snickersnack
Well-known member
- Dec 23, 2007
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Sure, but Newtonian Gravitation is just incorrect, but it's good enough to get to the moon. So, lots of things are workable with an approximation.Funny thing is that a lot of the "factual" stuff about D2 is also just an approximation of the truth. The only people who can know anything about what actually happens are those that open a debugger and see what code is being executed as the game runs. Considering that Blizzard does not look kindly on this (i.e. it forbids it for D2:R and tolerates it for D2:L) and the PK follows that policy, we are in a position of getting essentially no information on how D2:R works under the hood. Which is why you can't do anything but speculate when it comes to D2:R. (or break the EULA)
When somebody starts with some math nonsense (1 != 0.999..., -1/12 or 6/2*3) it is usually easy to untangle it, considering that it is either plain wrong (1 != 0.999...), stating a correct fact via abuse of notation (for example shadowing one definition with another, i.e. the -1/12 stuff) or undefined in most circles (6/2*3, because some people think that precedence rules are anything but a notational convenience).
With D2 there is no true authority you can refer to when somebody says something wrong and there are very few commonly accepted definitions of stuff, which makes sense because we don't have the source code or a specification of the game and hence have to make up stuff as we go along. Even if you debug D2 you still only debugged it for your system, it might be completely different on e.g. a Mac, see for example the insane loading times that some users achieved on a Mac, which where not reproducible on PCs.
I'm not talking about details. I'm talking about a website claiming that a new runeword only works in diadems, when that's not how D2 runewords work. Anyone who plays D2 looking at a screenshot of a new, as-yet-unavailable runeword in a diadem would know that it probably works in all helms. Some of what I read was just *silly* wrong.
Also, what's this -1/12 thing? Should I google that, or is that the one where 1+2+3+4+...=-1/12?
Edit: so I did google it. I remember seeing that Numberphile video a long time ago and being confused by it and thinking that there was some BS involved, but I never really looked into it more than that.
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