Magisterium needs fixing

[Oklahoman]

I know it's been said time and again here that Magisterium needs fixing. I also know of at least 2 people who are likely to chime in here saying no changes need to be made, or that changes can't be made because our wonderful devs are simply not that talented, or some other negative thing. And, I also know that anything posted in the Suggestions forum has an extremely slim chance of making it into the game at all. But, here goes anyway...

 

• (This is an LFG problem, but just to highlight what a league leader has to deal with) You form your teams up just like you want them, trying to optimize for which team will attack which AV, zone in, and you've lost the star and/or LFG has swapped teams 2 and 3.
• Mini-Tyrant needs to not exist at all when you go in. Too easy for a griefer to pull him and make everything more difficult than it already is.
• AVs regen tick is a problem when going for Triple Threat. It's semi-unpredictable and a lot of times happens immediately after a kill order has been given. I tell my league we can do everything right and STILL have this essentially come down to a coin flip - it's not fair.
• It would be nice if Nega's shield status was displayed in the AV window, but that's optional. As a league leader, I have a lot to watch for in terms of when to give the kill order, and since I need to be on Chimera to know his TP status I have to rely on the Nega team to tell me his shield status. It would be better if I could just see that myself in the AV window since I can't be in 2 places at once. I can make an educated guess based on what's in the window already - I get that.
• Really should just move the badge award for Triple Threat to right after final AV is dropped, and Ready to Rumble to after Black Swan is taken down. It would give a leader the option to attempt Really Hard Way and not risk losing another badge.
• I'm hearing it's not just me who finds the cutscene to be blurry. I think a change was made a few patches back that messed that up.
• It would be nice if the Quills wouldn't even work unless you were within range, but that's optional. It's just too easy to waste some precious seconds firing it on a column that's already been addressed, but just hasn't faded away yet.
• Mini-Tyrant phase should just be removed... or fix Mini-Tyrant. That's incredibly frustrating to do everything right then run into that little bug.

 

I've been tracking my badge runs this year, and out of 30 Triple Threat runs I've only had 10 successes. That's a serious outlier for me compared to everything else I run.

 

As for the regen tick - which someone is going to chime in here and say is just normal so get over it - I've heard some suggestions:

• Do away with it entirely in this trial only
• Make the regen tick not work once the AV is under 5%
• Have the IDF drop a handful of temp powers that will squelch the AVs regen for X amount of time
• Have an indicator show up a few seconds before they regen, like the Nova Fist warning for Marauder, in this trial only
• Have the amount of the regen amount tied to their remaining health, so if they normally regen 5% have it drop to a 2% regen tick below a certain health level, and 1% below another level
• Give more than 5 seconds between the first and last AV to credit the Triple Threat badge
• Have Luna sell something that prevents an AVs (maybe any AV in the entire game?) regen tick for X amount of time

 

I'm sure there are other ideas, too. I really hope someone is looking at fixing this trial - it's a lot fun, but it can be incredibly frustrating, too.

 

[Rudra]

19 minutes ago, Oklahoman said:

(This is an LFG problem, but just to highlight what a league leader has to deal with) You form your teams up just like you want them, trying to optimize for which team will attack which AV, zone in, and you've lost the star and/or LFG has swapped teams 2 and 3.

That isn't a Magisterium issue. It is a league issue. And yes, it needs to be fixed.

[lemming]

Yea, that whole league thing is messy in so many ways.  I think it would require a bit of an overhaul, but we can dream.

 

Triple Threat stuff:

I like the "Just get rid of the regen tick if they drop below 5%."   You'll still need to make sure your players don't screw it up, so still a challenge.

Awarding badges for completing phases sounds very reasonable. (In more that just Mag)

Mini-Tyrant stuff: yes.  (Though I didn't know he existed anywhere before the shrinky dink bit)

Quill change sounds reasonable

 

And completely not thinking of a change, but "teleport arrow"? 

[Uun]

11 hours ago, Oklahoman said:

Give more than 5 seconds between the first and last AV to credit the Triple Threat badge

Changing this would solve a lot of problems. Brotherly Love badge in Drowning in Blood trial has a 30s window. Cathedral of Pain trial has a 35s window for taking down the 3 resonators.

[Vanden]

Edited Thursday at 08:15 PM by Vanden

[Oklahoman]

On 2/19/2025 at 12:02 AM, lemming said:

Yea, that whole league thing is messy in so many ways.  I think it would require a bit of an overhaul, but we can dream.

 

I know we have a lot of people in our community who aren't devs on the game, but still do coding, and they would probably agree with me - working on someone else's code sucks. It wouldn't surprise me if there are ZERO comments and formatting in that code. 🙂 I wouldn't want to touch it. But for any brave souls who dare go there, you would be a legend in the community if you could make LFG and league forming work perfectly.

 

Those who have been in a BAF run with me have pointed out that when I split the teams up in the escapee phase I specifically say "MY TEAM go north" rather than "TEAM 1 go north" because the star may have wandered AND you get a lot of new 50s in that trial who don't seem to realize they have the star, don't know how to give the star to someone else, and maybe aren't reading chat anyway. The other day I literally had someone drop from the league and ask for a reinvite because they got saddled with the star and couldn't figure out how to give it to anyone else. Not sure why that happens *cough AE cough* but it does.

 

On 2/19/2025 at 9:49 AM, Uun said:

Brotherly Love badge in Drowning in Blood trial has a 30s window. Cathedral of Pain trial has a 35s window for taking down the 3 resonators.

 

Even doubling it to 10 seconds, like it is with BAF, would make a huge difference in the success rate. It's a tougher trial than BAF, with tougher requirements to even join, but still you are taking out 3 AVs instead of 2 - one of which can shield itself and another is TPing between 2 spots AND can TP other members of the league who are not nearby.

[srmalloy]

8 minutes ago, Oklahoman said:

I know we have a lot of people in our community who aren't devs on the game, but still do coding, and they would probably agree with me - working on someone else's code sucks. It wouldn't surprise me if there are ZERO comments and formatting in that code.

Or, worse, pointless comments. I spent a summer during college working for a company that, at the time, made the POS systems for McDonald's, and I remember a section of code that was a three-and-a-half page loop in assembler with the single comment "chunka chunka".

[Oklahoman]

32 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Or, worse, pointless comments. I spent a summer during college working for a company that, at the time, made the POS systems for McDonald's, and I remember a section of code that was a three-and-a-half page loop in assembler with the single comment "chunka chunka".

 

My background is more in scripted stuff rather than compiled, and while my current job is in a completely different field I do a lot of the SQL stuff for our EHR system. There's a comment in there somewhere where I said "I added this for Kevin's client" and it occurs to me that years down the road someone is going to have no clue why that is there.

[srmalloy]

15 minutes ago, Oklahoman said:

My background is more in scripted stuff rather than compiled, and while my current job is in a completely different field I do a lot of the SQL stuff for our EHR system.

SQL at least is readable. I worked IT at a naval hospital and wrote code for CHCS, the MUMPS-based medical information system the DoD was using at the time, and I could tell that the core code was written by at least four different groups of programmers who didn't talk to each other, because of the style differences in the different modules.

 

I remember an old joke about the 'readability' of various languages, measured in how long you can be away from the code and still understand it. BASIC you can come back to after a year and be fairly well able to read the code. With C, three or four months away, and you'll have to work a bit to puzzle it out. FORTH, you can go get a cup of coffee and face an almost unreadable wall of code when you get back.

[lemming]

I'm most comfortable with perl, but in the past I've done a lot of different languages and had to do a lot of code archeology.  Worst was a COBOL system that was moving to another system and I had to figure out the data format of the tapes that were being transferred to a PRIME system from a VMS.

Though I have yet to see a messier code base than the mcafee source in the 90s.

 

I have poked at the code from SCORE to get some insights at time, but it's not the most intuitive, and you can tell they didn't have a style guide.

 

A comment from the league.c

 //    Checking to see if the teamup is ever a bad number o.O (do we use unsigned ints for teamup ids this might be incorrect if we do)