Monday, May 2, 2022

Recent Questions - Arqade

Recent Questions - Arqade

Shulker Farm Failure Rate

Posted: 02 May 2022 04:31 AM PDT

I built a shulker farm following the design by devilmok. Centered on the trapped shulker, there are 4 nether portals with 17x17 portal blocks. These are spaced apart with blocks in between to allow shulkers to teleport to. This image taken from devilmok's video shows the side view.

design side view

According to the wiki, when the shulker wants to duplicate, it chooses a random block within 17x17x17 space centered on itself and tries teleporting to it, repeating if the block is invalid up to 4 more times (with a total of 5 times). Since there are 8 17x17 planes next to portal blocks it can teleport to, this gives a duplicate failure rate of p = (1 - 8/17)5 = 0.0416.

Shulkers have 30 health and deals 4 damage per hit. Since shulkers duplicate after being hit as long as they have over half health, the shulker can fail to duplicate 4 times before breaking the farm.

To calculate the mean time between failure, we calculate the average number of hits it takes to see 4 consecutive failures. This turns out to be (1 + p + p2 + p3)/p4 = 348400. If each hit takes ~2 seconds, this equates to ~8 days.

In minecraft 1.17, 8 days sounds about right: the farm never broke. But recently after I upgraded to 1.18.2, it broke 4 times on me within a week. Did something change? Or is my calculation off and I just got really lucky in the past? Or am I unbelievably unlucky?

Do smurfs "skew" or introduce bias in a competitive ladder? Why do players derank as a team?

Posted: 02 May 2022 02:52 AM PDT

It seems Overwatch is rife with smurf accounts. I ask around, and most of the time people answer they have 2 accounts or more. There was a sale on OW about one month ago. I once talked with somebody, on voice chat, who had 7 accounts.

I only have one account, and I play in solo queue, in silver tank, silver healer, and bronze DPS. I want to insist that when I started playing OW, I was about 2600.

It feels like smurfs are in all my matches, both in my team and in the opposite team. Often, it seems that smurfs are the player who can influence the outcome of a match, not me. Either my team can't win against a team with smurfs, or my team has strong smurfs and win too easily, so no matter how much effort I put, I don't contribute to the outcome of the match. It doesn't feel very good.

It's weird because I often hear players saying smurfs are not a problem, and they also say "there is no elo hell", yet I've heard pro players agreeing that smurfs make it harder to climb.

I have played online FPS for years, I was told my aim is not bad by a OW coach, yet I'm not even gold, where most players are.

If there is a lot of smurf accounts, wouldn't it create a "downward" pressure, meaning average players get pushed down by smurf accounts?

I wish Blizzard would enable their authenticator for OW, to allow players to not play with and against smurfs, a bit like what cs go did with cs go prime.

I regularly spot groups of players who "derank" as a team. I'm also curious why players decide to derank, and if it's really ethical, since it means those accounts will, in the future, play with people lower than them. I've heard arguments like:

  • "It's to play with friend"

    • answer: they should play in QP instead, because in competitive, you should only play with players of your level. That's a good limitation.

  • "It's to practice with another hero"

    • answer: they should play in QP instead, that's what practice is for. Those people can practice against people of their own level.

  • "I want to have fun while not losing MMR"

    • answer: they should play in QP instead, it's unethical to practice against players who are lower level.

I can understand why Blizzard can easily make money with smurfs, though.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch: Wearing a hooded robe and a dragon priest mask at the same time

Posted: 02 May 2022 02:50 AM PDT

When I do not have the Unofficial Skyrim Patch installed, I can wear the Archmage's Robes and Morokei at the same time (which is not a bug/glitch, it's intentional).

After installing the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, this combination is no longer possible. If I equip the one and then the other, the first gets unequipped like they are not compatible.

I can only guess the authors of the mod introduced this change as a reaction to this Skyrim bug:

[PC] [360] While wearing the robes, Dragon Priest masks (such as Morokei and the Wooden Mask) might make the player's head invisible, to solve this, drop the robes and pick them up, or unequip the mask.

How can I make this combination possible without having to give up on the fixes introduced by the Unofficial Skyrim Patch?
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