Portalborn · published
A few numbers were lying to you. They aren't anymore.
Thank you to Megan for reporting both of these issues — especially the second one, since it took a very specific portal and object to finally pin down what was happening.
Monster inspection showed the wrong stats
When you examined a monster, the inspection window was showing the level, HP, and attack values from that monster's original template rather than the scaled version you would actually fight.
In a scaling portal, that could produce something as alarming as a Level 75 monster with 3,725 HP in the inspection window, even though the room correctly showed it as Level 1 and the actual fight was properly scaled to your level.
Nothing was wrong with the combat itself. The monster you fought was always correctly scaled. But seeing "Level 75" before starting a Level 1 encounter is understandably alarming, and I'm sorry to anyone who backed away from a fight because the game gave you bad information.
The inspection window now shows the actual level, HP, and attack values of the monster you're about to fight.
Two related improvements came with this fix:
The displayed HP now accounts for combat pacing, so it represents the amount of health you'll actually be fighting through rather than an internal raw base value.
"Base HP" and "Base Attack" have been renamed to simply "HP" and "Attack", because those numbers now represent the real encounter rather than the underlying template.
Hidden stashes announced the wrong amount of gold
Searching certain objects could produce two completely different numbers.
For example:
"A hidden stash containing 3,080 Gold."
followed immediately by:
"You received 44 gold coins."
The amount of gold you actually received was always correct. The discovery message was displaying an unscaled value instead.
The announcement and the actual reward now use the same calculated amount, so the two can no longer disagree.
Why these problems kept appearing
Although these looked like two unrelated bugs, they were actually instances of the same underlying problem:
A number displayed to the player was being calculated separately from the number the game actually used.
Whenever two separate calculations are supposed to represent the same thing, there's a chance they'll eventually drift apart. That's exactly what happened here.
I've fixed both specific cases, but more importantly, I've added automated coverage for the entire category.
The tests now compare every displayed monster stat and every gold announcement against the values actually used by the game, at both very low and very high player levels, and in both English and Chinese.
If one of these displayed numbers ever disagrees with reality again, the tests should catch it before the update reaches you.
Thank you again to Megan for finding these, and thank you all, as always, for continuing to report the little things that don't look right. Sometimes a strange number on one screen is exactly what exposes a much broader problem underneath.
— TheHand