Feedback talk:Joe Kimmes/Archive Apr-Jun 2011

Trying to start programming for real

Hi Joe... I've learned some programming some years ago at school which i loved alot and now on my free time i decided to dedicate some hours to one of my passions programming (and in the future if possible game dev.)... I'm working on C++ and will move to VC++ once i finish it... so i deciced to ask some questions that sometimes popup my head since I'm a GW player... what language you suggest or it's more dedicated to game deving and what version of it you suggest... a more object oriented one live VC++ one like C++ ?! I would like to have your report and i'm sure this kind of questions have been asked to you from time to time (at less i hope :P) Reverser 14:44, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

C++ is an object oriented programming language. Not sure what you mean by VC++. If you're talking about Visual C++, that's not a different language, it's just an IDE produced by microsoft for the development of projects using the C++ language.--TahiriVeila 15:39, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Reverser may be thinking about Managed C++, an extension of C++ for use with .NET. There are significant reasons for wanting to avoid Managed C++ for games, even if you decide to ignore the question of portability to C++ environments other than .NET-on-Windows (or Mono on Linux). The principal objection centres around questions of performance, although it isn't as bad as all that, JIT compilation being what it is. The other problem may be the reduction in the availability of experienced developers, as C# and VB.NET are more common for .NET development. But you're right: C++ is a perfectly good object-oriented language, and perfectly capable of being used for game development. However, it is not unheard-of to use even things like Flash for game development, even for MMORPGs. (Look up "Dofus", a French MMORPG originally built entirely in Flash.)

Reverser: the most important thing to learn is not Programming Language X, but how to think like a programmer, and part of that is developing the ability to learn new languages and technologies without worrying about it. My recent job history involves going from a mostly C++ environment (but on multiple platforms) to a large-scale system written in a mix of C, Fortran, C++, and later on JavaScript, then to yet another platform programmed exclusively in C, but with Python and UNIX shell scripts in the build system. None of this bothered me in the slightest. ((End of preachy lecture, sorry)) Cynique 16:21, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

C++ is the work of Satan. Its wicked ways will turn your project into the great beast Leviathan, and ye shall struggle against it for all your days. Seriously, have you ever seen the Mozilla codebase? And that's just for a browser. I don't even want to think about how huge the base for big games like GW is. The general idea is to stick with a language until you think you "get it," then find something new and completely different so you don't stop learning and get stupid.

On the other hand, I don't actually make games, so maybe I'm wrong. –Jette 16:41, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Pretty sure most modern games are coded in C++ or .NET variations like C#. Could be completely wrong though. I know all of the hooks for GWCA were written in C++ and most of the work i've done with it has been in C++.--TahiriVeila 17:06, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

You have to make the distinction between learning programming just for fun, and learning to be a programmer. The key skill for programmers is adaptability- every company has their own system, so it's more important to be comfortable with picking up new languages and working with other programmers than to be particularly proficient in any one language. If you're not seeking employment as a programmer, though, you can pick and choose your own projects and it becomes much more acceptable to learn how to do things right in just one or two languages and ignore all the rest. I would suggest C++ and Java, personally. elix Omni 18:39, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

The fact that people use java seriously makes me so sadface =( --TahiriVeila 20:06, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Minecraft is java, fool. elix Omni 20:15, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

The fact that one object in a set is good does not imply that all objects in the set are good. Minecraft is a gem, doesn't mean that java isn't shitty.--TahiriVeila 20:33, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

@TahiriVeila, to clear up some things: Visual C++ is a compiler for C++, in fact the compiler one usually uses on Windows. And in fact most of GWCA was written in pure assembler.

That being said, it doesn't matter what language you use, just choose one to start (I would not suggest C++ to start learning) and make something. poke | talk 20:44, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Someone (I think it was Cynique) said earlier than rather to learn how to program, it was far more importantly to learn how to think like a programmer. That is, to think logically. When I was studying, we began learning with Dr. Scheme, a function-based programming language that is right for beginners; you can't create actual applications with it, but boy will it give you basics. I think nowadays it's called Dr. Racket. It was developed by MIT. The learning book was called "How To Design Programs". Truly, a good learning tool. -- Large 20:51, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Right, Visual C++ is an IDE produced by windows for compiling C++ projects. Basically what I said. As far as GWCA goes, all of the packet decryption was done in assembly code of course but all of the source code used to compile the .dll to inject was done in C++ iirc. And what's wrong with learning to code with C++? All of my intro CS courses were taught in either VB.NEt or C++--TahiriVeila 21:01, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

There's also Alice. elix Omni 20:57, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

For me all languages are mostly the same, including programming languages. All have their rules, and getting used to them is a mater of time. Use them enough, and you'll be able to say anything you can possibly say with it. As for Java, all I can say is that if you google "Java sucks" you'll get lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of results, and most of them are rants about how Java sucks, and I'm afraid most of them are right. Personally, I will always prefer compiling native code over virtual machines for anything but small accessory applications. MithTalk 23:56, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Well good to see a lot of people pooping-up but i wasn't as accurate as i should have been... I learned some programming on school some years ago.. i had 1 years o PASCAL, 1 year of VB and one year of C++ so i'm not that noob =P I've opened this post to get some support from Joe but of course everyone is welcome to give their opinion. Points to retain from what we got already
(I'll extend this list as soon as new ones pop-up)...

A Developer must be adaptable.
Apart from personal tastes each language is more dedicated to some kind of issue.
In our days the dotnet .NET languages are more popular as codding environment.

Reverser 10:40, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

I recommend sticking with C++; it's not good for everything and it's got its share of annoying quirks but once you have enough experience with any programming language, the others will be easy to pick up. Make some simple games, even text adventures, and it'll be a good learning experience. - Joe Kimmes 18:38, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Diminishing returns

Hey Joe, I know that you had discussed how the values of the Nightfall treasures diminish over time. I'm wondering if the same is true for other items in the game, such as Gifts of the Traveler or Royal Gifts? Particularly for the first, personally I've noticed that my prizes have gotten worse over time: over the past three months, all I have received (from personally received gifts, not purchased), are low value (sweets, party points), where in the past I've gotten a high value item (my favorite is the EL Cottontail tonic) once a month or so. I've also always been curious as to whether or not gift contents (including birthday gifts) are assigned when the item is generated, or when it is opened, thanks in advance. -- FreedomBound 13:24, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

For the first question, you can look at the GotT research page: several people (including myself) have published multiple times. I've kept track of my own rates and can't see any pattern for 500 opened: I've never seen any of the rarest items, but usually get a weapon or two. Sometimes I get more sweets, sometimes more drink; the percentages are well in line with expected results based on the totals. Short story: no diminishing rates; NF treasure is unique for that.  — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 15:50, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Correct, none of the openable present items have diminishing returns. - Joe Kimmes 20:23, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Joe, that's the answer I was hoping for. Any insight on the second part (if the contents are assigned when the item is generated, or when it is opened)? -- FreedomBound 21:55, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Birthday presents are decided when the item is created; anything else is randomized on opening. - Joe Kimmes 22:10, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Is there any practical difference at all? There shouldn't be a way to figure out what a present has inside anyway. Unless there is? You don't have to tell me or anything, I'm just curious. If I put two presents side by side and start screwing around with cheatengine or some other good craziness, is there going to be a way for me to figure out what's in that box, or at least conclusively determine that two given minis aren't the same? I understand your job prevents you from giving me a straight answer, so I'll tell you what: blink twice if there's a way to see in the box without opening. –Jette 00:06, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Probably no practical difference, and I have no idea why, but it was just one of those things that I wanted to know. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity, Joe. -- FreedomBound 00:47, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Jette; several years ago we figured out how to break the game by stacking attribute bonuses until we could cast a spell at attribute 21, which crashed the instance after several seconds. We used that to check what minipets were before opening (as opening them in the crashing area put them back in their box when we rebooted the client), and sold them as unopened if it was shitty.

I think they fixed that attribute thing years ago, though. -Auron 01:18, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

I remember that. Blowing up instances was fun. Now I think they cap it at 20 plus one from an item with a +1/20% bonus, which doesn't break anything. –Jette 02:14, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Hidden treasure (revisited)

see also: last convo re: LoD/treasures

You mentioned you were still interested in hearing about bugs with Light of Deldrimor and Hidden Treasures. I found another borked one in Sepulchre of Dragrimmar on L2, just left of the incoming portal. (See map)

• Two players.
• Both fully zoned before casting LoD. (Both went to nearby Beacon beforehand, just to be sure.)
• Light was clearly visible right up until second casting.
• No treasure spawned.

On a related note: would it be helpful if I gathered all the LoD bugs reported on the wiki into a single page someplace? Or is it better to keep posting occasionally here? (Or: how would you prefer to learn about 'em?) — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 05:17, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the report; I'm going to try some checks with this specific treasure and see if I can reproduce the bug. - Joe Kimmes 23:16, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Cool. Thanks for checking. — Tennessee Ernie Ford (TEF) 00:23, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Do certain trophies from Nightmare/UW/FoW Cretures have low chance to be ecto?

I have the very old Prima Guide and me,Tennessee, and Manifold are mulling over it trying to see if any beta and release elements/Mechanics still exist to this day in GW, and it brought up the question about "Remains" of any type becoming Ectoplasm if enough are expert salvaged? We expect it to fall in line of other rare materials from more modern items say, about one for every 50-100? Can you confirm or deny this?Yumiko ^,~ 18:07, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Many people have been recycling those to get dust for ages. If they were to contain ectoplasm, we would know already. MithTalk 23:27, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Fort Aspenwood

You mentioned in an archive that the turtle bug is difficult to fix. Is anyone at ArenaNet doing anything about the arena at all or have you thrown in the towel? If you can't fix the turtles could you at least remove them and give Luxon players some other mechanic that actually does work? If it can't be fixed, replace it with something else. 122.111.164.160 04:30, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

The live team has discussed the possibility of changing the Aspenwood mechanics to mitigate/remove the Turtle Issue. The problem is that adding a new mechanic is not a guaranteed fix; it could break worse than the turtles. - Joe Kimmes 17:20, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for responding. Does that mean you are not going to try a new mechanic? Should we just accept that the turtles are broken and they won't be fixed (because of difficulty - I know ArenaNet has tried, the number of changes over the years have made them worse in many ways while fixing some problems) or is there an intention to try something new at some point in the future? I understand it's difficult and there are no guarantees, what I'd like to know is if the Live Team is going to try anything else in FA? 122.111.164.160 06:16, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to speak decisively here, but the simple truth is that I don't know when scheduling will permit giving Aspenwood the time it needs. Even if I spent a week and fixed the turtles, it would still take a lot of testing to verify that it was fixed and new problems weren't introduced.

This said, I want to make at least one more concerted attempt to fix the existing turtle mechanics before overhauling them entirely. Even if it means rebuilding the turtle AI from the ground up, it's less risky than a new mechanic. - Joe Kimmes 18:35, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

How's the AI work in this game, anyway? More importantly, if you do end up re-writing everything, maybe take a look at the Carrier Defense mechanism too. I understand the importance of it in arenas like the Jade Quarry, but at FA they use it like a human would rather than an AI should, which means they'll spam it anytime a melee character attacks them, rather than only when they're stuck. That'd be okay if it was just an annoying teleport, but it also causes 100 armor-ignoring damage. –Jette 21:27, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree, Carrier Defense would need a look too. - Joe Kimmes 22:32, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

How about the possibility of having the code that checks for the death/respawn of the turtles also check whether or not the turtles have moved, if they haven't have them shadow step 2 steps forward on their path. On the other major issue, if a turtle attempts to attack and gets 'obstructed' it should not attempt to do another attack until after it moves a certain distance to that player. This will prevent people standing on the upper battlements for the first 1/3 of the battle to prevent the turtles from moving. --70.117.27.227 17:51, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

While that's a good suggestion, I think they'd be fine looking into it and figuring it out with is going on as they know the codes better. :-) So, It's not really prudent to suggest things like this that we don't know that much about. I feel they'll do something to get it fixed, when they have the time. Kaisha 17:55, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

If we're talking about the "stand here and stall turtle forever" bug, a friend of mine proposed a simple and elegant selection:

Make Turtle Siege non-projectile. This way, they can counter stalling by blowing people up. This change won't make much difference in actual play because 90% of Sieges in real games are directed at gates, and the NPCs don't move.

If we're talking about a different bug, nevermind! — Raine Valen 23:25, 16 Jun 2011 (UTC)

It's not so much a bug when they're stalled, although that's one of the issues brought up. The more major issue and actual bug is that sometimes they simply stop moving even when nothing is in range (sometimes when a gate is closed on them iirc) and never move again. Still, I like your idea. --ஸ Kyoshi 23:29, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

If we're talking about hypothetical non-bug-fixes, I'd say rework the entire turtle mechanic. The current way is absurd; Kurzicks get gates that absolutely cannot be breached unless something dies, but also can't use any real sort of enchantment-based builds because they get stripped in a bigger-than-earshot radius every 15 seconds along with an average of 180 damage to the entire team. The games are almost always ridiculously one-sided, and which side it's grossly balanced towards depends a whole lot less on how good someone is and a whole lot more about the number of monks on the blue team vs. the number of savannah heat mesmers on the red team, as well as whether or not there's some jagoff with the PvP version of Shadow Form (which retains the old function, the one about invincibility without damage reduction) that can blow up stuff with total impunity. I'd say get rid of siege damage and make the turtles the only critters that can crash gates. I dunno how exactly that would work, but tell Jimmy to work it out. Delegate.

I don't even like the format, myself, but it's the only thing one of my friends ever wants to play because he has a bubble-bath ego, and avoiding formats where there's no-one to blame but yourself is his Freudian defense mechanism against confronting his own shortcomings. By which I mean his penis. –Jette 00:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Question for Development team

Hello Sir, I have been a Guild Wars player for almost 5 years now. I recently took a break from the game to try my hand at Aion and Rift. Being displeased with both games decided that I would come back to Guild wars. To my dismay my account was accessed by gold sellers. After going through all of the proper steps to get my account unlocked and logged back in it was very apparent that my account was hacked. With 5 years of time getting the equipment I worked hard for it was gone in just a few minutes. As of now all i have are PvP characters to play, all of my PvE characters are naked and stripped of everything: Armor, weapons, mini pets. The thing that really made me the most upset is the person that hacked my account changed my screen UI and left my trimmed guild and deleted everyone off of my friends list, they took and did everything they could to make sure they ruined my Guild Wars experience. After talking with numerous GM's over the past 4 months now there has been no progress made. I wanted to know if it was possible to restore my equipment I once had. With screenshots, hall of monuments and my checklist I have everything I once had down to the color. Also being disappointed, every GM I have talked to in the past 4 months has given me the same answer: My items just cannot be restored. But one GM told me to try and contact the Development team, which is what lead me here. I know I am not alone with this request and I know being a long time Guild wars player, that if you as a team develop a way to restore items lost due to accounts being hacked that you will get a lot of the back-in-the-day players to come back. My request is simple, create a way to restore items lost from being accessed by gold sellers, or a way to compensate for the items lost. Having nothing on all of my PvE characters I cannot play them, so my way of making money is stopped, its a vicious cycle. Like i said before, I'm not the only one whose account has gotten hacked and lost 5 years worth of time and effort into making their characters look the way they want. And to have it all stripped away from them is very disheartening and discouraging. I hope my message and plea gets heard and something can be done.

Don't stop the good work,

--Sirsmashface 05:50, 8 June 2011 (UTC) (IGN: I Xenia Onatopp I)

P.S. If it makes a difference i'd gladly make donations to get the ball rolling on developing a way to restore items.

This has been asked several times, So I feel comfortable responding; Its not that the dev teams wont restore your lost items, its that they cant. Unlike a few more popular MMO's, There is no GM function to give items to people. Unfortunately, Your items have all been lost and there is no getting them back.
Were I you, I would view it as a reason to start playing again, getting all your stuff back. A goal if you will. --BriarThe Spider 06:29, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

There's also no method of simply "rolling" back an account - if I recall correctly, rollbacks are done on a server basis, which means they're almost never done. Of course, that's a rather insensitive sentiment, Briar. This guy is basically saying "hey, I got completely screwed over and it would be cool if you could do something to fix it", and you're responding (more or less) with "there's nothing anyone can do. Tough it out, and work back the five years of progress you've lost in the next six months."

That in itself really isn't a reasonable suggestion, I'm afraid. I can only imagine how devastating it must be to one day login and see that absolutely everything you had was gone. Fortunately, I'm reading as if the player's achievements were already recorded in the Hall of Monuments, but this also effectively inhibits any further progress in terms of HoM points.

Actually, I was going to offer some sort of gift, but I realize that my account doesn't actually possess anything of material value at this point, and it probably won't for quite a few weeks from now.

At any rate, I'm sincerely sorry for what happened, but the reality has pretty much already been stated to you - "There's nothing we can do to help you."

I'd hope that a system would be put in place in Guild Wars 2 so things like this don't ever happen again, but I guess only time will tell. Ryuu  *bite* 06:49, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

I've said it before and I'll say it again, someone should really implement a change-based account transaction tracking system. It's possible to make arbitrarily complex and exclusive rollbacks across many different accounts without affecting anyone who wasn't involved in the scandal.

Then again, people could just stop using four-letter passwords and giving out their information on porn sites. –Jette 13:57, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

The OP should also consider himself lucky the thieves only wanted the items and such, and left the original password alone so he could log in again. Cynique 14:40, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

As stated by the other responses, we simply don't have the technology to roll back accounts on anything but a server-wide basis. - Joe Kimmes 17:27, 8 June 2011 (UTC)