Magick Aptitude Test

So I've been thinking about the research I wanted to do on the One For All and energy control. To keep it short: If I really can control my energy and it works like One For All from Boku no Hero Akademia, I should be able to do a sprint in a shorter period in comparison. However, as I mentioned in the respective post this takes quite some time even if I keep it short and the results may not even be worth it so to say. However, I came up with another extremely simple test that takes a lot less time for every single execution but may take longer in the long run.

The Idea

If you read the magick oriented posts you should know this already but let's go into the details anyways. I remember from reading almost a year ago, Vrater V. D. wrote in the book "Schule der Hohen Magie" (approx. in engl.: school of high magic), that magic changes the chances of an occurrence by will. The example taken in the book assumes you want a meteor to hit exactly where you perform the ritual. The chance of a meteor hitting the earth, even more, hitting the earth exactly at this place is extremely low. Yet, using magic this chance can be increased.

I'm Not Planning on Suicide

Now, I'm not going to make that happen, I'm not planning on dying yet and I have no fun in having meteors crush down into the earth, even worse my home. The meteor thingy is just an example. I'm planning on something less dangerous that still can be extremely infuriating. I'm talking about dice. If you paid attention during the class in math - if you had stochastic... - you will know that dice has the same chance to land on each side. (Of course, this assumes a perfect dice, if you have one with holes in it or worse, numbers on it this might affect the balance, additionally damage done to it will also influence this). With every occurrence having the same chance this is called a Laplace experiment, by the way.

Throwing a Dice and Magic; How Is This Related?

If you combine both concepts explained in the paragraphs you may come upon this theory:

If throwing a dice infinitely results in each side showing up at the top equally often, this means that when using magick to influence the chances regardless of how often you throw it will occur more often. Even better, the higher the chance diverges the stronger the actor's aptitude to magic should be. At least that's the idea or concept behind.

Live/Life Research

I'm actually planning on posting all my ongoing research on my blog in the projects category under research. This project will listen there soon too probably. I mean the pure idea of this is ridiculous. You will need tons of dice throws for it to ever reach an equal distribution and secondly I doubt that my own magical power is strong enough to influence the chances so much that it's outside of the error margin.

Well, I guess we'll see.

Guild Wars 2: Festival of the Four WInds Without Procrastination

I actually wonder how many people expected this blog post. I'm more curious about how many people expected the post to come today. Hmmm, there seems to be a pattern. Anyways just like every other event that has repeatable achievements or lots to do I'm analyzing how much you would need to do daily for once, to know for myself and secondly to see what ArenaNet is expecting us to do.

Festival Of The Four Winds

It's been three years since the last festival, celebrating the scion. The festival consists of many attractions, like venturing through the Bazaar in the Labyrinth Cliffs, collecting Sky Crystals, wondering where Kookoochoo has gone, enjoying three new adventures, two races (Skimmer race and Dolyak race), a meta event similar to the Casino Blitz from Amnoon, many vendors, two activities, a diving goggle, a confused brown cow, a depressed Sylvari, as well as the Crown Pavilion, with Watchknights to battle, bosses to defeat and challenge enemies including five new ones to beat.  The whole event goes from July the 24th to August the 14th.

Determining The Length

The length of the event plays a huge role in how much we do every day. The longer the event is the less we need to do each day. The shorter the event the more we need to do daily. This is the reason why I love developers telling how long events go. Since I write this on the 25th of July while waiting for the Skimmer race to try the two minutes and 30 seconds of achievement, I will calculate from the 25th on. So if we start counting on the 25th that's seven days until the next month and 14 more days until August the 14th. So we got 21 days for our event. Of course, you could argue that today doesn't really count as a day anymore and the event may end prematurely or while people are still at work on the 14th of August. Following the calculation and using your number of days left should be doable I think.

Getting Relevant Achievements

Next up let's look through the achievements and find the ones that fall into the category of achievements I usually calculate for this. These are achievements that would take too long to do in one day or are limited by some kind of time gate. A lot of the achievements that are probably going to be repeatable every year from the Four Winds Customs category fall into these. The Queen's Gauntlet basically contains almost only single time achievements except for doing a few fights and a few fights with a gambit. I'm not going to list those but doing one or more every day is enough for those. Crown Pavilion features doing the Boss Blitz meta event ten times and killing 50 of each category of enemy. I'm also not going to take these into consideration since they're done rather quickly. Most of the Festival of the Four Winds achievements consist of collecting something, which makes more sense to do in one run on your own or with a guide. The rest is basically do something once except for the Bundle Plunderer, which requires you to collect 250 Bundles of Loot from the meta. When I did the meta I usually about 50 in each round which means you're done in 2 meta events if you know where the event is placed in which phase, so again, nothing to worry about.

The only interesting one here is the Zephyrite Lost and Found, which can be done in a few runs on the map but let's list this one anyways.

Our final list contains:

• Spectral Hand of the Market
• Boss of Bosses
• Four Winds Gale
• Master of Markets
• Ace Racer
• Zephyrite Lost and Found

Spectral Hand Of The Market

Did you miss him already? Drooburt is back! This time he's not interested in candy, sweets or something to eat. This time he wants our Favor of the Bazaar and Favor of the Pavilion. Oh, and the Favor of the Festival. For the achievement, we need to open 10 of his Mystery Bags for each tier. With five tiers we will need 10 * 5 = 50 of these bags. These only contain two junk items and a masterwork or better gear item. For the Favor of the Bazaar and Favor of the Pavilion, you get each two Mystery Bags. If you get the Favor of the Festival which is created from the both previously named favors you get five Mystery Bags. This means you need 50 / 5 = 10 Favors of the Festival. Worst case you only get one favor each then you need 50 / 2 = 25 favors. If you have the Favor of the Bazaar lying around from three years ago, first of all, kudos, secondly good job, you have this achievement done. Since you can only get one to two favors a day, this will take at most 10 or 25 days.

Boss Of Bosses

This achievement is given by doing the Boss Blitz meta in the Crown Pavilion. Each rank of this achievement needs the meta to be finished five times. There are five ranks which results in 5 * 5 = 25 runs. If we divide this number by 21 days this means we need to do 25 / 21 = 1.19 or about two every 4th day and one each other day.

Four Winds Gale

For the Four Winds Gale, we need to do three daily achievements five times for each tier. Featuring ten tiers in total this means we need to do the daily 50 times. Since we can only do 21 to 22 this year, this means it'll take 50 / 21 = 2.38 or three years to finish this event if it returns every year from now on.

Master of Markets

This is technically done in a few seconds if you just spend some Globs of Ectoplasm or other materials you have lying around (like tier five materials), but... if we break it down to every day we need to open and buy 20 bags for each tier, with five tiers given. That means 20 * 5 = 100 bags. Which are 100 / 21 = 4.76 or almost five bags every day?

Ace Racer

Not a fan of racings, yet you still want this achievement? No problem! You only need to do three races per completion and five completions to cap the achievement points. That's only 3 * 5 = 15 races! Over 21 days that's 15 / 21 = 0.71. So, doing a race about every one to two days.

Zephyrite Lost And Found

For this achievement, you will need to find Zephyrite kite baskets throughout Tyria. These can be found at least in the level 15 to 25 areas or maps. They have a basket symbol on the map and are pretty much spread over large portions of the map. You basically just have to get to it and open it. And that 1 ... 60 times. If you do 60 / 21 = 2.86 or two to three every day. You're gonna have this achievement done.

There You Go!

Festival of the Four Winds without procrastination. With this being finally written it's time for the raid and the respective stream.

Guild Wars 2: Danger Level at Desmina's Platform - Part 2

Okay, I had a change of heart. I'm going to release the Desmina research results now because I still can't find the time to continue and secondly because I want to keep any following data for different research.

Procedure

What I did was the following. I looked at the two wall spawns, three wall spawns and four wall spawns differently and tracks them separately. Then I added them all together but also looked at them added together keeping the duration of their phases in mind, created a weighted result basically.

I also calculated the percentage of coverage using the number of walls appearing at one point and dividing it by the amount of total wall spawns.

The Result

Size of Data

I have accumulated a total amount of 266 two sized waves which means 532 wave parts in the first phase. I've tracked 1201 three sized waves which consist of 3603 wave parts and I have tracked 444 four sized waves which are 1776 wall pieces. In total it accumulates to 1911 waves and 5911 wave parts. The first phase is weighted at 0.1, the second phase takes 57% of the fight assuming constant damage and the third phase is 33%. The weighted count results in 857.69 waves.

Two Wall Spawn

108 113 110 122 111 101 106 103 105 104 92 97 94 106 95 104 109 106 118 107 97 102 99 111 100

40.60% 42.48% 41.35% 45.86% 41.73% 37.97% 39.85% 38.72% 39.47% 39.10% 34.59% 36.47% 35.34% 39.85% 35.71% 39.10% 40.98% 39.85% 44.36% 40.23% 36.47% 38.35% 37.22% 41.73% 37.59%

266 or 532 may not be a big data set, yet it does not seem to try to reach an equal amount in every field. This has been confusing me. If we assume that it is completely random shouldn't each field have the same amount in the long run? That's not the case here though. There are what seems like random oddities all over it. Of course, I might have made some mistake here and there but none that should affect the result by that amount. Apparently, there are a few safer places as shown by the darker green in the percentage view.

Three Wall Spawn

732 729 715 711 706 723 720 699 693 699 726 715 694 686 693 692 692 669 672 676 752 759 738 729 735

60.95% 60.70% 59.53% 59.20% 58.78% 60.20% 59.95% 58.20% 57.70% 58.20% 60.45% 59.53% 57.79% 57.12% 57.70% 57.62% 57.62% 55.70% 55.95% 56.29% 62.61% 63.20% 61.45% 60.70% 61.20%

Looking at this result... okay, seriously. Is this generated using Perlin noise? If you assume this to be a height map, it could be some area straight out of Minecraft. That's soo weird. Nevertheless, it shows the safer places during the longest phase turn out to be in the lower right part of the platform. Now, this might have been the result of how we pulled her,  however, I've checked fifteen different days for between half an hour to three hours and our tanks start off with a pattern but switch to going wherever the walls and exploding deads lead us to. Usually, when something is random there is still a pattern behind it. For example, when throwing a dice randomly each side should appear an equal amount of times at some point.

Four Wall Spawn

444 376 366 372 444 368 298 290 296 368 361 291 283 289 361 377 308 299 305 377 444 376 367 372 444

100.00% 84.68% 82.43% 83.78% 100.00% 82.88% 67.12% 65.32% 66.67% 82.88% 81.31% 65.54% 63.74% 65.09% 81.31% 84.91% 69.37% 67.34% 68.69% 84.91% 100.00% 84.68% 82.66% 83.78% 100.00%

Here, we can see that 2 pieces are always forced to spawn in the corners resulting in the corners being covered by each wall that spawns at some point. This also - due to the nature of how the walls or waves move - results in very dangerous corners. This doesn't matter too much since the outer ring should be nearly impossible to touch without dying as the platform has been decreased to more or less a 3x3 area. Obviously, the middle is safer now. Besides from this fixed field, it seems like the corners and edges are yet a tiny bit safer than the middle. Whether or not this matter depends on how much you believe in numbers. I don't think this is the case though. We have three safe fields and two walls will always occupy two of those three safe fields at some point. That means 33% of a lane is going to be safe while the rest - the 66% - are covered by a wave. If this is completely random each area in the middle should end up with a coverage of 66%.

Total Coverage

1284 1218 1191 1205 1261 1192 1124 1092 1094 1171 1179 1103 1071 1081 1149 1173 1109 1074 1095 1160 1293 1237 1204 1212 1279

67.19% 63.74% 62.32% 63.06% 65.99% 62.38% 58.82% 57.14% 57.25% 61.28% 61.70% 57.72% 56.04% 56.57% 60.13% 61.38% 58.03% 56.20% 57.30% 60.70% 67.66% 64.73% 63.00% 63.42% 66.93%

If we sum up all the walls and touched areas we get this total coverage. So, if you're interested in an overall that does not care about the length of each phase this is the result. The safest area in the middle, still. Obviously, since the last phase strictly prohibits us from moving into the outer ring. Is this the reason people came up with the idea that big walls spawn when you go outside? To scare people from staying in the middle without explaining it mathematically? Hmm...

Weighted Coverage

623.04 576.69 563.67 567.17 612.16 567.55 519.86 505.17 506.81 557.53 563.25 512.12 497.43 499.21 549.36 560.55 514.82 498.6 505.11 553.97 630.54 588.49 573.13 573.81 623.53

72.64% 67.24% 65.72% 66.13% 71.37% 66.17% 60.61% 58.90% 59.09% 65.00% 65.67% 59.71% 58.00% 58.20% 64.05% 65.36% 60.02% 58.13% 58.89% 64.59% 73.52% 68.61% 66.82% 66.90% 72.70%

For the weighted coverage, we consider the length of each phase as well. This means the first phase plays hardly to no role and the last phase only a bit. We still get a result similar to the total coverage, however. There are some slight changes in percentages here and there, overall nothing new.

So, There We Have It!

An analysis of which area of the platform is the safest and whether or not there is a pattern to the coverage. The end results show that there's more at play than just randomness. At least that's what it seems like to me. Except for the fourth phase, the total coverage and weighted coverage, it pretty much seems like some kind of noise function.

Fun

I've created this height map from the three-wave data using Python and Matplotlib. It's always fun to do these things. Seriously, Python is awesome.

The Different Layers of Sex

A few posts ago I mentioned that sex is a topic in on itself and now I'm gonna throw myself into the hassle to shine a light on the different layers of sex. Maybe we can figure out why it is considered to be handled so immaturely in video games. This post may not be suited for children below sex education age, then again I don't think any of my posts are suited for that age of an audience.

Different Layers?

Now, some people may wonder what I mean by different layers. This has nothing to do with the act of sex. Instead, it is more about the intent or reason to have it. I don't know how many people are part of which category and this may be arbitrary. Sometimes multiple layers may be intended or maybe none of the ones listed in this post. I can say one thing at least: Sex is not all about pleasure and with that said, let's tackle the respective layer.

Pleasure

The first layer is something that might be very common especially in the younger generation. Of course, it exists. If it feels good then why wouldn't people do it? There are some consequences with this though. Sexual diseases, a chance for impregnation, especially if something goes wrong and something can always go wrong (Murphy's Law). This layer probably applies to everyone to a certain degree, however, I think it differs in strength from person to person, so that other layers are stronger shown. It's kinda like a policy or rules that are checked one after another if you see it more technical.

A person who has their focus on this layer probably doesn't care too much about who they're doing it with. This means that there's a high chance for these people to be pansexual or omnisexual. Whether they are or not also depends on social influences, at least as long homosexual is seen as a weird thing.

Love

Some people may see this as the opposite of the previous layer, there's no doubt that one of the reasons for sex is because you love someone. Whether or not love is some biological thing that drives us crazy for a person or makes us wanna sleep with them is something I'm not gonna debate here. The fact is that people who love each other have an interest in an intimate, romantic or affectionate sexual time. I would assume people in which this layer is strong have a great interest in doing it with their special one only. (heh, obviously) Also, this usually has not so much to do with having the looks. It's not about bodily features but more about the relationship. The only downside of this layer is, that the feeling of love may change over time. From experience, I would say love does not go away or decrease of disappearing, it instead kind of calms down so to say. Most couples are probably together as long the love is strong and once it starts to calm down they break up as they don't feel like they "love" each other anymore. Worst case scenario they break up after having a child already. The saying that people are together "because they're used to being together" may not necessarily be true. I think it is possible to still feel attracted or love a person without those tingly feelings in the tummy or being all into them. As I already mentioned, it's a different kind of love; More calm, less wild.

Reproduction

If you're talking about sex, you just can't leave out the biological reason behind it. Reproduction or giving birth to new life is a part of sex just like pleasure and love or intimacy. Additionally, I think there's no doubt that reproduction is a goal for some people in the world. Just imagine being able to teach and show your child the world. I can imagine that being a unique and awesome experience. Though I have heard of people not having any interest in having children, birthing them into the terrible world as is, people hating children and some being afraid of the pain or exhaustion from the first few years, the crying and aggressiveness or jerkiness of children and on, and on, and on. Some may even say no, due to the costs that are created. Whether or not this can be linked to an unconscious attempt of regulating overpopulation is another topic on its own.

Rituals

I already mentioned that I journey through the world of magick, it's interesting, gives a different perspective of the world and how things work and it's really interesting philosophically. Also, it tries to answer questions we can't answer yet. Anyways, from magick, I know that sexual intercourse can be used for rituals. Sexual magick is actually a thing that is used to channel the energies that exist during intercourse and use those to fulfill your goal or wish. This is done by two people of any sex who agree to pleasure each other while having the intent, goal or wish kept in mind. The climax is then used to release the intent, goal or wish into the unconscious. This is then followed by total silence and forgetting the act in an attempt to allow the energies to do their job in fulfilling the intent, goal or wish. At least that's how it can be described. What exactly happens is hard to tell, as there's not enough information on that. At least I don't know the details I never participated in or read into details on this topic.

That's It

As I already mentioned, these are the layers I know of, as humans can be infinitely complex there can be infinitely many layers and all of them can have different weights. Additionally, you can also see sex as a ritual to become more intimate with the person you love mixing the ritual and love layer with each other. Also, don't forget that these aren't all layers, these are the ones I would say I have noticed or that I can imagine existing. Nonetheless, it is important to analyze sex and sexuality scientifically and to ponder over it to address it in video games or other media. The more you know about it and which type of sexual behavior matches which person and vice versa the easier it is to create a befitting character or to fit the right sexual behavior to the right character. It's also an element that further completes the style of characters and type that you want to create for your game and it's also important especially in sex games that currently only focus on the pleasure layer. Even if those games try to make a romantic character I've seen it fail too often.