Thread:RedKnight7/@comment-99.246.16.78-20150712122705/@comment-166057-20150718000937

Hiya, that looks cool, what you added. I'm glad you found my info useful!

I don't know where RarityGuide got their info. Maybe they really had insider info, whether through hacking the game or from the devs. I'm sorry but it's all fuzzy to me now. If I ever knew where they got their info, I've forgotton. I only recall that I did extensive in-game testing. I can't recall ever pulling data out of files, nor anyone giving me any load of inside info. If you see somewhere where I say I did, I'll take a look and maybe it will refresh my mind.

Now it's coming back to me... that's why I am saying "number of shots to kill" when it comes to killing others (something I can measure), but then I can actually say how much damage is caused by explosives. Because I can see my own health when damaged by explosives. But you can't shoot yourself, so you can't measure bullets' damage per se... you can only actually directly measure how many times you shot others.

In theory I could have easily made an extrapolation to make a statement of how many health points they have. If you assume constant-strength explosives hit others as hard as you, you can see how many it takes to kill them (and you know how that translates to you). But this rests on an assumption that all the modifiers are the same for them as for you, etc. So I didn't do it. Like I said, my goal was simply to know which weapon was how effective for me, etc. Not to establish under-the-hood values when I didn't have any good handle or inside info on that, anyway. You don't really need that because all you care about is what weapons you're going to use, anyway. Who cares if you can't put a neat label on it, the best gun is still the best gun.

As you can see by googling, I didn't find nearly hardly as much info out on the web as I made, and even what existed was not in a nice enough tabular form for me. So I just did it all myself. (With some ideas and co-op from gyron and others as seen in the forum thread.)

My spreadsheet may seem huge (and it is), but for me, game aids like this start out small. Initially, you just want to see if there really are some big differences in a few things, which you suspect (but can't prove because you didn't measure it yet). So you start making a bunch of small notes in major categories or types of weapons, etc. Then once you have a lot of small things, it segues into a larger collection and you want to fill in gaps when you come across the odd weapon or whatever. Finally you have a really big table and want to get those last few values to make it complete. And when it's all over, you have this huge looking thing, but which really wasn't a lot of work at any one point. Because you didn't mind getting the next info bit, at any particular step of the way.

I misspoke earlier when I said I could see how much health damage the MP caused. I was running the two things together. Sorry... so many games, so many analyses, so many years. It's coming back to me now.

Your final link does not go to a file, for me... it wants me to edit the page.