Spreadsheets

Seriously, do you people at Portalarium have any sort of overall master plan for balancing skills, crafting, and crafting material attributes? Are you using spreadsheets so you can spot stats that are out of balance, inconsistent, or redundant?

 

Are you insinuating they are using dart boards or chest thumping as their current means?

 

So this thread really fuels the backstory for a comedy sketch I once wrote, about how corporate culture has pidgeon holed peoples' minds to the point where they cant comprehend anything outside of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are the diviners of truth, the contemporary oracle, and are your new age communion wafer. All of life's grandest decisions are fundamentally driven by spreadsheets. I even get visual software design specification documents in spreadsheets (even MS Paint would make more sense there!). People journal in spreadsheets. Your coworkers talk about their favorite spreadsheet macros at lunch, and have screensavers of recorded animations of spreadhseet activity. Someone is going to wear a spreadsheet costume to your next company christmas party. If spreadsheets arent involved, then I want nothing to do with it!

Something tells me Portalarium are a different kind of company, evolved and matured beyond the epoch of spreadsheet dominance, having opted for graph databases with intelligent scripts that spot the odd out-of-balance stat, redundant skill, or inconsistent animation, with automation.

*Theyre giggling and like, "no, dart boards!"

 

They gave up on Unity and are coding in Excel now?

 

I like how taxes were balanced... "hmmmmmm, lets double taxes...lol"

 

I assume they throw chicken bones...

 

It is a bit more complicated than that. I'm pretty sure this is how it works.

Spoiler

 

Your kidding, right?

If not, a spreadsheet is a tool for viewing a large amount of mathematical data and catching numbers that do not make sense. There are too many numbers scattered throughout the skills and material stats that are out of balance or do not make sense.

XX

 

Uhm.... did you see that he wrote

Data in a spreadsheet dependent on the human factor is far inferior to a database with visualization tools and automated scripts highlighting out-of-scope data.

Now mind you, I don't think that Portalarium is at the point that Black Tortoise is outlining there, just commenting on the inherent inferiority of spreadsheets in pinpointing inconsistent data.

 

This is what the Goblinworks devs provided last year while actively developing Pathfinder Online. You'll note nothing is hidden and quite a bit of detail is shown.

So, yes, it's likely it's all in spreadsheets, especially for combat balancing, given how the progression of some skills has been done. It lends itself very strongly to being a matrix of progression curves.

How such things end up so incredibly erroneous in the in-game implementation is an entirely different discussion.