Gasp! Horrors!
Once upon a time, the “real numbers” behind CoX were ultra-top-secret, hidden and masked and obfuscated from the players. The fear was that it would rob the game of a certain mystique, turning it into number-crunching and min-maxing and …
… but, wait, that happened anyway. People who wanted numbers did incessent trial-and-error and published their results and compared them and came up with numbers that even the Devs had to admit were pretty close — when they weren’t, eventually, correcting them. People who weren’t into numbers didn’t have to bother with them; people who were, could get a lot of the information — but never definitively.
In the new Test Patch, there are some new tools for seeing (gasp!) real numbers. Spiffy.
Well, we basically integrated some “tools” into the in-game U.I. which display the numbers behind the game’s combats systems. The Combat Attributes Window lists all the important attributes of the player and shows their current value. It also shows the source and contribution of buffs. The Combat Monitor Window is a lightweight window that can unobtrusively be left up all the time (unlike the Combat Attributes Window), so you can watch selected buffs change during combat. Additionally, more information can be found through buff icons that show their actual effects on the player, and in the combat log where hit rolls have been added.
I don’t recall the name of the tool, but there were some external monitors that used to run in parallel to CoX that would show these sorts of buff infos. As far as I can tell, that’s now fully obsolete.
Yes, perhaps some of the “romance” of “this is a big buff” vs “this is a small buff” is lost — but given that we’re already getting things that say “this adds 3% to the X,” it’ll be nice to know what “X” actually is. And it should also (if it works right) help debugging of the system as well …