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Mathematical Flaws In MMVI

Hmm, yes. MMVI had a number of serious flaws - so I will outline them, my fellow players, in the hope that a kind administrator will reflect upon my hard won knowledge, and perhaps improve the situation in time for MMVII.

Well, I'd have to say I'd change the application of chaos theory within several levels of the game. Through extensive testing I have found that applying exactly the same method to certain situations has resulted in very dissimiliar results. Problem is, I bought Might And Magic VI, not Mandelbrot VI. Below are the results of tests I conducted in a lead lined, zero gravity hermetically sealed chamber located exactly at sea level:

Experiment 1

This test presented perhaps the easiest to achieve sample conditions. Within an open area of Paradise Valley, I tested the prolificiality of a Supreme Titan's special death attack. My party was composed of four clerics, each with a body skill of 55. It was no my intention to kill the Titans, merely to observe their offence in their native territory. I utilised an Omega digital timepiece, and a compiled executable file programmed to freeze the screen in turn based mode within 0.00003 milliseconds of a reload, to ensure as exact a starting point for each test as possible. My clerics did not attack the Titan, they simply cast Power Cure once per turn each. My experimentations yielded strange results. In one sample (and the Supreme Titan's moves did vary, but more sideways than forward, so velocity and range were largely unaffected) the attack was attempted only 536,922 times, with successful kills counting at 32,023. This was out of 2,5000.000 combat turns. In a second test the attack was attempted 1,406,295 times, with successful kills logged at 1,340,535. As you can see, the results varied largely, a concern for me, as mathematically over such a great number results should have been closer together In fact they should have been equal.

Experiment 2

For this test, conditions were slightly harder. The room was required to be completely ionised, and as opening the laboratory door would COMPLETELY corrupt the results, I of course had to be present during the seven hour ionisation. And of course movement would affect the settlement of dust, so I took a 500mg dose of Serapax, timed to put me out for approximately seven hours, to be on the safe side. I wrote a buffer to the keyboard, to remember exactly the duration of all keystrokes, and the timing, and used a hydraulic weight to apply exactly 150g weight to the keys. This was to test the consistency of jumping within the game. I used a unique sample: the run and jump to the crystal location in the Supreme Temple Of Baa. To assist me, using Graphic Workshop vZ3 by Compuserve, I allowed for a grid that seperated my 1024x768 resolution image into precisely a million square grid, so that I could be quite exact in my point of jumping. So I ran to the edge of the platform, jumped to the other side, saved the keystrokes, and now I was ready for some serious testing. Fortunately, I had a 100% success rate in this option, out of 13,542 tries, 13542 were successful, so my hats off to the game's designers. Must admit though, I noticed a terrible discrepancy between walking off the big hill at Ironfist, in which for one instance I free-fell for exactly 0.54 of a second, and took no damage, as opposed to a little knoll outside Osric Temper's Castle, in which I fell for only 0.0012 of a second, and took damage! Sacre Bleut!

Experiment 3

Now this test really rankled me. And I had to go through a terrible ordeal in order to apply it. Your basic RPG random number generator is basically structured around a d100 system, that is to say, a number between one and a hundred. I am very suspicious of my PC since the night I saw that strange message, SYNTAX ERROR, so in order to simulate a microprocessor, I visited Tibet, to learn from an Ancient Monk the secrets of completely clearing the mind, and removing all forethought. Took me damn near six months to master the technique. And I had a car accident shortly after, the silly method appeared to have nasty side-effects upon my level of concentration. Upon my exit from hospital, I began preparation for my final test. I stripped my laboratory of all colour except white, and inhaled glue for three days in order to temporarily disable my sense of smell. And I lay in a bath of bleach for seven hours, to strip my epidermis, so that my sense of touch would be inhibited. 630mg of morphine helped for the pain. Now I was fairly sensorily deprived, and thus far more open in my capacity as a true random number generator.

I then began enchanting seperate items, logging the enchantments I was able to cast on each item, at the same time logging my hypothesis for the possibility for each enchantment. I did this 100 times for every item able to be enchanted within the game, this gave me my percentage chance for each item/enchantment. So if I enchanted a mage dagger 100 times, and out of that 45 times I ended up with a dagger +1 luck, there would be a 45% chance for that enchantment on that particular item. Of course 100 is too small a sample, so I did 1,000 sets of 100 for each. By assigning random numbers to each occurence on a pie graph basis, I at the same time recorded what those results SHOULD have been. Needless to say the results did not co-incide. In actual practice, I found that the "1-6 Electrical Damage" enchantment was a 28% possibility on a Champion Sword, whilst according to my own personal number generation, it should have been closer to 18%. Across such a sheer number of samples, that result was severely disturbing. I had similiar discrepancies with all my enchantments. I should add that I was using a level 12 water master, wearing no boosting equipment, and upon each enchantment, I reloaded and enchanted the same item again, until I moved onto the next one, so results should have been far more consistent.

So, in conclusion: I would like to see more logical application of numerical concepts within the Might And Magic Series, as for mine it is marketed as entertainment, and not simulation. And I think we gamers deserve more consistency, to me it outlines some shoddy and incosistent mathematical theorum. Now if you'll excuse me, I must ring 911, I fear that like so many others of genius intelligence, I may have suffered too much for my "art", and I believe my time on this earth may be limited.

Sincerely,

Ezra D.Peabody