Forcing 3rd party to see stats and begging for testers is insane.

Why are you making it hard to identify bugs?

 

Just a shot in the dark, but some background information( I will try to clearly label what is fact and my own conjecture/conclusions):

Fact: The release the stats window vanished, was a release that saw the addition of many new stats and removal of many more.
Fact: Since then there's been a constant addition/subtraction of stats as the releases come through.

Fact: By putting those stats in a window in the client, you now have to update that window, do testing on it, and remember to modify it everytime you need to change the /stats output.
Fact: Which also requires a new client build.
Fact: However, if it's tied to the output of a command send to the server, all you have to do is change the server to output the stat you want and a simple cycle of the server binary.
Conjecture: This makes testing and debugging much faster, and eliminates the overhead of modifying another in-game client window and keeping it up to date.
Fact: In addition, remember as a client window you have to parse the incoming data and put it into its correct fields,
Conjecture: which is logic and more place for bugs.

Conjecture: I firmly believe that /stats moving to a text command was done to make their testing better, and makes a lot of sense from the programming perspective.
Conjecture: They have limited bandwidth, meaning limited time for programmers to work on things. I also remember them saying at one point that rebuilding the client files takes multiple hours on their current fast hours, down from 12+ it used to.
Conjecture: The server binary, by comparison, would probably build relatively quickly. So deploying changes via that is probably much faster for testing.

Conclusion: I don't think they did this to make our lives harder. Hiding virtue stats? That was to make our lives harder. But moving it to text? That was to make their development faster.

 

It's possible they are doing each stat display individually, but my assumption is that they have a collection (or group of collections) and all they have to do is loop on the keys to get their values. Pretty basic stuff. The UI wouldn't need individual boxes for each stat, it would just be one text box to display the stats string. As long as there is a newline character added when looping through the keys and appending the values, it should look ok. No new build required for changes. As long as the stat was in the collection and returned by the server, it would be displayed.

 

I submit that this game has survived in part on the efforts of "third parties". Why would anyone be unwilling to take advantage of tools the community has proffered?

 

Fact: they still have to alter the values output for "/stats" for any additions/removals.

Fact: this application was written in such a way that it will properly display the output from "/stats" regardless of how many values are added or removed without modification to the code. There's nothing preventing the devs from doing the same.

 

I think it is more the necessity to use third party as opposed to the option to use third party that is the concern.

 

Ive downloaded and used it despite it not working for me anymore.

 

Both are not only not facts, the first one is conjecture that misses the point, while the second one finds the point again.


Your second is actually conjecture because, although they haven't done it recently, there have been breaking changes to the /stats command that required modifications, although they haven't done one in awhile. However, and i stress this, that only broke our parsers, NOT the client. Because the client isn't parsing anything, it's a straight raw incoming data dump.

The reason that application (or my own HUD) don't need modifications to account for new stats, is that the stats are relatively similar formatted when dumped now, although they didn't used to be. In the early days of /stats, a few structure changes required me to modify some parsing into the state it's in now, which has been thankfully consistent the past few releases.

For your first conjecture, the reason that might not be true is that the new stats command, at it's face and due to how it's output changes over time, looks like it does a straight array dump that's purely created/edited/stored server side. But because it's a straight dump with the only parsing done server side, they can change it at a whim. Because the only changes are server side.

Which goes back to the point, server side changes are cheaper than client side changes.


Now, while I agree it'd be nice to have this in a nice easy format, and they are relying on 3rd party programs to fill some gaps, I can appreciate them focusing developer energy on things that matter a bit more. Most players who truly both benefit and kick benefits back to the community from this data, are able to access it and utilize it, so i think it's a nice middleground.

 

So, what were the changes that broke your HUD?

 

I will stress it wasn't the HUD as it is now, but the informal parser i was using for my own calculations at the time, that eventually became the HUD.

It's been awhile, I want to say it was how the seperators/breaks were parsed out and the initial ordering. I don't believe it was a full datatype change, but it definitely was a back-end shift on how they were representing their storage structure. Minor and a quick-fix to be sure, but the recompile time on my tools is seconds, vs their much larger (and more finicky) unity monstrosity.

My point was merely that while I'd love if they included the stats tab in-game, and i did campaign for it, I can understand their need to prioritize, and the fact that even seemingly minor things, still require upkeep and QA and can lead to unintentional breaks in a sufficiently large project on someone else's engine, so not having needless stuff isn't horridly a bad plan.

I will also say most of the non-breaking stats changes are on the dev+ QA server, and live has seen less.

But again, most of my comments are also conjecture. I'm sure attenwood or someone can come comment on their actual reasons/development lifecycle. I'd love to know what their build times are for new server code vs new client code.

 

Question then: Why does /stats not at least report the output in the window it was entered? There is enough other spam flowing through the default window that it cannot be due to TMI. Why must I tab out of the game to see the results of /stats?

 

It used to for awhile.
But, the chat window does not parse line breaks, among other things, and it's an ungainly mess when they do it.
Lots of people complained it looked ridiculous, and almost no one actually used it in the chat window since it was so relatively unreadable.
So to remove the complaints, they just made it put a nice message and told people to check the chatlog which most checked anyway.

They did, however, add a new command /datafolder to make it super-simple to get to it.

 

No.

That was to preserve one of the core elements of the storyline.

If you care about the story, you have some idea of why.
If you do not care about the story, your virtue stat does not affect you whatsoever.

 

This is correct. Thus why the text dump changes when new stats are added/changed within the game.

 

@Lum the Mad, are there any other values output by /stats that are obfuscated?

 

Just checked and nope, just virtues.

 

Thanks.

 

Thanks for your replies! It really helps when a dev comes in and clears up some of our conjecture!

However, re: your No, I don't feel those aren't mutually exclusive ideas.
For a counterpoint:
If you care about the story, you can just not check it and having those stats won't affect you whatsoever.
For those who don't care about the story, they can check it to ensure they have access to the towns/etc they will want to use in their normal play.

It can both make our lives harder and preserve a core element of the storyline.
Particularly, the inorganic part.
The part where our actions affect our virtues in seemingly counterintuitive and/or buggy ways. Which while there aren't many, are still some bugs, and that stat was useful for determining which was which.

Note I'm not disagreeing, in fact I think it's a fine choice. I personally don't check my virtue scores outside of evaluating a potential bug, and will be playing organically.

A lot of people use data only because it's available, and would do just fine and play more organically without it. Therefore denying them that easy data will get them to play more true to their feelings and invest themselves more in the story.

However the reason I stress that makes our lives harder, is that the harder aspect is temporary.

Depending on the granularity of the virtue cloak as a barometer it probably won't be too long until someone devises a tool to tell you your rough values by the color/strength of your cloak in a screenshot.

Likewise, it won't be too long(I'd bet a sizable amount of gold with someone that we'll have one before commercial) until someone compiles a list of every virtue action and it's measured cost/effect on your virtue score, both organic and otherwise. Ostensibly this will probably be to help people achieve the virtue cloak they want, whether it's red, purple, pink, chartreuse, etc. Or to make sure they can use the right town vendors. Or to help us evaluate whether something is working as intended or buggy. Or just to offer a "speed-run" version of the quests to help you find the unlocks you want in the shortest time "wasted" on the story for certain die-hard pvpers.

 

It's ludicrous that character level has to be retrieved from a TXT dump, whether by add on or manually.

While not all of the 'stats' dump is useful or intersting and I have no real investment in knowing my virtue, per se, the levl of information hidden that one would expect to have access to is infuriating