Giant Mushrooms are a Rip-off

[bobo baggins]

I have also seen it hit the same person twice. As you said Bullbound everytime a new oppenent shows up it rolls to see if it uses the catapult so if the same person is up on the receiving end it is possible for the same person get hit twice

[Jengas]

Edit: sorry didn't read the full post above :P

[spiny norman]

Originally Posted by Bullbound

Did you hit the skip button at all? The catapult should only attack a player 1 time total. Holding Bay has used it to tip several fights lately and we have had quite a bit of success. It attacks 3 different targets, one time each. It usually doesn't make it past the half way point of the opposing guild, but that is because of how the catapult is programmed.

Each time the enemy comes up to fight, the game does something to randomly decide if the catapult will fire or not. If it comes up that the catapult should fire, then it does so before any attacks can occur. Due to it not picking 3 random enemies at the start, you are more likely to see it at the start of a fight than at the end. However, the animations do get screwy if you use the skip button.

In the case in question, the opponent ranked #40 defeated several of our lower ranked players. Against our lowest the catapult fired on the first shot, knocking #40 down to half. After 3 or 4 of our members had been defeated and #40 had been knocked down to about 10% hit points the catapult fired again and knocked him out. So as others have noted, even though the catapult may only fire once in a particular battle, it may fire twice against a given player.


If I were designing the code, I would have handled it this way: Let's say that you are attacked by a 50 player guild with 3 mushrooms loaded. The computer rolls the dice in the first battle with a 3/50 chance a mushroom will be fired.

If a mushroom isn't fired and the opponent is not defeated, then for the next battle the dice are re-rolled with 3/50 chance of a launch.
If a mushroom isn't fired and the opponent is defeated, then for the next battle the dice are re-rolled with a 3/49 chance of a launch.
If a mushroom is fired and the opponent is not defeated, then for the next battle the dice are re-rolled with 2/50 chance of a launch.
If a mushroom is fired and the opponent is defeated, then for the next battle the dice are re-rolled with a 2/49 chance of a launch.

The pattern repeats until all the mushrooms are launched or until the raid ends.

This would result in many more mushrooms launched against higher level players. All mushrooms would get launched if you win, but not all might be launched in a losing cause. That is actually a good thing for the catapult user, because if you have, say, 2 mushrooms and 4 opponents left, you weren't going to win anyway.

whatever algorithm they are using now seems to result in way to many mushrooms launched against low level players.

[ralff]

it hits the same person twice almost every time i use it.

*while the above was true when i wrote it now that i have a stronger guild the catapult rarely hits the same person and is mildly useful.

[Jengas]

Spiny brought up a good point in another post concerning soccerstar (a different Playa game) and the toilet item generator. Playa has a very poor RNG system in place that is always skewered to one end. Meaning Shroom Pults are likely no exception.

[spiny norman]

good point. It would seem to be a relatively simple fix to make the catapult functional, and if playa did so they would sell a heck of a lot more mushrooms. But they don't. I can't fathom why, except that they don't have the programmers with the skills to do so.

edited to add, because heaven forbid I double post:

An easy fix for the catapult would be to have the mushrooms only fire at the top, #2 or #3 members of the opposing guild. Really easy to program. 1 mushroom loaded, only fires at #1. 2 mushrooms, they fire at #1 and #2. 3, they fire at #1, #2, and #3. If the battle ends before these players come up, then the remaining mushrooms don't fire, and are saved for the next battle. This would encourage guilds to use the catapult because few mushrooms would be wasted: they wouldn't launch in a battle where your top member is wiped out by #4 or lower.

you may argue that playa won't like this because the mushrooms may not fire, but let's face it: if no one uses the catapult, they don't sell any mushrooms, and half of a bunch of mushrooms is better than 100% of zilch.

[Anuba]

Totally agree with your last post Spiny.