Absolute Virtue & You: A Learning Experience

[Rocl]

JUST BECAUSE IT WAS RELEASED AFTER ABSOLUTE VIRTUE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN'T USE IT.


Does anyone else want to take over this thread? Twenty pages of retard have killed my faith in humanity.

[HadesBothari]

JUST BECAUSE IT WAS RELEASED AFTER ABSOLUTE VIRTUE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN'T USE IT.


Does anyone else want to take over this thread? Twenty pages of retard have killed my faith in humanity.

thank you!?!?!? i was just telling myself that as I drove home for lunch

Edit: Can we use Cor to reset 2hrs? Please?

[Jackyl]

Should lock all AV threads until someone can PM a screenshot of AV dying or AV below 50% or something to a mod, then they can start a new thread worth clicking to read.

[ronin sparthos]

Should lock all AV threads until someone can PM a screenshot of AV dying or AV below 50% or something to a mod, then they can start a new thread worth clicking to read.

By those standards, see you in '09 for the next 'hint' brought to you by Square-Enix - along with the next Rubiks Cube HNM.

[BerenTebogo]

JUST BECAUSE IT WAS RELEASED AFTER ABSOLUTE VIRTUE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN'T USE IT.


Does anyone else want to take over this thread? Twenty pages of retard have killed my faith in humanity.

Make me a mod for a day, I promise, I'll fix it.

[*Shinzon*]

Should lock all AV threads until someone can PM a screenshot of AV dying or AV below 50% or something to a mod, then they can start a new thread worth clicking to read.

By those standards, see you in '09 for the next 'hint' brought to you by Square-Enix - along with the next Rubiks Cube HNM.

We'll be waiting that long anyway because SE isn't going to beat it for us. And since theres such a low portion of success at getting him anywhere, yea that seems about right. The more people do JoL and AV the more we'll learn. People want to sit on JoL pop sets be my guest, I know theres a shell on Kujata holding 7 JoL pop sets. So glad we're still the only ones to give this a serious attempt.

[Seditedi]

JUST BECAUSE IT WAS RELEASED AFTER ABSOLUTE VIRTUE DOES NOT MEAN YOU CAN'T USE IT.


Does anyone else want to take over this thread? Twenty pages of retard have killed my faith in humanity.

I never said you CAN'T use it.. I just said SE didn't make it necessary to use it in order to defeat AV. Obviously in the video the dev team didn't trigger the use of Meteor, therefore didn't need fealty to resist it >_>.

I guess you aren't thinking on the same wavelength as me, but it's not likely that a JA implemented a year or so after AV was released would be required to kill it.

Fealty would definitely be a viable means to handle Meteor, but from what the video has shown; you can limit AV's use of Meteor to 0.

[Rocl]

Here's what I'm going to do; someone (preferably someone like Mojo or Shinzon, maybe even Sath) PM me a list of debunked and somewhat feasible theories. I literally lost faith this morning when I opened the new pages seeing the same old shit over and over. Once this is done, I will make a locked sticky with the theories needing testing for those LS who will be fighting JoL soon. Afterwards, it would be appreciated if those people who tested the theories sent me a PM with the results and I will update the thread (and edit the title to reflect this), and this thread can fade into obscurity and worthless theories that border on the idiocy of Ebon Panels.

Fealty would definitely be a viable means to handle Meteor, but from what the video has shown; you can limit AV's use of Meteor to 0.

If they showed us the entire fight, I would agree. They didn't though, they showed some cut and paste bullshit.

[BerenTebogo]

Probably just be easier for all 3 of us to discuss it and then get back to you on the list, I'm about to sleep for 3 hours waking up 7 times for 1 minute each though, so either I'll PM out my AIM SN when I wake up, or Mojo / Shin can PM me and I'll IM when I wake up.

[Nagamaki]

I guess you aren't thinking on the same wavelength as me, but it's not likely that a JA implemented a year or so after AV was released would be required to kill it.

That would be the retard wavelength?

In the video, AV doesn't Manafont. In the video, players use their 2hours at will, and in the video the aerns in the surrounding area apparently just don't exist.

Fealty will allow people to survive Meteor, and thus live to attempt different things on AV rather than wiping, killing morale, exp and whatever progress has been made.

IT DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER THAT SE DIDN'T INTEND IT TO BE DONE LIKE THAT. AV has been in the goddamn game for close to 3 full years and its still not been killed without glitch exploits, its pretty goddamn clear nobody knows exactly what the fuck SE intended players to do, including all the crackpot theory hordes.

[Zoot]

Honestly if you had like, 30 paladins with fealty merited you could possibly even survive through a wipe lol. But man that isn't feasible.

Don't need 30. If you can restrict it to 79%, 59% and 39% (assumed pattern), then you need 3 PLDs with Fealty (or 1 PLD with 2hr reset twice). Stop damage at 81%, Send one/two BLM(s) (sacrifice) in to do the nuking keep everyone else 30' away from PLD(s) and have the blm nuke past the 79 mark. The PLD might need to invincible to survive normal damage as he may be out of support range.

That's like why I said "through a wipe" and not just when AV manafonts. Basically meaning when you get meteored before comet. Was kind of a joke. AV needs alot of support. Having all your support dead kind of sucks if they all die to meteor.

Sath, you've fought AV? Didn't realize, my mistake.

[Lyriane]

Two things to contribute. After reading the whole of this thread and most of the previous, I haven't seen substantial thought devoted to either topic.

-----

First, while everyone has focused this whole time on the use of Manafont in the video, I think it should be noted that SE's whms ALWAYS and ONLY used Benediction in response to AV's Soul Voice. Always and only is exactly the kind of pattern we're looking for in this video - it implies some direct connection. What connection do these two SPs have? The obvious answer is that these are the SPs of two aerns that share local spawn points. What effect might this have on AV? Unknown. It _could_ be related to preventing the use of Benediction but that would be jumping to conclusions. How many times must it be repeated to have an effect? Unknown. What is the window in which to execute? Unknown.

Well... correction. Reviewed the list, and it appears that 1 whm also used Bene in response to an Astral Flow, near the end of the fight. I wouldn't say this necessarily destroys the correlation though. Benediction seems like a good response to AF regardless of any other effects, could've been needed to stay alive. I still think this is an important note.

----

Second, I think it's worthwhile to consider: why were people able to lock AV's 2-hours in the past, and why was it considered a glitch? What type of coding mistake could have led to this situation? Discerning this could be very valuable. To state my conclusions first, it's possible that AV maintains a list of usable 2-hours and that this list was incorrectly able to be reduced to zero, thus he tries to choose one from an empty list and ends up in undefined-behavior-land, possibly even erroring out of his AI subroutines on the server side completely. SE's fix, therefore, may not have changed the original method. It's likely that, instead, whatever was locking two-hours then is still effective now, but simply more limited. If as SE stated two-hours were never meant to be completely locked, possible fixes include a minimum on his pool (perhaps 3/15 two hours are always available to him) or the effect wearing off and needing to be reapplied at various intervals.

...too bad then that, as I understand it, nobody was ever quite sure what exactly was locking him in the first place.

But anyway, digging deeper. Somewhere on the server, some code is running called something like Monster.ChooseAction(...). Inside is some logic that takes into account state data maintained by the object, or made available by the caller. This will probably be performed every frame, although presumably most calls will find that he is not ready to choose a new action, and return immediately.

AV's logic is obviously unique, but may call other existing AI subroutines to perform common tasks (like creating a list of targets, or maintaining the hate list, or performing regular melee attacks). If the flaw were in these other routines, it's likely that other monsters (especially those most closely related behaviorally, such as other Aerns) would have been affected at some point. Since that wasn't the case, it's likely that the flaw was in AV's own unique logic.

With me? Here's where it gets interesting. There's really only two possible places for the error to have been. One is in the phase of detecting the conditions and the other is responding to those conditions. Of the two, it's unlikely that SE screwed up and accidentally made AV care about and react to something they don't want him to. That would be an oversight on an entirely different scale to the latter case, I'd go so far as to say that would have been a major design bug. It's far more likely that, upon detecting the stimulus, they simply made a mistake in applying his intended behavior.

When AV was "locked" I do suspect that on the server side, the state passed in to this function was borked in such a way that the function threw some kind of exception which was caught at a higher level. An edge case such as a data structure being empty was allowed to occur and not handled. Exception propagates up until a handler notices and rights things, program resumes, but Monster.ChooseAction itself failed to finish. No action was chosen, and the state responsible for the failure wasn't changed ensuring that the same thing happens again next frame. As a result, AV ceased to do everything that function was responsible for until he was either killed, or enough state was reset to stop throwing that error. This entire chain of events is a common result of simple coding errors and completely explains the observed behavior when AV was lockable.

Finally, there are two common ways to fix this error. One is to handle the case in such a way that it stops throwing an exception (in the example above, checking for empty list or whatever) and the second is to revise the state so that the case can no longer occur (such as by making sure to never remove the last item from the list). SE could have done either one or both of these and it would be very difficult for us to detect which.

This is why I do NOT think it likely that the conditions he responds to have changed. It may not be possible to completely lock him down any longer, but there should still be some effect. Perhaps by combining the best found ways of setting up the old method, with the new information from the video and this recent testing, we can make some more headway.

The grain of salt here is that, IF this were an elevated exception case in the original glitch, then there isn't any particular reason to think that the intended behavior was related to his 2-hour usage at all. The fact that he stopped acting would be a result of code NOT running, rather than code running. However, there are other types of glitches that could be involved where the code is running but simply taking the wrong path. Limiting the choice or frequency of two-hours in that case is quite possibly intended.

Just food for thought.
Edit: added an important which.

[Zoot]

If you look at the last page, you'll find the answer as to why it was probably a glitch. I tend to agree with Ismarc.

[Antithesis]

Erased my other post cause it was just a little joke XD

EDIT

I heavly apologiez if someone stated this in a previous page but:

I was whatching the AV video again and I noticed something (English version of AV video.) The first couple of second when the zoom into the chatlog (meaning first zoom in) there obviously zooming in to show something important in the chatlog. This timefram in the video is 2:10 through 2:41. In the first zoom up (either im stupid and blind) I noticed that Absolute Virtue does not use a 2 hour ability. Now im starting to wonder why exactly DID they zoom in for those couple of seconds? Im gonna keep whatching to see if anything new pops out.

Sorry again if this had been posted earlier ; ;.

EDIT #2:

Again sorry >.>;;

In the 2cd zoom up I noticed AV used Chainspell and then casted Aeroga IV and it still went off instant cast after the other people had use their 2 hour abilities..

[drizztwest]

shrug ..... SE has been very adamit about NOT wanting to nerf AV at all. To me when they have been asked about "OMG WHEN ARE YOU NERFING AV?" there attitude.... from all the responses I've witness has been... p u s s y try harder.Its like they have 10 hints and they'll throw out one (if pushed hard enough) and wait 6 months to see if that the one that worked. This old farts opion is there just getting tired of the questions and in one last effort they threw out this "video" (like they said they would at fan fest) to see if this would finally do it. They talked about a "Enfeebling item" in the past. Update is coming ... the video is out weeks before the update, with enough time that if the video worked they wouldn't need said item... if not then bam they'll add said item into the update and be done with AV for good. If they do end up adding the item it be a statement that says yes we admit AV is NOT killable as is. It would show them loosing face (honor) and IMHO is why they have fought tooth and nail to not "nerf" AV or have some "Enfeebling item" for so long. So why would they give in now .....cause like your little kids that asked you to do something.., after the 234567890 time they ask... your like f00k it GO AHEAD just leave me the f00k A L O N E~~~















yeah ....... i had to smoke lotta weed to come up with that shiot ^^)b

[Lordender]

EDIT #2:

Again sorry >.>;;

In the 2cd zoom up I noticed AV used Chainspell and then casted Aeroga IV and it still went off instant cast after the other people had use their 2 hour abilities..

If you look closely they do not use their 2hours when AV "readies" chainspell they hesitated until the log actually says AV "uses" chainspell then they blow their 2hours leaving me to believe using your 2hour when AV "readies" (whatever) 2hr will do nothing.

[Kais]

shrug ..... SE has been very adamit about NOT wanting to nerf AV at all. To me when they have been asked about "OMG WHEN ARE YOU NERFING AV?" there attitude.... from all the responses I've witness has been... p u s s y try harder.Its like they have 10 hints and they'll throw out one (if pushed hard enough) and wait 6 months to see if that the one that worked. This old farts opion is there just getting tired of the questions and in one last effort they threw out this "video" (like they said they would at fan fest) to see if this would finally do it. They talked about a "Enfeebling item" in the past. Update is coming ... the video is out weeks before the update, with enough time that if the video worked they wouldn't need said item... if not then bam they'll add said item into the update and be done with AV for good. If they do end up adding the item it be a statement that says yes we admit AV is NOT killable as is. It would show them loosing face (honor) and IMHO is why they have fought tooth and nail to not "nerf" AV or have some "Enfeebling item" for so long. So why would they give in now .....cause like your little kids that asked you to do something.., after the 234567890 time they ask... your like f00k it GO AHEAD just leave me the f00k A L O N E~~~















yeah ....... i had to smoke lotta weed to come up with that shiot ^^)b

Oh my fucking god

[Maxxthepenguin]

shrug ..... SE has been very adamit about NOT wanting to nerf AV at all. To me when they have been asked about "OMG WHEN ARE YOU NERFING AV?" there attitude.... from all the responses I've witness has been... p u s s y try harder.Its like they have 10 hints and they'll throw out one (if pushed hard enough) and wait 6 months to see if that the one that worked. This old farts opion is there just getting tired of the questions and in one last effort they threw out this "video" (like they said they would at fan fest) to see if this would finally do it. They talked about a "Enfeebling item" in the past. Update is coming ... the video is out weeks before the update, with enough time that if the video worked they wouldn't need said item... if not then bam they'll add said item into the update and be done with AV for good. If they do end up adding the item it be a statement that says yes we admit AV is NOT killable as is. It would show them loosing face (honor) and IMHO is why they have fought tooth and nail to not "nerf" AV or have some "Enfeebling item" for so long. So why would they give in now .....cause like your little kids that asked you to do something.., after the 234567890 time they ask... your like f00k it GO AHEAD just leave me the f00k A L O N E~~~















yeah ....... i had to smoke lotta weed to come up with that shiot ^^)b

[*Shinzon*]

Probably just be easier for all 3 of us to discuss it and then get back to you on the list, I'm about to sleep for 3 hours waking up 7 times for 1 minute each though, so either I'll PM out my AIM SN when I wake up, or Mojo / Shin can PM me and I'll IM when I wake up.

Ya, can aim me or PM for it and I'll compile a list of whatever I have for the time being.

[ronin sparthos]

shrug ..... SE has been very adamit about NOT wanting to nerf AV at all. To me when they have been asked about "OMG WHEN ARE YOU NERFING AV?" there attitude.... from all the responses I've witness has been... p u s s y try harder.Its like they have 10 hints and they'll throw out one (if pushed hard enough) and wait 6 months to see if that the one that worked. This old farts opion is there just getting tired of the questions and in one last effort they threw out this "video" (like they said they would at fan fest) to see if this would finally do it. They talked about a "Enfeebling item" in the past. Update is coming ... the video is out weeks before the update, with enough time that if the video worked they wouldn't need said item... if not then bam they'll add said item into the update and be done with AV for good. If they do end up adding the item it be a statement that says yes we admit AV is NOT killable as is. It would show them loosing face (honor) and IMHO is why they have fought tooth and nail to not "nerf" AV or have some "Enfeebling item" for so long. So why would they give in now .....cause like your little kids that asked you to do something.., after the 234567890 time they ask... your like f00k it GO AHEAD just leave me the f00k A L O N E~~~















yeah ....... i had to smoke lotta weed to come up with that shiot ^^)b

Is that you Rambus?