "sorry, you've already reset before. i hope you enjoyed "
        "putting everything into storage and npcing all your mercenary "
        "scrolls as much as you're going to enjoy spending the next ten "
        "minutes getting your cart back and trying to remember exactly "
        "which and how many of each item you had--all for NOTHING."
        "oh, and have fun doing this 50 more times!";
    exit;
}
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Yggdrasil WoE, part 2

So I lied; I’ve been logging Yggdrasil WoE all along–until today, that is, when I completely forgot. I guess I won’t be doing that anymore.

Posted in castle status | 1 Comment

Genetic leveling

I noticed something interesting while leveling a few genetics this week: the combination of cart boost speed, longer than normal skill range, and one-shotting makes it really, really hard not to accidentally KS people. Seriously.

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The time I got banned for “botting”

May 2008

There was a double exp event. I was soloing a high priest at anubises with TU using borrowed gear. Some details of my setup: I had my mouse’s “back” button bound to the “enter, enter, f9″ key sequence and the “forward” button bound to “down, down, enter, enter.” Continue reading

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Upgrade calcs “fixed”

I guess the upgrade calculators haven’t been working for anyone else during the past three weeks or so, since they were sourcing jQuery from a path that I’d made private. It’s a shame no one reported it, so I only realized this during an epiphany on the way home today. Sigh…

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Branches still abusable

Last month I decided to humor the GMs by reporting a mostly harmless bug. I reported it in public because I believe in transparency and because I didn’t want them just to ignore me or pretend the “bug” didn’t exist as they’ve done in the past. (This is why I stopped reporting bugs.)

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Potting

Not that anyone cares (or reads this at all), but I’ll probably start potting again in … let’s say two weeks.

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Yggdrasil WoE

I don’t currently have the resources to log WoE on Yggdrasil. If someone would like to do that and send me the logs, then I’ll set up a site for it. Otherwise, there’s nothing I can do.

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Live updates

Sometime during the next few weeks I will be modifying the castle status sites so that the Overview and Timeline pages update in real time. (Stats will still be delayed for the time being.) This will require some major under-the-hood changes, but I think it’s long overdue…

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A strategy for ranged MVPs

Here’s a strategy I developed years ago for countering some ranged (attack range > 1) bosses, although we didn’t start using it extensively until late 2009. Several others have (probably independently) rediscovered it, and I won’t even claim to be the first since it “emerge[s] from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.” In other words, anyone giving it some attention would have been able to figure it out. However if you’ve never seen this before it’s still something to think about.

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