Air burst conversion

[Yomo Kimyata]

Every IO has a level, even an attuned one.  However, the attuned IO has a *random* level assigned that (as far as I know) is invisible to the player's eye.  And I *believe* that every time it gets converted it is reassigned a new random level in the range.

 

So if you try to convert an attuned Air Burst by category: targeted AoE and it fails, that is because it is in the 10-19 range.  If you convert it by uncommon and you get, say, a Quickfoot, you know a. that the old level was somewhere from 15-19 and b. that the new level is somewhere from 15-50.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Yomo Kimyata

[Bionic_Flea]

Good guess, but no.  An attuned air burst is always 10-50.  It will never convert to any other Targeted AoE regardless of how many tries.

 

Again, I don't think this is broken or needs fixing, but if it's going to be changed, don't forget Exploit Weakness in Snipes and any others there might be.

 

However, when you convert an attuned Air Burst it by rarity you might get an IO that has a different range and therefore a chance at a better conversion.

Edited March 24, 2021 by Bionic_Flea

[Yomo Kimyata]

Hmm, that's what I was told by a GM here on the forums, I'll have to try to track that down.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Sure enough, I should have tested it myself.  Just bought ten attuned Air Bursts:  no option on any of them to convert by category.  then bought ten attuned Detonation, converted each by category until Air Burst, at which point the convert by category option disappears.  Serves me right for listening to someone else!

[UberGuy]

The levels weren't random, but they used to be something like it.

 

At sunset, there was only one way to get an attuned IO - buy it from the Paragon Market. If I recall correctly all attuned IOs obtained this way had a hidden "internal" level equal to the set's minimum level.

 

After sunset, because there was no more Paragon Market and thus no way to obtain attuned set , the SCoRE team added using Catalysts to turn crafted set pieces into attuned ones. This method created attuned pieces whose internal level was equal to the level of the original crafted IO.

 

This caused strange things on the Auction House. Every attuned IO with a different internal level was treated by the auction house as a distinct item. Yet no matter which one you bought, they would all act the same way when slotted. So this was simplified with a code change so that converted attuned-Os were always their own minimum level (like the ones that came from the old Paragon Market). I want to say the auction house code was updated to enforce that same level change on any attuned-Os dropped in it as a way to avoid the need to bulk update inventories. So now they're always the same (minimum) level.

[Bionic_Flea]

This still exists if you look at Overwhelming Force in the /AH.  Multiple levels of an Attuned piece.

[UberGuy]

I wonder if that was an oversight, or what.

[Yomo Kimyata]

I wanted to post this from @GM Sijin from a while back -- sounds like it was incorrect or an oversight?

 

 

[Bionic_Flea]

Never trust a potoo bird or a retied GM . . .

[UberGuy]

I'm not sure that's correct. The code doesn't seem to support it. (I'm looking at 2019 code, but I don't think this has changed.) Base on what I see, when looking for sets to convert to, the target level for conversion is the same as the input enhancement level.

 

I think what should probably happen here is either:

• The minimum levels for the RAoE sets need to be normalized. Either Air Burst needs to rise to 20 or the others need to come down to 10.
• The logic for finding valid conversions needs check for sets that have any overlapping available level ranges, and not just "other sets that exist only at this level".  Only if no sets exist at the current level would the conversion resort to finding mutually overlapping sets, and it would convert to their lowest level.

I think the 2nd option is complicated and may have edge cases or implications that are easy to overlook. I think changing the low-end level of the RAoE sets is the simpler, safer option, and of the two ways to do it, bringing the other RAoE sets down to level 10 is probably the least disruptive. We don't generally generate a lot of drops in the level 10-19 range.

 

If this was just about being able to convert a dropped Air Burst to some other set, I wouldn't even think this was worth fixing, but the fact that any attuned (non-PvP/VR) RAoE set can dead end by being converted to an Air Burst makes this a problem worth fixing, IMO.

 

By the way, looking at the code also confirms that a conversion of an attuned enhancement always creates an enhancement at the minimum level of the (new) set. So all the other RAoE sets can be converted to an Air Burst, but the Air Burst can never be converted back.

Edited April 6, 2021 by UberGuy

[Arbegla]

Would changing the attuned from a minimum to an average help be a temp fix?

[UberGuy]

That wouldn't affect existing enhancements, and updating them would require database surgery during server downtime. IMO that makes it a harder change and therefore not so helpful as a "temporary" solution. Changing the available level ranges of the enhancements/recipes is just an off-line code + data change that could go out with a new release.

 

Edit: Thinking about it, I guess that doesn't matter. Existing stuff would just change to the new target on conversion and be fine from there. In that case though, I'd probably just go for the max level instead of the average.

Edited April 6, 2021 by UberGuy

[Arbegla]

7 minutes ago, UberGuy said:

That wouldn't affect existing enhancements, and updating them would require database surgery during server downtime. IMO that makes it a harder change and therefore not so helpful as a "temporary" solution. Changing the available level ranges of the enhancements/recipes is just an off-line code + data change that could go out with a new release.

 

That makes sense, I wasn't sure how the existing enhancements would be affected. Changing the level ranges seems like the best fix, and it gives more options for frankenslotting for lowbies.

[ZekeStenzland]

I think there’s two different things going on. 
 

First, I think the rules for whether “by category” shows up in the ui at all is whether there are any legal conversions at the enhancement’s level if it has one, or at the set’s lowest level if it’s attuned. This explains Air Burst and Exploit Weakness. It should probably check against the set’s entire range for attuned enhancements. 
 

Second, the rules for converting an attuned enhancement is to choose a random level at the time of conversion and try the conversion. This explains why you can eventually convert a Siphon Insight to a Cloud Senses if you try the conversion enough times. 
 

 

[MTeague]

As a programmer, I believe this is the kind of code you try to say "Functioning As Written" and hope one looks toooo closely at that statement. 

 

I don't think it's wrong per se. I do think it's deciding on a "level to be used for conversion purposes". And then since there's no others in that category for that range, you can't convert by category.  The real questions are "what SHOULD be the use-this-for-conversion-purposes" level of an attuned?  And is this so big a deal that it's worth upsetting it now?  Say a change is made such that it always takes the max level for an IO.  What OTHER set conversions would be impacted by that?  Would we replace one problem with another? Or if it were recoded to encompass anything possible anywhere in the attuned range of the current set, what issues might that cause?  Would that mean you suddenly need 5x the converters you needed before to get a Steadfast Protection+Def, or a Karma/+Acc?  

 

I'm sort of leaning toward "not worth it, leave it as it is."

 

Although it would definitely be nice if there was some way you could SEE what the "treat this as lvl X for conversion purposes" value is, at any given moment.

Maybe it would be enough to just reveal that value to the end-user.

[UberGuy]

A more sane implementation, IMO, would look at what sets overlap the level range of the original enhancement's set, and let any of those be possible targets.

 

Without checking, I suspect that would make the conversion lists larger in several cases. That's great for fixing a case like the one in the OP. It's not so great though if it makes it harder (read: less likely) to get from one set to a specific other set though conversions, though.

 

I rarely attune things. I mostly do so with globals like LotGs. I don't go playing lowbie TFs on +4 or anything, and rarely care to solo them. And while I do solo Ouro arcs for badges and such, I rarely feel the need to crank their difficulty. So I really just don't need all my set bonuses to follow me down to low levels. The point of explaining that is that I have probably never converted an attuned IO. I create or buy exactly what I want attuned and then never change it other than perhaps to move it to a different character.

 

And even absent this problem, I don't think I would ever want to convert attuned IOs. With crafted IOs, you get only sets that exist at exactly the level you started with. That allows a lot more control of the output in at least a few really useful conversion cases. (Defense, for example.)

 

Personally I'd like to see this fixed or improved in some way. (Having a random chance that it offers you an overlapping set sucks.) But I do think any solution is probably going to have some side effects.

[srmalloy]

16 minutes ago, MTeague said:

The real questions are "what SHOULD be the use-this-for-conversion-purposes" level of an attuned?

Ideally, the code would look at the set's level range and the conversion type, and make a list of all appropriate sets that overlapped the level range -- essentially giving the conversion the same 'any level' possibility that putting an IO into the AH does. So if you had an attuned IO in a 10-30 set, it could convert into other 10-30 sets, 20-50 sets, or 30-50 sets, as long as they matched the type of conversion (i.e., category or rarity).

[Bionic_Flea]

I would not like attuneds to be changed to any overlapping within a category.  I'm with MTeague - its not broken and its a pretty obscure "problem".

[UberGuy]

There's a (harder to implement) fix that would not break any other conversions. When converting an attuned version of a standard IO, you get a slider to let you pick the level you want the conversion to happen at, with its limits defined by the valid range for the current IO's set. So if converting an Air Burst, you could choose any level from 10-50. When converting a Miracle, you'd be offered 20-40. The dropdown would only off you "category" conversions if you chose a level with valid overlap with other sets in that category.

 

Logic to achieve this in the actual conversion function (boostset_Convert()) would not be very hard to write. The hard part would be adding the slider. UI changes in CoH are apparently the stuff of nightmare.

Edited April 30, 2021 by UberGuy

[Bionic_Flea]

Where are you seeing a level slider at the conversion UI?  Or are you saying that is the fix -- add the slider?

[UberGuy]

Yes. Adding a slider would be a fix to the current behavior that wouldn't break anyone's desired conversion set ... what's a good word? Spans? It might open up some new ways to control what you get that didn't exist before for attuned stuff, but I truly doubt that's a big deal.

Edited April 30, 2021 by UberGuy

[ZekeStenzland]

As far as I could tell, there's only the 6 sets currently affected by this issue. Other sets either had multiple options at the lowest level or had no overlap between high and low level sets Knockback (1-20, 21-50).

 

I suspect there's also a more trivial way to work around this: just add another 1-30 IO set to affected sets. Then the UI will allow "by category" conversions, and the existing code will (i imagine) occasionally convert to the higher level set.

[Myrmidon]

On 3/24/2021 at 7:55 AM, UberGuy said:

How best to fix it is less clear.

I say we take off and nuke the Air Burst set from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

[UberGuy]

12 hours ago, ZekeStenzland said:

As far as I could tell, there's only the 6 sets currently affected by this issue. Other sets either had multiple options at the lowest level or had no overlap between high and low level sets Knockback (1-20, 21-50).

 

I suspect there's also a more trivial way to work around this: just add another 1-30 IO set to affected sets. Then the UI will allow "by category" conversions, and the existing code will (i imagine) occasionally convert to the higher level set.

 

The really more trivial ways are to extend or contract sets bottom ranges so they match. Honestly, this is the most "harmless" option in my opinion, because I doubt that, outside of the special rules for converting Attuned IOs, that anyone cares about level 10-20 Positron's Blast or the like.

[LQT]

Still not working. Decided to check some attuned tAoEs I have for conversion purposes and out of 10 Detonation conversions I ended up with 5 Air Burst, 2 Posi, 2 Anni, and 1 Bombardment IOs. So that's 50% of the IOs unable to continue converting by category and now relying on RNG to land elsewhere on the table of flipping results.