Asherons Call: A Halloween Style Grab Bag of Dev Q & A (Part 2 of 2)

Question: illusion24 - ATTN SEAN: Serious graphics bug that has driven me NUTS! This point is: beds. Beds in AC are criminally attrocious. 1) They're *disgusting.* Have you looked at a bed lately? If not, I recommend it. As you will notice, your top sheet is covered in various shades of grey grime. Now I realize that in AC we have a relatively primative, middle ages society, but if we're advanced enough to have indoor plumbing in our meeting halls, then dammit all, we should be advanced enough to wash our bedsheets! 2) (This is my big big BIG point) BEDS DEFY THE LAWS OF LOGIC BY PROTRUDING INTO THE WALLS OF HOUSES. The parallax error I get while walking around a bed in a cottage/villa/whatever makes me dizzy. I get so confused about reality that I start trying to put my real-life furniture into the walls. But guess what: it doesn't work BECAUSE IN REALITY 2 OBJECTS CANNOT INHABIT THE SAME EXACT SPACE AT THE SAME EXACT TIME! Sean, I implore you: save the physical integrity of our universe. Pull our beds out of the walls. Before I am driven to madness. And for the love of all that soft and furry, please clean our bedsheets!
Answer: Sean_Huxter - It's actually impossible to remove the bed from the wall, because all floor hooks are the same. ie: I can put floor hooks on the floor of any room in hopes MOST things look right. SOME things, however, are intended to go on certain hooks, and will not look good on others. That's something we can't get around. I can't place all floor hooks just so the bed looks right, because then the desk and chairs won't look right, etc. etc. etc... So use whichever hook makes the bed look best for you.

Question: -Zoth- - Mage crits up?
Answer: srand - Clarification: The rate of magic crits was not increased this month. This was mentioned as an adjunct to the Life Magic tweaks, and of those tweaks, only the mana C changes were in October. (In the future, remind me not to release info about future plans right before an update. It just confuses people.)

Question: Zestryl - Srand, How hard would it be to code two new spells? After hunting the new Golems with a fellow consisting of two mages, an Archer (wow, when he joined they fell like rain) and an Axer, I think we need a new Monster Only Spell. As one of the mages, I am used to getting debuffed. Baffled, Feebleminded, Weakness, and Slowed. I am also used to being inepted, Life, War, now Critter. But I have never seen a monster inept a Meleer or Archer with the appropriate inept. It was said that this was due to the inability of the AI to know what it was getting hit with.
Answer: srand - I believe that this would require a significant, although not impossible, amount of coding. Right now, there are two ways we can set a spell -- to affect one skill/attribute/secondary attribute, or to affect all skills/attributes/secondary attributes. (That is, there are spells that affect all your attributes, but none that affect both quickness and coordination but not the other attributes.) Spells only have space for one skill/attribute/secondary attribute name, and the "all X" flag is specially coded. So there would be some underlying systems changes that would need to be made to grant spells the power you are asking for.

Question: hungwell - Attn Devs: Tinker request. Please make velvet and oak unusable on missile weapons. Iron gives you a message that you cant use in on them. Please make velvet and oak do the same.
Answer: srand - You already can't use velvet on missile weapons. You get the targeting indicator -- because I don't have fine enough granularity of item types on the client to avoid it -- but the material will not actually be applied to the missile weapon. When you try, you get a message like: "You can't apply Salvaged Velvet to the Ivory Yumi!" Oak, on the other hand, is perfectly valid for use on missile weapons.

Question: Cuttlery - Is there a way to get ahold of a Admin or Dev besides urgent assistance? I have a very very very odd problem happening with one of my accounts. I tried Urgent assistance multiple times the last 2 days but never get an answer, and I think this is something the devs would want to know about.
Answer: srand - First, to answer the question you asked:
- If you need urgent assistant right this instant in the game, use urgent assistance.
- If you need to report a bug or oddity, use the bug page at: bugs.zone.com.
- If you have a question about a possible bug or oddity, you are welcome to PM me here and I will try to answer. I cannot give you in-game assistance, and I expect that you will report any bugs you ask me about on the bug page as well.

Now, to the odd behavior you saw: I didn't think that what you described was at all possible, but a short conversation with the server team taught me that it can technically happen in just the right situation. There is no danger to either of your characters, and you can probably fix it by moving to an area of the world handled by a different subserver. And lastly: You say that you had a character stuck on WE. Could you tell me when this happened, and the exact circumstances surrounding the incident? Is the character still stuck? I've just checked, and WE is currently doing just fine, but as you might imagine we are keeping a close eye out for the symptoms we saw before the last hotfix.

Question: Turin-Turambar - Confused Greatly About Critical Hits And Critical Blow. I was in an OHN today burning up some SIKs (PLZ make SIKs stack). My axe skill was at 397 and using a CB Hammer with a damage of 29.15-53 at +25% attack. I was not imperiling anything and was at the SIK chest so was fighting only Soldiers and there were no variations in my skills since no magic was in play. With swings always at the lowest power setting I had crits on Soldiers ranging from a low of 130, to a mid range of 150, to a high of 184. I had understood CB added a fixed multiplier (based on skill) to the max crit damage but this does not seem to be the case.

PS: I was always swinging low - if that makes a difference.
Answer: srand - Actually, Olthoi soldiers have 4 different inherent armor levels spread over 5 different body parts. Three of those you can hit when swinging low. So I expect that this is the effect you were seeing.

Question: Masahara - Questions from someone who's been awol for months
Answer: srand - There is no such bug. What dug is refering to is an inherent part of the tinkering system design. Basically, the total you salvage from one Usting is calculated as a real number (the total in the Ust * the percentage you can salvage based on your skill). This is then turned into a whole number by always rounding up (ceiling'd, if you prefer) so that you can never salvage 0 no matter how low your skill. But this means that salvaging 10 items one at a time will usually return more total salvage than salvaging those 10 items all at once (unless your skill is high enough to get a total return). So if you are extremely concerned about eking out every last drop of salvage, you will probably want to salvage each item separately.

Question: Sigma Omega - Why aren't there more dyes for this? Would it be that hard to put codes in for a black dye?
Answer: Sean - Art-wise no, it would not be difficult to add more dyes for the Shadow armor. However, it requires a Content Designer to take it on as a project and see it through. This would be part of that Designer's monthly content. During this interesting time in AC where many new features are being added by some very good programmers, we are much more inclined to add content that uses those new features than to go back over old content and add to that. Unlike adding more general dyes, which would be a collossal effort touching EVERY piece of clothing art in the game, adding dyes that affect only the GSA would be quite easy. If a Content Designer sees it as something he or she would like to do for that month, it may get done.