Puzzled...why?

[Ukase]

They say time heals all wounds. 
And to call this a wound would be, and IS quite over-dramatizing the situation. 

I appreciate everyone's feedback, and respect everyone's right to their opinion even if it's different than mine. It means your wrong, of course, but I'm sure you'll learn the error of your ways in time.  That was a feeble joke, there. It's early. 

I'm sure I'll get over it sooner, than later. 

I have vented properly, and the thread didn't get locked down, (yet), and so far as I know, nobody got banned. I call it a win. 

Now, about that inf cap...can we raise that thing to 100Billion yet? (and that's only half joking. 50 Billion would be just fine, too.)

Edited December 18, 2021 by Ukase

[Ironblade]

Overall, I agree with your point.  My girlfriend and I were able to duo MoITF with less than optimal characters.  No longer possible.  A sad day.

 

 

16 hours ago, Ukase said:

Now, about that inf cap...can we raise that thing to 100Billion yet? (and that's only half joking. 50 Billion would be just fine, too.)

Actually, that would be hard.  That's a math/coding limit.  A long integer value can only go up to 2,147,483,647.

 

Now, Reward and Vanguard Merits are a different story.  They cut off at 10,000.  That means the display can handle 5 digits and it must be stored AT LEAST as an integer value, which can go up to 32,767.  So there's no good reason for it to stop at 10,000.

 

[Glacier Peak]

What a passionate community!

[srmalloy]

On 12/18/2021 at 8:13 PM, Ironblade said:

Actually, that would be hard.  That's a math/coding limit.  A long integer value can only go up to 2,147,483,647.

Bzzzt. There are two versions of long integer -- signed and unsigned. Signed long integers have a range of 2,147,483,647 to -2,147,483,648. An unsigned long integer has a range of 0 to 4,294,967,295. Since you can never have a negative amount of influence, there's no point in keeping the influence total as a signed integer, which allows you to double the maximum influence without doing anything more than changing the definition of the fields for influence from signed to unsigned -- the bit length remains the same. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past the original devs  to have taken a shortcut and hardcoded the database to use signed integers for everything, which would keep this change from working without significant amounts of programming.

[Faultline]

2 hours ago, srmalloy said:

On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past the original devs  to have taken a shortcut and hardcoded the database to use signed integers for everything, which would keep this change from working without significant amounts of programming.

 

The concern is more about pieces of code like if (influence - price >= 0) or if (influence - price < 0) which would all break if influence becomes unsigned int (the first one would always be true, the second would always be false). It's not worth the time to look at everywhere in the codebase that interacts with influence to make sure it doesn't do anything like that instead of the more reasonable if (price > influence) and so influence remains a signed int. Not to mention the possibility that there's an influence = influence - price somewhere that then puts it at 0 if it's negative, and would instead result in the character getting 4 billion inf out of nowhere.

[tidge]

 

2 hours ago, Faultline said:

Not to mention the possibility that there's an influence = influence - price somewhere that then puts it at 0 if it's negative, and would instead result in the character getting 4 billion inf out of nowhere.

 

What you call "nowhere", others call @Yomo Kimyata's pockets.

[A Cat]

Either way, it's not worth it to spend valuable programming resources to just benefit the fat cats of the 1%. We need some Universal Basic Inf (UBI) for all of us poor superheroes just trying to scrape by. We need to occupy AH. Let the voices of the 99% be heard!

[nihilii]

5 hours ago, A Cat said:

Either way, it's not worth it to spend valuable programming resources to just benefit the fat cats of the 1%. We need some Universal Basic Inf (UBI) for all of us poor superheroes just trying to scrape by. We need to occupy AH. Let the voices of the 99% be heard!

 

Alas, the superpowered top hatters have abandoned Wentsworth and trade from the comfort of their private islands with /ah.

 

Re: inf cap, rather than code tweaks with unintended consequences, we could make a "1 billion influence certificate" you could buy for, well, 1 billion influence at your friendly NPC vendor, and sell back for 1 billion influence as well. Stack as many of these as you want, convert back when you need liquid influence.

[tidge]

8 hours ago, A Cat said:

Either way, it's not worth it to spend valuable programming resources to just benefit the fat cats of the 1%. We need some Universal Basic Inf (UBI) for all of us poor superheroes just trying to scrape by. We need to occupy AH. Let the voices of the 99% be heard!

 

"Can I interest you in the exciting world of Day Jobs?"

[Doc_Scorpion]

16 hours ago, nihilii said:

Re: inf cap, rather than code tweaks with unintended consequences, we could make a "1 billion influence certificate" you could buy for, well, 1 billion influence at your friendly NPC vendor, and sell back for 1 billion influence as well. Stack as many of these as you want, convert back when you need liquid influence.

You could do something like that in Ultima Online...  So people would have stacks of checks (certificates) locked down in their houses.   And they still complained they didn't have enough storage, even when you could walk through their house and see checks collectively worth unimaginable amounts stacked everywhere.

It doesn't matter how high you put the cap, eventually you'll have more and more people reaching it and insisting you have to raise it more.  It's a fool's errand.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Doc_Scorpion

[Ironblade]

12 minutes ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

It doesn't matter how high you put the cap, eventually you'll have more and more people reaching it and insisting you have to raise it more.  It's a fool's errand.

So, really, the best course is to just ignore people asking for the inf cap to be raised.  (To be fair, the person who mentioned it said they were half joking.)

 

Once you have a few billion, there's not much point in having more.  As far as I can tell, it's just for the challenge of seeing how much you can accumulate.  Back on live, I had gotten to 56 billion by the time the game shut down.  Nowadays, I don't bother with most of the things I did to get inf.  It no longer seems entertaining (to me).

[The_Warpact]

21 hours ago, A Cat said:

Either way, it's not worth it to spend valuable programming resources to just benefit the fat cats of the 1%. We need some Universal Basic Inf (UBI) for all of us poor superheroes just trying to scrape by. We need to occupy AH. Let the voices of the 99% be heard!

Go to hell hippie and get a job!

[A Cat]

21 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:

Go to hell hippie and get a job!

I'm trying bro, but the commune already has a poet. 

[Doc_Scorpion]

41 minutes ago, Ironblade said:

So, really, the best course is to just ignore people asking for the inf cap to be raised.  (To be fair, the person who mentioned it said they were half joking.)

 

Once you have a few billion, there's not much point in having more.  As far as I can tell, it's just for the challenge of seeing how much you can accumulate.  Back on live, I had gotten to 56 billion by the time the game shut down.  Nowadays, I don't bother with most of the things I did to get inf.  It no longer seems entertaining (to me).

Ignore sounds harsh...  but yeah.  That's what it amounts to.  I know the person said they were half joking, but it's not the first time the topic has come up.  It won't be the last.

And with 1000 slots and 2 billion inf per...  realistically you'd have to be Scrooge McDuck to actually exhaust the inf storage capacity that effectively exists.

[Ukase]

18 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

realistically you'd have to be Scrooge McDuck to actually exhaust the inf storage capacity that effectively exists.

For one, stashing 2B per character is illogical, because then you can't earn any more inf - you're "full". 
For another, Scrooge McDuck would violate Disney's copyright. That would be a no-no. 

But, 1B per character is what I'm doing now. I would do more, but it's impractical to do so because of the way I will sometimes pull inf out of email in billion size chunks. 
And I ran out of room in email. So, I had to make a 4th account, OR, make another character that I would have to log out, then back in to email it, then log out, then back in to access it if needed. Or, I can just log in the 4th account (on a different server, of course) and email it from there.  That seemed easier to me. 

Stashing in AH just makes the inf character bound instead of account bound, so email is a better option at this time. But when you can only carry a billion...you run out of room eventually. 

[Chrono-Bot]

I can't wait to have the same problem. I'm about to break my first 800mil. 

 

Ima hold so many costume contests.