Featured Wynncraftian Featured Wynncraftian S4e3 - Motoki1

FEATURED WYNNCRAFTIAN
Season 4, Episode 3:
Motoki1


Hosted by @Pretzule and their lovely assistant, @Pretzule

Greetings one and all to the third interview of Featured Wynncraftian! For anyone that has no clue what in the world I'm rambling about, let me explain it a lil bit. Basically, we feature people from the community that have done something that I can ask questions about or are pretty cool and have something to feature, doesn't always have to be a popular member, just as long as I can ask them about things that make them unique.
If you think you know someone that might be good to be interviewed or is crazy interesting or someone that is a standout member of the community feel free to suggest them here seriously please suggest some, I really can't find them all on my own, and it never hurts to suggest people.

Alright, so sorry again about the wait for Featured Wynncraftian, I was in Florida partying with the alligators, should be back on track now!

For this third interview, I am interviewing someone that, I am hoping, most of you know about due to his work in damage calculation, translation projects, and guild XP charts...

It is none other than @motoki1 and he was suggested by, @King Kaelan, thank you for suggesting him!

Welp, enough rambling, time to get to the meat of this interview!​

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What caused you to take an interest in the inner workings of Wynncraft, such as damage calculation?

During year 2016, I've had so many gameplay experiences with the community. All those glitches involving damage calculation (Raw spell and +Tier if anyone remembers them), they actually made my interests towards the system greater and greater. My current guide threads wouldn't have been here without all those experiences. And then the Wynnter Fair 2016 was held. There, of course, we enjoyed many fun mini-games, and I found a bow called "Polar Star" in the prizes, whose base damage is 100-100 Thunder (because "Polar Star," get it). I was genuinely interested how the damage would become and guess what, the damage dealt by Polar Star bow was always constant!
So this is what struck me, I was sure the damage formula is not that complicated, since it does not use any RNGs other than selecting Base damage from the damage range of the weapon.

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So without Polar Star, do you think you would have still tried to figure out the specifics of the damage?

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Maybe yes, but I wouldn't know about that. Since I love to mess with numbers, Polar Star was just a good chance for me to begin such researches.

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Oh, so it would have just been a tad harder for you to get into it. Well good thing that bow was around to help you.

Is there anything about damage calculation that you're unsure of?

N0w I know basically everything about damage formulas (although there's no proof my formulas are correct), but in very first days I started researching around, I had no clues at all. So I went searching the forum, and found Salted once made a brief damage formula to public, in Gavel Patch (14.0.10) changelog. All it said was "(10*DPS*spellMultiplier)" but it gave me an idea how formulas could be inferred.
There are many people I have to thank for these works, even a little piece of advice did help me so much.

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So how long did it take you to finally decide that what you've come up with is good enough to be somewhat correct?

It took me roughly a week or two to finish the base of current guide. Almost full-time, I really enjoyed figuring out formulas step by step, looking into many old resources for possible clues, calling people for help for PvP damage and such.
To talk about the story a bit, I started by looking into the damage of Polar Star first. Taking all my knowledge about the game, like what stats could affect Neutral or Element damage, I started guessing the formula.
There was once a thread about damage calculation by someone, about one year before I posted my guide (thread number 108104). It does somewhat similar to mine, but there was an absolute difference between mine and his. The old one does: Multiply the Elemental damage (such as Earth Damage x%), take the output and multiply that with "Boost" again. This means the damage output is multiplicative from each damage boosts, but eventually I found this wrong. What I found is that all the damage boost factors are added first, not multiplied, and the combined boost is just multiplied on the Base damage. Yes that is all I found, I though someone who coded the damage formula must be smart enough to know that 1.1^100 becomes a big number, this fact could easily be abused by having multiple types of damage boost. (1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 becomes 3.375, but to be more fair using 1+ (0.5+0.5+0.5) becomes 2.5.)
Once I have found this fact, I couldn't suppress all the hype and immediately went making the thread, spent 4 hours in midnight, and when I pressed the "Post Thread" button it was already 2AM for me. I kept researching for a week or two later on, and thanks to all those players who helped me, my guide now supports every kind of damage in-game (except glitched damage).

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That's quite some dedication if you were working on figuring it out for 2 weeks nonstop.
Have you done anything like this before in other games then?

No, as the other reason I felt like doing these works on Wynncraft is because I noticed that not many had completed decent works in the filed of system research. I played some RPG or MMO games when I was younger, and Wynncraft was one of the best I could find. The community was closer, it was somewhat a comfortable place for me, this server became my home before I knew it.

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Oh, well you've done a fantastic job of it so far.
So if you noticed that there wasn't much happening here when it came to researching the inner workings of the game, have you wanted to investigate another aspect of Wynn and figure out how it works?

Yeah, most of the successful threads are about damage calculation. Also I tried to figure out how Percentages of Skill Points are calculated, and how GMs design items' IDs, I gave up on both though, as I didn't know anything of statistics study.
I was more than happy when I saw some people found my guide threads helpful for their builds. So I wanted to do some more researches in the aspect of damage calculation, Specialist/Pure was one of the perfect examples to make a guide thread on. The facts I summed up on my threads, might have brought a lot to the community, sometimes controversies as well. Nevertheless, I believe that these are just number or math fun facts, it's always the second most important when compared to your gameplay skills and partying with others. As a premise, this is a Role-Playing-Game, that's something I thought when reviewing my works. Maybe wrong, or right, but I always found the game most interesting when played with others.

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Regardless, it's still very handy to know how something works, especially if you're trying to do as much damage as possible.

What would help you figure out how Skill Points are factored into the game?

Since Skill Points is not a simple 'boost' of those corresponding damage but also they have unique effects to help their element based gameplay, I can tell it is not always the easiest to make and balance these features. Thanks to all of our GMs, we have items, skill points and damage quite balanced in the system.
However, the basic idea was always simple enough, if you look at the description of the skill points, it self-explains what each element does. In fact, Earth's description says "it increases any damage you inflict" and "it increases Earth damage", actually this both applies to Earth damage, as a result if you have 68 points = 50.0% in Strength skill, it increases your Earth damage by 100%, and any other damage by 50% as well. This is the unique effect of Earth and Thunder elements while other 3 having different unique effects on their own. This is one of the examples to prove the game mechanic is not made insanely complicated for balances as some of us tend to think, but it's actually simple enough to figure out what factor does what, thus contributing individuals to understand and develop their own best builds.
Despite that fact, when it comes to calculating the curve of SP's Percentage per Points, none of us are yet to reach the answer.

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Maybe the curve will be discovered at some point, but it does seem to be somewhat constant between them all.

This will be the last question(s) how did you find Wynncraft, and how has it changed you as a person since you've started playing?

Before I came to Wynncraft, I used to live in a different minecraft server, much smaller than Wynn. I created many friends through chats, and one day ones of those friends invited me to this server. Once I've joined, I found the game very much interesting. The leveling systems, unique mobs and items, those stuffs I've never seen in a minecraft server attracted me so much. Though I barely understood the quest dialogues in English at that time. Wynncraft, you guys taught me how to speak English, and that's one of the reason I started translating quest dialogues.
I was not involved with the community before Gavel, but after Gavel update I started involving the community, from Trades at the first time. Some of my first messages were terrible things, because I knew nothing how the community or trade works. I still remember those people who gave me kind words even when I did something wrong. "No one has a perfect beginning."
I'm sure I wouldn't have been here without all the people in the community, both on forum and in game. Though all of us sometimes forget, but such my story reminds me that we will always learn, and that it is important to treat newcomers with a heart of kindness and gentleness.

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Well, I'm glad that you've stayed and done what you've done.
Thank you for everything so far, and thank you for letting me interview you.

Thank you very much for your time.

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This concludes the thiiird interview for this time on Featured Wynncraftian.
The next Featured Wynncraftian will be in another 2 weeks.
If you missed the last Featured Wynncraftian where I interviewed @Yuno F Gasai check it out here.

Thank you once again @motoki1 for letting me interview you!​

 

Someone's going to suggest me for a FW any second now...

Any... second now...

Any sec- See! No, wait, that's someone else.

 

+1

stupid 10char

 

I nominate cruuk because he will cross-dress if he gets 10000 likes and FW is a good way for him to get likes

see i got you <3

 

Somebody nominate me I've done lots of good things for the community

 

finally
congrations you done it!!

 

Grats on fw!
May your nomination thread rest in peace

 

LOL FINALLY XDDD
gg moto

 

Congratulations

 

congrats motoki, knew you would be the next FW!

 

Congrats on being Featured!

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Nice

 

Whoa

I did something that worked....

 

Congratulations!

we gonna talk about lvl 102?

 

Gratz 10 char

 

Finally. Grats moto, in my opinion you deserve it.