I'm sorry, dude, but I just don't like it. The little specks of icons are too small -- it's hard to make out what they are. The placement is awkward, too. But mostly the whole thing is just more confusing -- I can't imagine trying to explain to new members here why some weapons have teeny little icons next to the big ones, and what exactly that means. The system right now works fine -- if a weapon's fractional, it's stated, and we're told what the exact fraction is. I find that easier to understand, and I think it's enough. Icons would be superfluous.
The thing about that 0.1 is that it's almost always going to be rounded down to 4 which fractional display shows clearly that it may as well be ignored.
I don't think we'll be needing to explain the tiny icons much. We pretty much only have to say "Displayed icons are how they appear in the battledome but the small icons are how IDB shows, visually, the weight of the icon." Just a single sentence. Unlikely that it will be asked about though in my opinion. Heck it may even reduce some of the questions people are constantly asking about fractional icons anyhow. Some people have asked if fractional meant all icons are fractional and if the weapon deals only 0.3 of what it displays. This can show that fractional only affect the last icon.
It may be superfluous, but it sure as heck can increase browsing speed through a large list of weaponry. For the weapons A & C board I'm constantly looking up weapons and occasionally get excited to find a new possible gem, only to be disappointed after trying to calculate its damage.
The the Gold 00 Hog Battlecard was such a case. I had written a article on single-use weaponry and, at a glance, G00HB appeared as an alternative to
Snow Mudball because it looked like it would average around 13 icons. I was thinking that this was nice and could be less vulnerable to a single shield than the mudball. I had added it to my list when I decided to calculate the exact iconage... lost almost two whole icons and made it way to expensive and comparable to the much cheaper
Sand Snowball
I believe the time saved by instantly recognizing fractionals more than makes up for time spent in making the display and time wasted on false hope.
professorelite Wrote:The thing about that 0.1 is that it's almost always going to be rounded down to 4 which fractional display shows clearly that it may as well be ignored.
I don't think we'll be needing to explain the tiny icons much. We pretty much only have to say "Displayed icons are how they appear in the battledome but the small icons are how IDB shows, visually, the weight of the icon." Just a single sentence. Unlikely that it will be asked about though in my opinion. Heck it may even reduce some of the questions people are constantly asking about fractional icons anyhow. Some people have asked if fractional meant all icons are fractional and if the weapon deals only 0.3 of what it displays. This can show that fractional only affect the last icon.
It may be superfluous, but it sure as heck can increase browsing speed through a large list of weaponry. For the weapons A & C board I'm constantly looking up weapons and occasionally get excited to find a new possible gem, only to be disappointed after trying to calculate its damage.
First of all, there's already an explanation for fractional icons on the idb
here and no it's not just a useless number if it's a .1 or even if a weapon that shows up with .05 . With a high enough boost, those .1 fractionals can add up to a decent amount (which is the reason we know that there is a fractional icon.) With the damage calculater you'd learn that .1 icons can add 1-2 damage onto you attack which could be useful if a high icon weapon comes out with a .1 fractional icon on it. Which should definately not be ignored if a weapon you find is capable of doing a little more damage or have a better use for a fair price.
When browsing through weaponry the actual icons are displayed. With the little icons you're proposing I would either skip over the weapon thinking my computer is having a glitch or I'd have to READ the actual icons it has writen under it anyway and maybe even READ the research if it can do a range of icons. Who here would be able to know which small icon is which fractional by looking at the picture? They'd have to look below anyway. It's just useless pixels there to confuse even more people. And it gets even worse when you're trying to show
Honey Potion's fractional in the min icons. People would start sending corrections saying that the max seems to do one less icon since you'd be shoving two fractionals in there and on neopets it'll only show one full icon when its max attack is done. It'll therefor look like it does more damage than it really does.
And plus, not everybody has good eyes. Any people that use idb that have bad eyes would only see a blurry speck or something where you put an icon which may lead one to believe that it does fake icons when it could actually aid a high strength boost pet.
Besides we're not lazy people that just pick a random weapon because it looks good without thinking about the icons types and maybe even reading the little part that says the actual icons or its average icons. With your method, nobody's method of deciding between weapons would change. We'd just have to scroll down a little more when searching through weapons and the people of the idb would spend months putting little icons in that won't even be paid attention to and having to change the pictures as well as the number underneith every time anyone finds out a more exact amount of icons for a weapon. There's currently 2,312 weapons on the idb, and there'll be useless change to 1/4th of them? There's no reason to put tiny icons down while testing it since we're looking for the exact stats of the weapon anyway, so there's no reason to do it on the idb its-self.
You wish to waste months of time and confusion to get rid of 5 seconds of false excitement?
Lets say 600 weapons need updating, which is likely exagerating it... each update probably takes less than a minute... but for the sake of showing the worse-case scenario,??lets say it takes two minutes.
Let say each updater spends a modest 20 minutes a day to update... a mere 10 updates a day per updater.
Lets only assign two people this job...
That means it will take only 30 days to complete the job even with such ridiculous terms... Months..? Probably not that bad...
Now realistically updating will probably take about 30 seconds to update each item... especially considering after doing it repeatedly, they'd become quite skillful at doing it efficiently. Lets keep the two updaters and 600 weapons and the mere 20 minutes and it will take only a week...
It shouldn't be very hard to program a form to input fractionals for this. just add a sub routine to check for fractonals and display them and modify the one made for variable defense and voila, I imagine.
With the form, it could automatically decide how to size the icons so the updaters need not check the chart often. Updaters already add info to the IDB database through a form so there likely won't be a major change in how they do it.
Heck, somebody give me the script and the power to update and I'll have IDB fully updated with the new system in about a month, tops. >.>
You know, there comes a time when you have to let something go. It wasn't a BAD idea, but it's impractical and a little unnecessary. You've got tons of good ideas, so there's no need to dwell on this one.
BTW, the name "Brain Muffin" is obviously a parody of a bran muffin. I'm both surprised and ashamed that no one has pointed that out yet. However, it's possible that when they created the weapon, they didn't realize it was actually only one letter away from a real food
And the discussion moved to here..., now are you satisfied that theres enough people that dont agree with your idea?
thanks for the suggestion prof
i'm in the process of re-working a good portion of idb, and one of the changes is simply a numerical value of each weapon dedicated to "actual" icons (both att/def)
like some may have mentioned, having a 1-pixel icon represent .1 and a 3-pixel icon represent .2, there just a very clear distinction between the two. some may even miss the icon completely.
well, .1 and below is a 5x5 icon in the rounded (simplified) chart =)
Just to repeat, the charts are here:
http://www.neopets.com/~giganite
Yeah, unfortunately, the smaller fractionals can be missed.. that's why I put the alternate chart to the very bottom of giganite's page.. it's a little ugly though...
But perhaps missing them might not be so big a deal, because if they hardly can be seen when represented mathematically, then it is not that significant =)
(0.1 and smaller are represented by a 5x5 icon in the simplified chart... here's the math:
Regular icons are 18x18.... which is 324... 5x5 = 25... 25/324 = 0.0772, which is between 0.1 and 0... that's why I picked those numbers.)