How modifiers work (maybe)

NastyPhish · February 2022

I’m not saying that some dev should take the time to put down every interaction in game. But ANY pertinent game details should be found SOMEWHERE in game and we shouldn’t need to be a mathematician to figure them out.

Furthermore, if the modified value is “of base value” ie. 65% reduction of a 30% chance. It should be stated in the kit plainly. Simply “65% reduction of base value.” This would solve a lot of issues and misunderstandings.

Just $.02

DNA3000 · February 2022

magnus_xix said:

magnus_xix said:
I've never been able to wrap my head around the description of the slow debuff. To me it seems as though there is crucial info missing.

The slow description states it reduces evade ability acuuracy by 100% but despite this in 99.9% of scenarios it straight up stops the opponent from evading even if they're immune to AAR or have increased AA. This shouldn't the case if all slow truly did was reduce AA.

The 0.1% of the times where slow doesn't stop evade is when you throw an unblockable special at spider gwen with 4 or more spider sense charges.

After testing I found that at 3 spider sense charges spider gwen will NEVER evade. Why is that exactly?

SG has +550% ability accuracy against unblockable specials. It's unclear if this is a flat Increase or if its a relative increase but I think its now safe to assume its a relative increase. So with a slow debuff active her AA falls to 450% from 550%.

At 3 spider sense charges she has a 21% chance to evade. This is increased to 94.5% with an evade AA of 450%. You would expect SG to have a really high chance to successfully evade but she never does at 3 spider sense charges. She does evade at 4 charges however. With 4 charges she has a 28% chance to evade and this is increased to 126%.

With 4 or more charges she is guaranteed to evade and with 3 or fewer she still has a high chance to evade but never does. This can only be the case if the crucial info slow is missing from its description is that it also reduces evade chance by a flat 100% in addition to reducing evade AA by 100%. This would also explain why slow prevents champs that are immune to AA modification from evading and also champs with a relatively small increase in AA (like the "best defense" node).

It would be great to hear what you have to say and if you could pass any relevant info to the right people to get the slow description more in line with what it actually does.
Aired g 😔

The slow description is inaccurate. I seem to recall discussing this in another thread (as I recall this post specifically) but the Slow description that was added to the game in a hyperlink is missing information (and it was not described consistently correctly before that). Slow reduces unstoppable and evade ability accuracy, but it also seems to suppress those effects. In other words, a Slowed champion has a lower chance to trigger unstoppable and evade, but even if they do trigger unstoppable or evade they will behave as if neither effect does anything.

The Slow description in-game was partially corrected to address this. It now says that Unstoppable champs that are slowed will behave as if not unstoppable. So something with increased ability accuracy can still trigger unstoppable effects, they just won't actually be unstoppable in practice (this can still be a meaningful distinction, as there are consequences for something having an unstoppable buff regardless of whether they behave unstoppable or not). It doesn't say anything about Evade yet though.

The "modifier" part of slow is accurate. It does modify ability accuracy the way it describes it. The problem with Slow is that it has other effects besides ability accuracy reduction, and those effects are not stated explicitly in its description.

DNA3000 · February 2022

NastyPhish said:
I’m not saying that some dev should take the time to put down every interaction in game. But ANY pertinent game details should be found SOMEWHERE in game and we shouldn’t need to be a mathematician to figure them out.

Furthermore, if the modified value is “of base value” ie. 65% reduction of a 30% chance. It should be stated in the kit plainly. Simply “65% reduction of base value.” This would solve a lot of issues and misunderstandings.

Just $.02

The devs appear to be taking the opposite tack: presume all percentages are "of base" unless described otherwise (i.e. "flat"). I can see why, they are trying to keep the amount of text from becoming unnecessarily larger. It is also important to recognize that "of base value" has to be translated into other languages in a consistent way, and having the most common situation be the one that is considered the default situation without the need for extra text has more than trivial benefits.

AverageDesi · February 2022

Sabertooths awakened ability gives him more than 100% ability accuracy for regens. But quake can't prevent regens with her concussion. Would that mean awkaneed ability dies not factor into base ability?

DNA3000 · February 2022

AverageDesi said:
Sabertooths awakened ability gives him more than 100% ability accuracy for regens. But quake can't prevent regens with her concussion. Would that mean awkaneed ability dies not factor into base ability?

I would assume that is because the signature ability describes this as an ability accuracy increase (i.e. +XX% flat ability accuracy) and thus it counteracts Quake's concussion. But this is a good one to investigate further.

Squirrelguy · February 2022

DNA3000 said:

AverageDesi said:
Sabertooths awakened ability gives him more than 100% ability accuracy for regens. But quake can't prevent regens with her concussion. Would that mean awkaneed ability dies not factor into base ability?
I would assume that is because the signature ability describes this as an ability accuracy increase (i.e. +XX% flat ability accuracy) and thus it counteracts Quake's concussion. But this is a good one to investigate further.

Really you could just do a whole separate investigation about how concussion (mainly Quake) interacts with different abilities.

Also, I love that you’re doing this. Will definitely take a lot of work, but it’s one of those things that would’ve been way easier to implement earlier in the game when the overall number of interactions and abilities was far smaller. Doing it sooner is always better than later.

Definitely wish we could access code on most of this and see how the specific debuffs and abilities are applied. There are ways to test but that would be so much simpler in most cases.

To add to the list of interesting modifier interactions when testing:

I also have always assume that you could double or triple this synergy up with different rarities of the champ, but I’ve never tested it.

Edit: I can’t type.

Colonaut123 · February 2022

DNA3000 said:

magnus_xix said:

magnus_xix said:
I've never been able to wrap my head around the description of the slow debuff. To me it seems as though there is crucial info missing.

The slow description states it reduces evade ability acuuracy by 100% but despite this in 99.9% of scenarios it straight up stops the opponent from evading even if they're immune to AAR or have increased AA. This shouldn't the case if all slow truly did was reduce AA.

The 0.1% of the times where slow doesn't stop evade is when you throw an unblockable special at spider gwen with 4 or more spider sense charges.

After testing I found that at 3 spider sense charges spider gwen will NEVER evade. Why is that exactly?

SG has +550% ability accuracy against unblockable specials. It's unclear if this is a flat Increase or if its a relative increase but I think its now safe to assume its a relative increase. So with a slow debuff active her AA falls to 450% from 550%.

At 3 spider sense charges she has a 21% chance to evade. This is increased to 94.5% with an evade AA of 450%. You would expect SG to have a really high chance to successfully evade but she never does at 3 spider sense charges. She does evade at 4 charges however. With 4 charges she has a 28% chance to evade and this is increased to 126%.

With 4 or more charges she is guaranteed to evade and with 3 or fewer she still has a high chance to evade but never does. This can only be the case if the crucial info slow is missing from its description is that it also reduces evade chance by a flat 100% in addition to reducing evade AA by 100%. This would also explain why slow prevents champs that are immune to AA modification from evading and also champs with a relatively small increase in AA (like the "best defense" node).

It would be great to hear what you have to say and if you could pass any relevant info to the right people to get the slow description more in line with what it actually does.
Aired g 😔
The slow description is inaccurate. I seem to recall discussing this in another thread (as I recall this post specifically) but the Slow description that was added to the game in a hyperlink is missing information (and it was not described consistently correctly before that). Slow reduces unstoppable and evade ability accuracy, but it also seems to suppress those effects. In other words, a Slowed champion has a lower chance to trigger unstoppable and evade, but even if they do trigger unstoppable or evade they will behave as if neither effect does anything.

The Slow description in-game was partially corrected to address this. It now says that Unstoppable champs that are slowed will behave as if not unstoppable. So something with increased ability accuracy can still trigger unstoppable effects, they just won't actually be unstoppable in practice (this can still be a meaningful distinction, as there are consequences for something having an unstoppable buff regardless of whether they behave unstoppable or not). It doesn't say anything about Evade yet though.

The "modifier" part of slow is accurate. It does modify ability accuracy the way it describes it. The problem with Slow is that it has other effects besides ability accuracy reduction, and those effects are not stated explicitly in its description.

In a similar fashion functions Coldsnap.

Drenlin · February 2022

Thanks guys now my brain really hurts

altavista · February 2022

Great post. Helpful but somehow makes me even more confused, which is definitely a sign of knowing more.

DNA3000 · February 2022

Squirrelguy said:
To add to the list of interesting modifier interactions when testing:

An oldie but goodie. I suspect the combination interaction of Quake, Black Widow, and Hawkeye was a lot of veteran's introduction into the weirdness that is ability accuracy, attribute modification, synergy stacking, and potency.

Destr0yer · February 2022

DNA3000 said:

AverageDesi said:
Couldn't/wouldn't the people who codes/programmed/designed these interactions know how and where each work? As fun as it is, why would we have to personally investigate how they add up?
First of all, whom ever implemented the original mechanics aren't necessarily available to be questioned. They could be retired, they could be no longer alive, they could even be working for EA.

Even if there is someone who knows everything, they aren't going to take the time to answer the question "can you please give me a list of how every single interaction in the game works." That just isn't going to happen.

What *can* happen is we can ask them to improve the in-game documentation of these things, and better explain them to the players. But to ask them to improve the in-game documentation, the players have to actually have some idea of how things are supposed to work in the first place. If players have no idea how things should work, there's no way to know if they aren't working correctly. We have to have some solid idea of what to expect, so we can then tell the devs when they are either explaining things wrong or doing things wrong or both.

The more we know and understand the more leverage we have to get Kabam to fill in the holes in our knowledge. And the more we ask them to explain things correctly, the more pressure we put on them to do things in a consistent way so that they can *be* explained. If everything is just a mystery to most players, it doesn't matter how things work. But if the players are educated to expect things to happen in certain well documented ways, we can leverage that expectation to ask that things happen in ways that integrate with that understanding better.

In an ideal world players shouldn't have to do this, but we don't live in that world. So we do the best we can with the hand we are dealt.

Thanks, @DNA300, for your contributions. I always enjoy reading your posts and I appreciate your thoughtful commentary and the principles you subscribe to.

Here are my thoughts:
- this issue of documentation is critically important for the MCOC;
- while grassroots movement aimed at improving documentation is helpful, ultimately there should be a mandate at the executive level of the company (Mr. Seungwon Lee: please take a note, if you read this) and allocation of adequate resources to resolve this issue;
- development team should not be in charge of how the game mechanics is chosen, development team should be in charge of executing designer's vision in an efficient, secure, reliable, testable, portable, and maintainable way;
- a special "designer" team that includes game architect(s), technical writer(s), software consultant(s), project manager(s), and such should be created to address this issue using top down approach and to develop comprehensive game specifications;
- realistic goals and expectations should be developed, e.g., between design and implementation to complete this project within two years;
- codebase should be cleaned up, optimized, and rewritten where necessary to conform with the above detailed game specifications
(the fact that the game code is being currently refactored is another argument why this project is urgently needed to be started if not yet);

And, I anticipate your response to the tune of "that just isn't going to happen." This is why this argument should be made at the executive level and that's why I am calling Mr. Lee's attention to this mater. Allocate ten million bucks a year for two years, hire good brains like yourself, fire any non-cooperating turf-protecting incompetent corporate bureaucrats, cut through corporate silos using the power of an executive mandate and get some tangible results. How to make this happen? I suspect that if player community starts reaching out to parent company's executive and investor relations offices somebody in charge will take notice. Just my two cents...

How modifiers work (maybe)

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