Things that make you go Hmmmmm....

[Theo_GL]

When mining - Gargoyle pickaxes increase the level of ore found by one level.

While ONLY mining with gargoyle pick axes - I receive iron ore with some swings. Why? Technically this should not be possible.

Things that make you go hmmmm........

 

[Merus]

Think something has been busted with them for a while. When check for ore with a prospectors tool I should get an ire type higher with a garg pick axe... But it's the same type as the prospector tool shows.

 

[Basara]

Theo: Yeah, I really wish it would make all the iron Dull Copper, but them's the breaks.

But, the real reason.... You're only changing the ore the system says should be special (as, devs to the contrary, every resource square has a different, permanent, percentage chance of ore being colored that is then modified by the racial bonuses). The pickaxes only affect that special pool of ore (everything else is hardwired as iron), which is why an Iron-only spot gives some DC when hit by a GPA or PT (or shadow, if both), because the "type" check is still being made, even when the "special type" slot is also Iron. The remaining iron is the base metal the good stuff is found in, just like digging with a normal tool.

Merus: What procedure are you using?

Prospector's tools will only elevate ore either to a level you can mine, or elevate ore you can mine to the next higher (even if you can't mine the better ore) - I forget which, and don't have the time to check the FAQ (there's a full description in the FAQ). There's a bit of an area for sub-95 miners where you can't elevate lower stuff twice, in the gap between your best metal and the next highest one.
So, if you have 83 skill (bronze ore) and are hitting a gold vein, it won't bump it to agapite. You can get agapite elementals from such a site, though, with a GPA, even though the ingot return from digging is all iron.
The same 83-skill miner could get gold ore from a bronze site with a GPA, but be unable to smelt it down, and may or may not be able to use the PT to get gold from digging with a normal tool (again, see the FAQ on these tools).

 

[Vexxed]

Things that make you go hmmmm........

I once had a guidmate who was borred one evening in Ventrillo & had made a new character & was working up skills. All of a sudden he started cracking up like he'd heard a great joke, but no one had said anything. When asked what was so funny he responded that he'd

"named his new character with his Real life name" & consequently for the last few hours had "Been playing with himself ". LoL.. as you can tell he was borred.

 

[Theo_GL]

Makes sense Basara. It would be nice to see it documented somewhere.

So essentially a spot has an 80% chance of giving shadow.
When hit with gargoyle - 20% of the time you get iron, and 80% of the time you get copper.

Common sense about the way the garg pickaxe is described you would think you would get 20% DC and 80% copper.

 

[Gospel]

Makes sense Basara. It would be nice to see it documented somewhere.

So essentially a spot has an 80% chance of giving shadow.
When hit with gargoyle - 20% of the time you get iron, and 80% of the time you get copper.

Common sense about the way the garg pickaxe is described you would think you would get 20% DC and 80% copper.

Why would it need to be "documented" somewhere? Majority of people don't bother to research or test for themselves (obviously), they just ask on the forums.

 

[Basara]

Gospel:

This issue in this case is that people asked here, and we ended up testing it and documenting it in the Craftsman forums.

The reason it was originally asked (8+ years ago) was that the Devs said that humans had a flat 40% chance of getting colored ore, everywhere, and that Elves would have a 20% bonus, but didn't say if the bonus was additive (adding +20%) or multiplicative (multiplying the human chance by 1.2 (aka 120%)).

Now, this didn't match pre-ML mining, where the thousands of us who put together Mining books for our or others' use KNEW through long term use and testing that -

• some spots rarely produced colored ore (I had one Verite spot that was more likely to produce a Valorite elemental with a GPA, than even a single Verite or Valorite (with tools) ore),
• and, others that ALWAYS produced 80%+ colored ore (and allowed 20-30 digs each time, in Trammel!)

Nor did it match ML-era mining, where it quickly became apparent that the elven "20% bonus" was

• MAYBE a 20% increase in swings (usually by increasing the number of medium and small ore for an elf)
• and/or multiplying the existing percentage for humans by 120% (so that a 20% chance of colored ore for a human was 24% for an Elf, and 80% human became 96% for an elf). The bonus was most apparent on spots that were good, but not great before ML (1/4 and 1/5 are well within statistical range of each other, especially with humans getting a extra ore 10% of the time, and the expected range of iron on the highest-color-output spots was also not likely to show much (how obvious is it that you are getting only 1-3 iron ore out of 30 digs as an elf, when you used to get 2-4 as a human?)

And, the ore randomization proved that while the ore colors might change, the iron/colored ratio for each spot stayed the same no matter what color it became (and even spots that were currently 100% iron preserved those ratios so that they came into play if hit with a PT or GPA, before or after ML and the randomization).


A lot of things got documented solely because people asked, and not even experts could find answers in official documentation or unofficial answers from devs - and sometimes even those answers don't help. Some things are just TOO BIG to test on one character, in a timely manner (Valorite BOD drop rates, for example).

A few of the things in the last 5-6 years that questions, and multiple people providing data, resulted in...

1. Proving that there was a bug in the Smith LBOD system (it was a a matter of a missing parenthesis - spellcheckers don't help with code, and much of UO was written before coding software would tell you if you left a hanging open parenthesis), and that the advertised +10% to exceptional quality BODs was either removed in Publish 19, or was never implemented in the original release (despite being in the design document).
2. After that fix, confirming that Smith BODs now worked as advertised (to within 0.1% of expected values after tabulating 3000 BOD pulls from over a dozen people)
3. Discovering that no one had ever updated the design document with Tailor BODs, and the normal to exceptional ratio for Tailor BODs was 2 normal per 1 exceptional, not an even distribution of either (as Smith BODs).
4. Semmerset and others' work on Reforging.

And, that's just stuff for THREE skills in one aspect of the game (crafting).

The only documentation that's been done officially by EA since AoS has been when new systems were introduced or old ones massively changed, and a lot of that got changed between announcement and release, but the docs never updated to match.