The Players Corner Archive

The time to take the next step has come! As you may know, a period of item adjustment is called for before we progress any further. GameMasters will be making manual adjustments to armor and shields, where it is deemed necessary. Please note that we're not working on weapons yet, just armor and shields. We encourage you at this time to take a LOOK at the STrength and DUrability of your armor, weapons and shields. You can then compare your items' STrength/DUrability with that of what an item of that type/metal "should" have.

Please use the information below to evaluate your items (shields, armor and armor accessories only at this point)to see if they're receiving the proper ST/DU values.

Keep in mind that if your item mentions that a metal embosses, etches, gilds, alloys, hilts, pommels, chases, engraves, encrusts, edges, or studs your item, that does not necessarily mean that the metal value will modify the item, as the metal mentioned is used for decorative purposes, not ST/DU purposes.

Also, if no base metal is mentioned in your item, it's safe to assume it's made of steel (or regular leather, if we're talking about leather armor) - both steel and regular leather have the applicable values as listed in the base item value chart below:

Item.............................STrength.......DUrability

-Armor-
AsG20 some full plate............69.............665
AsG19 some half plate............65.............575
AsG18 an aug. breastplate........65.............505
AsG17 a metal breastplate........60.............475
AsG16 a chain hauberk............59.............495
AsG15 some aug. chain............55.............480
AsG14 some double chain..........55.............450
AsG13 some chain mail............55.............350
AsG12 some brig. armor...........49.............325
AsG11 some studded armor.........45.............285
AsG10 some cuir. leather.........45.............270
AsG9 a leather breastplate.......35.............300
AsG8 some double leather.........35.............290
AsG7 some reinforced leather.....35.............270
AsG6 some full leather...........20.............285
AsG5 some light leather..........10.............250
AsG2 some flowing robes..........10.............230
AsG1 some normal clothing........10.............230

-Armor Accessories-
leather helm.....................30.............200
visored helm.....................40.............290
metal aventail...................45.............300
arm greaves......................25.............185
leg greaves......................25.............200

-Shields-
wooden shield....................45.............155
reinforced shield................45.............165

Once you've found your item's base ST/DU above, if you believe it should have a metal adjuster (i.e. your item is made of a specific metal), adjust the numbers by the modifiers listed here that correspond to the metal type:

1. alexandrite -40/-100
2. bronze -15/-50
3. iron -10/-10
4. leather -10/-50
5. obsidian -15/-50
6. ruby -30/-110
7. modwir -10/-80
8. vultite +15/+40
9. ora +15/+30
10. imflass +20/+40
11. glaes +24/+65
12. mithril +20/+40
13. wood -20/-90
14. steel +0/+0
15. faenor +35/+65
16. black ora +15/+30
17. invar +10/+10
18. rolaren +20/+65
19. golvern +25/+99
20. urnon +80/+200
21. mithglin +20/+50
22. kelyn +15/+55
23. krodera +5/+60
24. urglaes +15/+30
25. drakar +0/+0
26. veil iron +24/+75
27. rhimar +0/+0
28. zorchar +0/+0
29. eahnor +30/+75
30. gornar +0/+0
31. vaalor +10/+30
32. razern +5/+15
33. eonake +20/+55
34. mein +24/+65
35. ironwood +5/+10
36. witchwood -15/-80
37. white ora +15/+30
38. black alloy +0/+0
39. low steel +0/+0
40. gold +0/+0
41. high steel +0/+0
42. coraesine +20/+40
43. veniom +0/+0
44. laje +0/+0
45. white alloy +0/+0

After looking this over, if you believe that your item is not receiving the proper ST/DU values (we expect to see the majority of problems being with items that were altered and had the metal removed from the description), please ASSIST and request that a GM review your item and adjust the values if necessary.

We expect to be reviewing numerous items, and thank you for your patience with any delays in answering your assists and referals. This period of adjustment will last until the demand for single item adjustment dies down appreciably - only then will we move on to the next step of implementation. reg

Announcement: We made an error in our announcement about the method of correction for DU/ST breakage statistics for armor. Until we have compiled a new announcement, we ask that you please do not assist regarding changes to your armor. Those players currently in queue for an assist regarding their armor may remain in queue. You will be referred in case you still qualify for a modification to your armor. However, your referral may not be answered until we have corrected our announcement, which may take more than a few hours. We apologize for our error and thank you for your patience.

-=Insomniac=- reg

Is urnon supposed to be +80/+200? That seems high, even for a rare metal. reg

Now people with normal problems are not going to be able to get help. I been waiting for hours trying to get my problem solved (not breakage) but there has been over 20 people in front of me the whole time.

Plus, nothing makes sense. Why would say. Iron helm will be -10\-10 weaker then a leather helm? How can any leather be stronger then metal?

Oh wait! I know your answer. It's only a fantasy game. Then you don't need breakage to make it more realistic if it's only a fantasy game.

They have wasted countless GM hours on a system that is to big to ever finish. Wasted countless hours of GMs on something the majority of players do not want. Wasted countless hours on something that is not needed.

Oops! See the ball dropping?

Just reset the lands and start over. I would like that better then breaking it more.

edge reg

R
reg

Aerienne reg

The conversion process first began by addressing all items en masse. In an attempt to retain some of advantages that items had, they were modified in relation to the baseline for that type of item. For each type of item a modifier was selected based on the degree of deviation from the baseline. For all items that have outlying values, they were modified to bring them closer in line to the average, yet still retain a degree of their unique value.

When making these corrections we encountered several problems.

All armor is created out of a base armor and a base material. The breakage statistics of both of these are combined to create the final breakage statistic for each piece of armor. The base material is always steel (even for leather armors) unless specified.

Over the years items have been altered to include additional "superficial" materials, to remove the true base material from the name of the item, or additional words have been added which sound like one of our existent materials.

For example:

some ruby red armor
some mithril encrusted armor
some black armor
some ruby red glaes armor
some glaes ruby encrusted armor

When the converter encountered armors such as these (among others) it stood a chance of misreading the correct material of the armor. As a result, some armor has been modified incorrectly either as steel (the default metal) or as an incorrect second material (such as a material listed which was intended to be superficial.)

It is important to understand that long names, shows and descriptions had absolutely no affect on the converter. Only the TRUE name of the armor affected the converter.

The most likely armors to have converted correctly include only one material (the base material for the armor) and are very simple. For example:

some mithril armor
some glaes armor

Armors which include multiple material names, which include references to ruby, or which do not include the name of the base material may be broken.

A detailed list of the problems created by the converter follows:

- All armors that did not include any reference to a material were converted as if they were default (steel.)

- Some armors that DID include a reference to the material but also included the following words may have been incorrectly converted: emboss, etch, gild, alloy, hilt, pommel, chase, engrave, encrust, edged, and stud.

- Some armors that referenced superficial materials in addition to the true material may have been incorrectly converted.

- All armors which referenced superficial materials, but did not reference the true material, were either incorrectly converted as steel or as the superficial material. reg

The first thing every player should do is check to see if their armor, shield and armor accessories (greaves, helms, etc.) are in danger of being broken.

If you are a relatively new player and your armor, shields and accessories do not include any special materials (for instance, if you are using the items that your character was "born" with, or that you purchased from town shops) then you are probably okay and you do not need to assist.

If a friend of yours gave you special armor, or if you are particularly enterprising and could afford to buy armor with special materials or buy an alteration for your armor, it is probably wise to take a careful look at your armor as follows.

More advanced players with special or unique equipment should check the name of their armor, shields and accessories. In order to be sure that you are seeing the correct name (rather than a long name) you should APPRAISE your item. Appraise will now list the true name of your item.

For example:

>You pick up a black shield.
>appraise my shield
>Careful examination indicates that "a glaes shield" has a strength of 69 and a durability of 220. You determine the current state of the glaes shield to be at 100% integrity.

In this instance, the true name of the shield is "a glaes shield" even though it looks like "a black shield."

If your armor includes more than one material, does not include any reference to a material, or references ruby as a superficial decoration, please assist.

IMPORTANT: We will NOT fix armor, shields or accessories simply because the breakage statistics do not perfectly match your EXPECTATION based on the armor type and material type. The only repairs we will be doing are to those armors that were converted incorrectly due to the system errors listed in the previous post titled, 'BREAKAGE: CONVERSION.'

Brauden reg

http://www.play.net/gs3/info/armory/breakagecalc.asp reg

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GemStone III will shortly be 12 years old. There is no equivalent to this in the game world, and there's a reason for that. It's very hard for a game to maintain its integrity over a 12-year span, particularly with some of the history that GS3 has born.

In those twelve years of history GemStone has seen 4 different product managers (which isn't a bad number really, but still has it's affects) and it has also seen Simutronics grow from a small naive group of volunteers serving a small number of wealthy and mature patrons, to a medium sized company with true employees serving a significant number of customers of all varieties.

For these reasons, policies as well as the administrative style have changed over the years.

The basis for armor types and material types was founded in the Rolemaster system. But even in the I.C.E. years it was not uncommon for a GameMaster to execute some amount of creativity when releasing a new material with new properties that were not documented. The early years were like that ... the administration had not yet learned the necessity of consistency and documentation as far as materials were concerned. In those days they were also still learning the necessity of maintaining a realistic view when creating alterations, and they were beginning to understand how important it was to regulate services.

Let me babble about that in more detail.

I chuckled to myself last night when I responded to a post from a player (in this topic) who informed me that his armors name was a silk shirt. It was very alarming to me that this gentleman might be running around with such an item but whats amusing is that when I was a player, my own armor was a a silk shirt and my backup armor was a tunic. Oh how our perceptions change!

I felt much the same as this gentleman in those days: Changing clothes difficult and inconvenient. I wanted to wear something nice that I felt expressed my characters personality. I didnt care that it didnt make sense that a shirt should not be as protective as armor I just chalked it all up to magic. <shrug> Well its a MAGIC shirt.

After oh I guess seven years on the other side of the fence, my perspective has changed. I understand that integrity and consistency is ESSENTIAL when building a game. Ill go into more detail on that later. However, it took me a number of years to get to that point, and this is true of many of our GMs. Why? Because we hire GMs from our customer base. Most of the game staff members are not professional game designers before we take them on. They dont know how to make a good game. What they do know is what THEY thought was fun when they were a player, and they want to give that fun and enjoyment to every player they meet. What takes many GMs some time to understand is how abandoning internal consistency is horribly detrimental in the long term, even if it gives a player a thrill.

So in the early days, our management was still learning those lessons, and they were learning that they had to keep the GMs (whose intentions were good) in check. As the years pass by we become more and more inflexible as far as our policies and requirements and rules are concerned: for two reasons. The first is that we continue to learn the lesson over and over how important game integrity and internal consistency is. The second reason is that over the years so many problems have been created that its required staff to tighten restrictions considerably more than necessary in order to attempt to reverse some of the damage created in the previous 12 years.

So why is internal consistency and integrity so important? Why do we insist on creating systems, rules and policies that arent fun. Wouldnt it be better if we just let everyone have what he or she wanted? In the short term, total flexibility is a great deal more fun. But in order to maintain a real viable game for the long term, its important to set guidelines, rules, and restrictions. Its like hedonism. We could give everyone everything they wanted and everyone would gorge in a massive orgy of happiness and pleasure and fun. But when the immediate thrills were fulfilled there wouldnt be much left. The game would be hollow, empty, and unchallenging. Think about the computer and console games. Over and over again, I hear people say the game is ruined for me as soon as I get the cheat codes I can only play it for another week or so before I loose interest. Heres a truth about humanity. We REQUIRE challenges, and if they do not present themselves we will look for them. When given any challenge we will do whatever we can to bypass the rules in order to obtain our goals. The fastest path to success is what we almost always take first. This is why BUG abuse is so severely punished in the game. Because we recognize it is human nature to abuse bugs, and we MUST set very severe penalties for doing so in order to discourage it as much as possible.

In order for GemStone III to continue to be successful in the long term, we have to play a balancing act. Give the players a taste for what they want and leave them wanting for more. If at any time we satisfy a customer if at any time there is not another thing they want to obtain then they have obtained their goals in GemStone III and they will move on to something else. People call online games addictive and this is one of the primary reasons. GemStone III is a world that plays on human natures unending need to be continually challenged.

Please allow me to apologize for all the detours Im taking. But giving you any less information would be a simplification of the truth.

Ok so back to where I began up until now Ive mostly been talking about armor/materials, the lack of documentation and the lack of consistency in the creation of these items. (Which continues to exist even up to today to a MUCH lesser degree.) Even given the lack of documentation and consistency in materials, the creation of UNINTENTIONAL MISTAKES was not such a terrible problem until the removal of breakage. Generally the inconsistencies up until this point occurred because a GM was being creative, or they wanted to make something super cool for players, etc. Unintentional mistakes in breakage values etc were generally caught because if an item was released en masse to the population and it was incorrect, we would see one of two things happen: Everyone complaining because it was too weak and their items were breaking too fast, or everyone rushing to buy the item because it was way too strong! When unintentional mistakes were released into the game it was EASY to see the problem and take steps to correct it, in MOST cases.

When breakage went away, the mistakes that slipped through had no effect on the player population. Further, as the years passed and breakage became less and less of an issue and GMs became less and less familiar with it, mistakes in breakage values increased. Without the ever present reminder of breakage on hand the staff tended to slip a bit more often, they were out of practice, they were less educated because the system had no relevance, their attention was elsewhere.

Of course, even as this was happening, QC restrictions began to tighten and tighten and tighten somemore - but even as QC tightened, some mistakes were still released. Do you know how many items are created on a monthly basis? Individually, hundreds. But considering duplicates: thousands. At that rate, even with 99% accuracy, youre going to have a large number of mistakes slip out.

About five years ago, I would guess, we began documenting our materials and naming standards. The GMs responsible surveyed the game and tried to determine what materials exist? and also what are their NORMAL statistics? This was not an easy task - those documents have continued to be updated as we found more information. (Even as we neared completion on breakage, and we began to publicly post our statistics, we were informed of errors in our documentation, and were required to make adjustments the materials page on the website has undergone numberous changes since it was published, for example. Those changes are reflected in our staff documentation.)

So that summarizes the mistakes of the past as far as individual items go and how they came about. When we began planning to bring breakage back, these broken items were of primary concern. It would not be possible to go back and manually adjust years and years and years of potentially wrong items. For two reasons: The first is that it would be so work and time intensive that we might never actually get to the point where we could release breakage. The second is an additional factor that I havent mentioned yet: item enhancements.

You see its one thing to take the base armor and add the base material to determine a stat and fix it. However, nothing is never simple in GS3-land. For a decade we had been offering various merchant services to enhance items. Because items were passed around so often. Because over a decade our service records have improved dramatically (they started out pretty shoddy). Because over a decade weve changed hosts many times and we can no longer track the history of a single character all the way back to its beginning. Because so many accounts and characters are gone. Because of all these things, there would be no way for a GM to tell whether an item was incorrect based on its base armor/base material or whether it had been intentionally enhanced.

There would be no way to fix every armor and weapon in the game. Not only did we not have the resources or time, but more importantly we did not have the information to accurately repair every item. In order to do so we would have to be willing to tell every player in the game that there would be no exceptions, no enhancements, no especially strong items sold at special festivals. All that history would have to be erased.

We had to choose between fixing the mistakes we made, and deleting every improvement and enhancement to armor and weapons we ever created.

Our solution was this conversion process. Im not very technically oriented, so Ill put what we did into English for you. We determined the average value that every armor should have based on its material and its armor type. From that average we determined what the acceptable range of the statistics for each armor would be. (For example, we determined how weak was TOO WEAK for a glaes shield, and how strong was TOO STRONG for a glaes shield - including any enhancements or detractions.) Once we determined that acceptable range we attempted to locate all of the items that did NOT fall within this range. Those items that were so broken that they were way too strong or way too weak. Then we multiplied the statistics of these items by a factor that would bring them closer to the acceptable range. What this would do is ensure that any item that was way too super strong would still be the strongest of that type available yet wouldnt be obnoxiously, unreasonably strong.

So you see we have never intended to fix broken items. Let me repeat, that if we were going to fix all of our mistakes, it would require that we delete every improvement and enhancement to armor and weapons we ever created. (And believe me, there are far far more improvements then mistakes out there.)

What we are doing right NOW is fixing the mistakes that the converter made, not mistakes in the weapons and armor themselves. The calculator was intended to help verify a conversion mistake but unless the naming of your item shows that it truly was a conversion mistake, the calculator may simply be showing you that your item was created wrong, or was enhanced/degraded intentionally in the past.

What are we doing to prevent this from happening in the future? Well, remember once again were dealing with 12 years of history here and 12 years of mistakes. Were dealing with 12 years of lessons learned and taken to heart. Almost all measures weve already taken. We have very stringent guidelines in place regarding enhancements. We have documented the properties of all metals and weapons. We have created an extensive QC process which every item, every word, every script, every room must pass through. We have tightened and firmed our alteration guidelines. We have done all of these terribly unfun things to ensure the integrity of the game.

And now were bringing breakage back not only to improve our economy, to reduce inflation but also to provide a new challenge to our customers (loss is an essential part of any game), and also to help us wipe the slate clean. Breakage itself will fix the mistakes of our past by slowly removing them from circulation. reg

>time
Today is Day of the Huntress, day 4 of the month Lormesta in the year 5102. It is 23:35 by the elven time standard.
>queue
>
Assists pending: 1
Premium assists pending: 6
Referrals pending: 47
reg

[This message has been edited by Draack (edited 01-05-2002).] reg

Be mad if you got +27 heavy crit padded hauberk that is now +22 with no records of it being ever registered with the last 8 owners.

Go figure.

edge reg

Draack reg