Taralin Snow

The forums are working properly for me again (on both my computer and my phone). I didn't change anything on my end but whatever the issue was seems to be fixed now. This is what it looked like for me while I was having problems (now that the problem is gone I can actually upload this):

to answer my own question: When the same Item ID appears twice in a ResourcesAdded array, then both entries apply. The daemon that processes these lists does not appear to notice or care that it already saw that item in that port previously, when it reaches the duplicate entry.

I've found more duplicate ResourcesAdded values in the Shops API (these are on us2, aka PVP Global): Port=La Habana [38], Item=Iberian Dried Pork [790] Port=Kingston / Port Royal [79], Item=Lancashire Iron [806] Port=Les Gonaïves [93], Item=Fine Fabrics [824] Port=La Tortue [96], Item=Provence Oak [829] Port=Fajardo [116], Item=Iberian Dried Pork [790] Port=Christiansted [129], Item=Norwegian Fox Fur [819] Port=Gustavia [133], Item=Cape Coast Honey [833] Port=La Désirade [139], Item=Languedoc Violins [825] Port=Fort-Royal [156], Item=Corsican Mint [823] Port=Carriacou [163], Item=Textile Machinery [811] Port=Cartagena de Indias [212], Item=Spanish Dried Fruits [796] Port=Atchafalaya [294], Item=Normandy Cider [827] It is unclear what to do when the same item is found in the list twice. Should the correct value be taken as the first one in the list, the last one in the list, or the sum of all the entries with the same item id? (sorry if formatting is bad, I still have that bug that removes all styles from the forum web pages)

Also I just tried using Safari on iPhone. Same result. It's as if the stylesheets for each page aren't loading at all (which maybe they aren't).

Ever since the forum outage all I see now is raw text, without styles. This makes the forum very hard to read and some features (like going directly to unread posts in a thread) don't appear to work at all. I would attach a screenshot showing what I see except the "choose files... Click to choose files" link does nothing. F5, Ctrl-F5 and Shift-F5 did not help. JavaScript is enabled. I tried opening this forum in IE rather than Chrome and got the same result. Anybody know what I need to do to fix this? I assume it's just me seeing this otherwise I'd have expected to see complaints from others posted here already.

I really think this was something special, and more importantly it wasn't an event limited to just a few people in one night, it was nearly the entire French nation (at the time) over a several week period. The defense of Pedernales in particular was glorious, and it became a point of French pride that we refused to allow it to fall without a fight, even if it meant sitting inside the port for 2 hours every night just in case a flag was launched against it. The other 22 hours of each day was packed with PvP, and it mattered -- it wasn't just sinking ships for fun, it was all-out war and it became our moral obligation to Sink All Pirates.

I think Vllad includes traders and crafters in the category of PvP players as long as they're willing to do their trading and crafting in potentially unsafe waters, in support of the greater war effort. This is one of the things that makes this such a good PvP game -- ship combat and logistics both play a role.

I don't think CCCP can afford to treat France as an equal. It would look bad and people might think all that saber-rattling was empty talk and start to re-evaluate their own relationships with the Danes. So they will define a victory condition for themselves ("reduce France to one port!") and if they achieve it they will declare that they have won the war, and they will not be able to understand why we keep sinking their ships and stealing their cargoes even though they have already "won". I suppose the next step would be to demand the devs fix the game because it's obviously broken if people you have already defeated refuse to go away even though you took all their ports, and when the devs do nothing they will just have to quit the game because it's stupid and boring and the devs are stupid to make such a broken game that doesn't even let you win and they're going to go play another game which is way better anyway.

Also, I noticed that while the API indicates which ports are in which counties, it does not actually provide the *name* of the county (only the list of all the ports in the county). I found this a curious omission.

The "ResourcesAdded" array for the La Habana Shops entry has Item ID 790 (Iberian Dried Port) listed twice, once at the beginning of the array with a value of (67, 0.28) and again at the end of the array with a value of (62, 0.28). What does it mean when the same item appears in the ResourcesAdded array twice? Should the final effective value be taken as (62, 0.28), (67, 0.28) or (62+67, 0.28). This was the us2 server data if it matters.

McAfee SiteAdvisor blocks that URL: An unacceptable security risk is posed by this site. McAfee Content Category: Phishing McAfee Security Rating: Red it looks like the loading bar displays, then the security screen comes up, so maybe something is being loaded from somewhere else with a problem?

I don't see how curvature itself would improve the game at all, but I do see how ship visibility due to curvature could add realism tothe game and improve the sense of immersion. And I agree that switching from 2 to 3 coordinates is a huge waste of CPU time and bandwidth. Far easier to simplify it as follows: 1. In a battle instance, the earth is flat. change nothing. 2. On the open sea, ships appear to sail lower in the water the farther away you are. This would be something done client-side without any server involvement. Ships that render near your own ship (or near the camera position if you want to do it that way) appear normally, but ships rendered farther away have increasing amounts of negative Y applied until eventually all you can see is masts sailing through the water like a submarine's periscope. If you did this that would give the illusion of curvature without actually doing much math at all. Most players would never even be able to tell the difference between 'approximated curvature' done this way and 'real curvature'.

The cost to collect a resource from a building (not counting labor) is less than the price you can sell the resource for at a port that consumes it. This makes buildings the equivalent of a money fountain, all you have to do to make money is collect resources then sell them for a profit. A labor hour requirement limits how much free money you can produce this way per day.

the BR limit needs to be surpassed before the battle closes (or the 2 minute join timer needs to elapse). This means that if the current BR ratio is 300:200 (1.5x exactly) the higher side can still add another ship. Any ship they add (from Basic Cutter to Santisima) will then cause the BR to go past 1.5x, which will then prevent further joins on the higher strength side.

I was thinking about the change to the XP curve in Patch 9.7 today, and wondering what tools the developers have to identify the best shape of the XP curve. For example, how many players get stuck at rank 5 for a long time because the required XP for rank 6 is a big jump but their ability to gain XP doesn't go up as much? Is there a way to measure this? If you make an adjustment, how easy is it to measure the effect when you don't reset things? How are the developers going to test whether the new curve is in the right shape if there are no testers left at rank 1 to try the new curve and see? It occurred to me that in order to test how long leveling takes for a new player, you need the ability to reset your XP to 0. Very few players will be willing to do this for their entire account, but you could reasonably expect some players to do this if they could do it on a specific server only. So my suggestion is this: On character creation, allow a player to specify that for that character, XP (and crafting XP) should be stored in the server database and not synced to their Steam account. If the flag is set for that character on that server, XP is 'local' to that server and doesn't sync from/to Steam. If the flag is not set for that character on that server then XP is synced to/from Steam as before. This would allow players to keep their XP on their 'main' characters and still make new rank 1 players on other servers for testing purposes. Or they could even delete their main and start from scratch, knowing that they can regain their 'parked' XP by making another character with Steam sync enabled. And perhaps more importantly, it would allow players to do this via self-service rather than requiring admin intervention.