The discussion below got me thinking again. In the past the whole Cabdru-in-silent thing really bugged me. However, timeline is important here....

If the order had gone like this :

Cabdru gets silent tower gear --> Cabdru builds huge axe

That would have been unkosher. I also *suspect* nep could have done just that, but chose not to.

But instead the order went like this :

Cabdru builds huge axe --> Cabdru gets silent tower gear

Given the stats on that character I don't think what he did was unreasonable. Dwoggurd, for instance, probably could have easily done the same if, oh, he hadn't up and deleted Nabburak when he did. It is purely a matter of mechanics. Give any player who knows how to get to those mobs the same character for their birthday, and they could probably kill the mobs.

As per defiance and gathering it early, if you read Nep's posts (here and on the 'other' board, hurr hurr hurr) regarding it he has given everyone all the clues they need to do it. No one has bothered to do it at the levels he has done it, but it isn't all that hard I think. Requires a little luck.

>As per defiance and gathering it early, if you read Nep's
>posts (here and on the 'other' board, hurr hurr hurr)
>regarding it he has given everyone all the clues they need to
>do it. No one has bothered to do it at the levels he has done
>it, but it isn't all that hard I think. Requires a little
>luck.

I still die doing that, incidentally. Heh.

One thing that I think has been missed in all of this is that PvM challenges are still a big appeal of the game for me as a player. Sure, I probably can round up a coalition of 9 people to go get Defiance if I'm a paladin, but it's more interesting to me to see if I can do it under more difficult conditions.

It's also a good way for me to see, as an area author, if I've made something too tough or if something doesn't work the way I thought it would. If I'm pulling out all the tricks I can think of and I still can't do something, probably, 90% of the players are going to be lost doing the same thing and I need to rethink it. (The other 10% is more clever than I am in that respect.)

I think the only thing that cab did that was "iffy" are all the 95-100% skills he had at 100 or so hours.

Including time to find and pk over 1 person an hour. Including time to actually rank.

Sorry. Don't add up, his explanations of how he got all those skills up that far as a fire giant just don't cover the gap between my experience with felar/duergar/cloud giants/fire giants etc and the reality of his skill/spell list (in my opinion).

but you know what. I don't really even care.

Heh. I've been coding with my own mud ideas for a large number of years. And I will admit, I thought of and half implemented a hidden flag that could be put on a 55+ imm's mortal characters that would increase the learning rate.

There is even a rationale to it. There is alot of mindless grind that goes on in playing a mort. Part of a higher-level imm's job, in my opinion, is to constantly help with the game balance between classes and different uses of skills and such. The best way to test these out is to play them in a live environment, so I'd rather have them spending their time testing those skills at 100%, than spending a few hundred hours getting them to 100%.



The short of it is, there is probably nothing nep or valg or anyone on the staff can say that would convince me that ZERO tinkering went on with respect to the long list of 100% skills on a fire giant that early in the character's life, short of letting me look at the code, and seeing logs of him averaging 8.44 skill improvements an hour with fire giant int....or averaging a skill up every 7.1 minutes or so.....even with +1 int over normal fire giants for a percentage of his life.

174 hours....1469 skill improvements (not counting scion power skill ups that aren't shown in pbf) 1469/174 = 8.44.....60/8.44 = 7.1


Factor in having to sleep for mana/hp/mv. movement time between fights/ranking areas. ranking area repop (all of which for me takes about 60%-80 of my characters life pre-hero, but I am willing to say takes significantly less for someone like nep who knows how to power it out efficiently) and I would not be surprised if he had to average a skill up every 2-5 minutes of actual fighting. Sorry. I don't care how many secrets you know of that are available to any mortal. No fire giant is going to average a skillup every 2-5 minutes or even every 7-10 minutes of fighting. I'd be hard pressed to believe an elf or gnome averaged that.

AND, that is assuming he practiced all of those skills to 75 in guild. Which in and of itself is a feat for a fire giant ap. If he only practiced some of those twice to 69, he will have had to average alot more skillups an hour.




But that doesn't bug me in the slightest. Even their outright denial doesn't bug me in the slightest. Because outright denial is the only sane way to deal with the significant portion of cf's populace that are conspiracy theorists and who venomously attack people because of their theories.

Good post though, pretty convincing on it's own. Though I have no idea how accurate those numbers are I think I'd agree with you just on the principle that so many 100%'s were fishy but not particularly unfair.

Yhorian

That is the problem with posts like those, they hide behind numbers that really does not say anything at all.

What method of lowbie practicing did cabdru use?
Did cabdru always use skills/weapons he had not perfected while ranking?
Did he remove things like recall/enhanced/bash that was already 100
Did he account for quests that add skill %?
Did he account for extra % through imm xp and the normal you get when you level up?
Did he account for cabdru using special items while spamming some spells? Both for increased learning and increased regeneration?
Did he account for the amount of time cabdru spent fighting extremely high level mobs?
Did he account for the skills that every char will have perfected at that many hours of play, regardless of practice? (second attack, third, meditation, fast healing etc)

That is the problem with posts like those, they hide behind numbers that really does not say anything at all.

Yup. And for the reasons you gave.

The phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" doesn't mean "knowledge is dangerous". It means if you try to draw conclusions based on incomplete or incorrect information, you're in danger of having conclusions that are both certain and wrong, which is generally worse than being ignorant.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

on the other side, there are things that might tip it the other way.

Like sure, he can spam blind and curse and all as soon as he has the mana, but he has to sleep or rest to regen the mana. And he isn't spamming while he is doing that.

And also, how many of those skills started at 63, and so would add another 12 skill improvements needed to get to where they were?

And how those numbers compare to other players. my last char I soloed to 47 or so, over 200 hours. Probably spent by far the highest percent of that chars life in combat compared to any of my past chars. that char was a dwarf with a whole bunch more int and wis than a fire giant. And my numbers were way behind cab.


My numbers were supposed to be a rough estimate. Of course I wasn't taking EVERYTHING into account in some sort of scientific statistical analysis. They were meant to give an idea of why I had the impression I did about his stack of 100's.

an aside, I've had many hero felar warriors, all of them tanks, all with better int/wis than fire giants and none of them have perfected third attack or fast healing by 100 hours.


My opinion isn't based on "He did better than me, he must have cheated". It's more based on the fact that I've played for alot of years now, and I've seen the general range of how long it takes characters to build up sets of 100%'s like that, both for my characters and for others, and looking at the pbf's and such, and it's my opinion that his just falls far enough outside the observed standard deviation to be somewhat "hinkey".

Am I saying there is 0% chance I'm wrong? nope. But I would be seriously surprised.

but, I'd like to stress again. I really don't mind it or care if there was some meddlin going on.

>Like sure, he can spam blind and curse and all as soon as he
>has the mana, but he has to sleep or rest to regen the mana.
>And he isn't spamming while he is doing that.

Assume no resting or sleeping for mana occured. This isn't that far from the truth. For example, an ivory amulet and a plethora of slow wands go a long, long way. Multiple pieces of gear that restore mana in combat help.

>And also, how many of those skills started at 63, and so would
>add another 12 skill improvements needed to get to where they
>were?

Don't forget learning from mistakes is 1-3%, for the skills in which it's applicable. Some skills only improve on successes, but others will be all or nearly all mistakes, so overall that probably about equals out.

>an aside, I've had many hero felar warriors, all of them
>tanks, all with better int/wis than fire giants and none of
>them have perfected third attack or fast healing by 100
>hours.

You probably don't spend enough time fighting then. :) I'd have to see what if anything I have logged in the way of a practice screen from early on, but I'm willing to bet third attack was well into the 90s before even 20 hours. (That's all with 15 int, FYI.)

I'm not a super practice nazi with every character I make, but when I want to pull out all the stops I can be damn efficient.

I'm reasonably certain your success is doable, just not with my current knowledge. I recently found a mana restore item, and I'm certain with that and some healing gear, you could fight nearly indefinitely at low levels practicing spells/skills simultaneously. The biggest problem I have with practice is always weapons, which go up too slowly from 90% up for me, and especially hand to hand, which always seems to stick at 98 or 99% for hours on end. Out of curiosity, how early did you perfect HTH, and the two-handed weapon skills? Right out of the gate, or get them to a high % and let them go up more naturally?

I'm not positive which way I went in this case, but I want to say up to ~90-95% very early and then somewhat more naturally from there. With a character that dumb, it's nice to see the level and immXP improves raise polearm from something like 95 to 97 rather than from 63 to 65.

Really, that seems to say to me that we should rework how those go slightly, but that's a thought for another thread.

Skills boosted by commerce/observation XP. There's no need to spam lore or careful vision, for example -- they're just going to go up enough from doing what I'm already doing.

For example, there may be a quest that ups all skills by x%.

Never heard of it, but doesn't mean that there isn't one.

Fire giants with two practices end up at 63, incidentally, not 69. :)

A couple skills and spells come in after 32 when his int went up, but not a lot.

Some things I did practice to 75, but I don't think very many.

Basically you have to assume that every better way you've found to practice a skill or discover efficiencies in the process (e.g., hey, I don't need this mana for practicing sword, I'll also work on blindness at the same time) over the years, I'm probably way past that, just by virtue of having played the game for a staggering number of hours over around 13 years. Something like, say, pick lock can be done a lot quicker than you'd think even with abysmal int, and I'll be thinking... hm, if I practice this up quick early, I'll find a way to kill someone with this skill later.

Levelling time for Cabdru was very minimal, considering the XP penalty; I came into most of a great set of gear (wide copper bracelets, etc.) at level 12 or so and never really had a bad levelling group. At worst, my groups were people who felt like really solid players even if they were playing a character that wasn't super awesome for levelling.

I have a tendency to be ruthlessly efficient and not stop to smell the roses enough as I'm playing a character. If I can't find someone to kill right then (that my character should be killing) and I can't find a great group to level with, I'm relentlessly practicing, etc. It's a not-entirely-good habit that I'll be trying to break.

I might be able to pull it off with a drow, but I am by far no true master of practicing like you are. That many hundreds with that few hours on a fire giant, I must know! Tell me all your secrets, or I shall cut off Larcat's toes.

I don't know ST, so I can't speak how easy it would be for Nabburak.
The area is in for many years but most of players still are far away from understanding it (including me). From a gameplaying point of view I believe it is too hard. Kuo-toa is hard too, but at least solvable.

Also, Cabdru had some shortcuts to build his huge axe.
Mana draining axe killed some people and I believe he was the first who has shown its power (though I may be mistaken).
He also got about 60+ charges (huge amount) by instant-killing a certain druid with his amulet, and I believe he also was the first who has shown its power. True, some years ago players actually obtained that power-item but as far as I now they never realized how it works.
Then he goes to ST and get eq which preserves his big axe.

I agree that the design is too hard. But that isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about if, given the character one of the current players who does know how to get to all those mobs could kill them with that character. I think yes.

Make all the consessions you want, Nep probably deserves them, but I have to voice just how much he made he ruined many of my aspirations.

Cabdru's biggest positive effect on the playerbase was providing a nice challenge for pkers. Attacking him never got old. But his biggest negative effect was completely mocking anyone who has ever dreamt of achieving something in ST. Cabdru made a public statement. And that was that only an immortal-played super-AP with full knowledge of ST has ever got any serious benefit from it. #### that.

The biggest mockery was him 'proving' it could be done. He didn't prove anything except that archmages go down at 0 hp like every other mob. He didn't 'test' anything except that he still knows how to pwn his own area. What are my realistic chances of doing the same? Depressingly improbable. And this is why I feel so cheated and angry. The area no longer looks like a super-hell challenge. It looks like a place idiots waste con on unlikely dreams. Idiots like me.

I don't know if there is a solution. It's a mega-hard place, that relies on HUGE amounts of insider knowledge and is only accessable to 5% of CF's characters. Maybe if more people were allowed in, the character-ruining punishment was lighter/reversable or if knowledge was more freely shared, then maybe there'd be a happy medium where I could -believe- forming a group of 3 to kill an archmage might happen. As it is, I don't, and Nep abusing that fantasy was too much.

Yhorian

Incidentally, I've definitely seen people who aren't me with most of that gear before.

If I'd known this would be such a sticking point I'd have done a 'Tower Hall of Fame' to keep track of these things as they happen like Scarabaeus' Inferno one.

Or at least a Tower hall of infamy starring all of the greatest bad oops moves you have seen watching your area eat people.

I know I would have to be in at least one of these, phooey

Was what happened with Cabdru justifiable, yes. Will the character always hold some sort of taint to some of the playerbase, yes. That will happen with any superpowered character. If it wasn't an imm playing him, then people would assume it was someone with imm connections. CF has always been that way and likely always will.

My only problem was the log you posted on dio's where you made the comment about irongrip. Where you said it was mistake not putting it up. Even though you knew that with that certain piece of eq you weren't in any real danger. :P

>My only problem was the log you posted on dio's where you made
>the comment about irongrip. Where you said it was mistake not
>putting it up. Even though you knew that with that certain
>piece of eq you weren't in any real danger. :P

I was, but not necessarily for the most obvious reasons. There's still some very, very important holes there that irongrip was still useful for.

Hopefully that's not so vague that you have no idea what I'm talking about.

nt

About right. I move we put an * next to Cabdru's pbf.

We got to be friends ic, and I got to hear about all of his escapades. He solved a pretty big hunk of the tower. I think Wungar did too.

Is there a log somewhere or just wild guesswork?

IF it is true, it would be from multiple kills, not a single kill. The druid was worth about ten charges.

nt

I dismiss this as mere hearsay just like 99% of the other "Cabdru did XX" rumors.

But as Nep says, he didn't get it from his area.

But there is a log of the druid dying to it and him getting 10 charges. He did kill that druid several times.

nt

.

nt