Talk: Item Stacking

2020-04-10: This is an awful discussion page, and I hate that gamepedia does not simply have a comments section like fandom. Someone please just copy from the Fandom Item Stacking page. I do not know how to use this website well, I ran into issues even posting this discussion, which labeled my link as "Wall of Spam". TheWerepyreKing (talk) 21:41, 10 April 2020 (UTC)TheWerepyreKing

Above comment was edited to show the correct year. HarbingerOfMe (talk) 19:39, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Here's my feedback on what this page needs

Hi, I'm that 179.2x.yyy.zzz anon that has been making several slight edits and no, I don't need to hide my IP. I've been looking at this article several times, comparing it to the one in fandom and I feel some things need to be addressed.

• For starters, this article mentions the different stacking types but does not list all the items that use said stacking types. Sure it says Tougher Times is hyperbolic but what about Stun Grenade, Old Guillotine and Sentient Meat Hook? On that note, Focused Convergence is not hyperbolic.
• Secondly it wrongfully says exponential items do not suffer diminishing returns when I'm pretty sure Fuel Cell, Alien Head and Gesture of the Drowned can be considered diminishing since the effect is applied to the current value not the base one. The whole section seems too centered around Shaped Glass giving the impression all exponential items stack powerfully.
• Third, I do not think telling readers to essentially go look at every single item's page for effective limits is a good idea. It's tedious and not all articles have the effective limits as this page mentions (e.g. Sticky Bomb, Ukulele, Razorwire). It would also be nice to have all the equations listed in this page for convenience's sake. The tables and the calculators however I do agree they should be on the item's respective pages.
• Fourth, if we're going to talk about survivability shouldn't we explain what this means and include the equation? Saying that going from 88.2% to 88.4% block chance represents an increase of survivability of less than 2% means nothing to the reader. I also don't see how expressing survivability in percentage rather than average hits taken is useful.
• Lastly, simply stating Rusted Key uses the lottery analogy is plain lazy and misguiding. It actually makes more sense to me to list all four equations than thinking of the analogy because according to the analogy, the odds for all three rarities should be really good at some point even tho there's thresholds where an item's rarity starts to decrease.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as aggressive here but it pains me how mediocre this article is compared to the rest of the site. It desperately needs so many changes I don't know where I would even begin! And the fact that the previous comment was seemingly ignored for a YEAR concerns me. This article is still confusing and hard to read, Fandom's article while needlessly long was much more comprehensible because most of the information was expressed in tables rather than "for example" sentences.

I also see in the history versions that Seud0 and Paradoxyz seemingly had a feud with edits which makes me feel that if I attempt to add the first point in my list one of the two will revert it without any justification. I do agree, gamepedia's communication means are bad because you have no way of knowing if someone is talking until you click that button. I bet this will fall under the radar as well. 179.24.160.67 16:10, 27 April 2020 (UTC) 179.2x.yyy.zzz

Hey, I'm Seud, the one who rewrote this page. Let me address your points one by one.

• First, the reason individual items were removed is because... they were kind of unnecessary ? Individual items already list their in their page the statistics that are affected by scaling and how. The tables were just, in my opinion, polluting the page. A page listing a content-complete table is useful when someone wants or needs to access a list, but for items, you usually want to know how a specific item stacks, not all of them at once. If there is really high demand for this feature, maybe Paradox can whip up a way to automatically build tables based on the data used in individual pages to avoid double entry.

• Second, all exponential items *do* stack that way. The effect of the statistic is important here, not the fact that numbers go up or down. Each Alien Head cuts 25% of the remaining cooldown in casts, which means +33% of maximum casts compared to the previous value. Fuel Cell and Gesture stack the same way - there's a reason these items are crazy powerful. Diminishing returns means that as you stack an item over and over, the relative effect of that item gets lower and lower, not that the value is compounding, which is the exact opposite.

• Third, the amount of items with effective limits is very low. Apart from Focused Convergence which is hardcapped at 3 and items that cap at 100% chance, there aren't any other that comes to my mind, although I may be mistaken. I do agree these exceptions could be specified more clearly however.

• Fourth, I picked these items only because their effects are instinctive and well understood, but not necessarily the math behind them. The exact numbers do not matter, but they are my attempt to show a math-averse reader an instinctive way to understand the mathematical differences between linear and exponential stacking without relying on tables or graphs.

• Fifth, the analogy is mathematically correct, and the most intuitive way to understand in my personal POV. This page is supposed to be a support for the stacking types, detail is included in the page 1 click away if the reader wants to learn more.

The quality of an article is relative, and I rewrote the page specifically because the old one was confusing, sometimes plain wrong, and was essentially repeating what was in individual item pages, sometimes conflictingly depending on whether updates modified them or not. Also, the rewrite was done during March, so if a year-old comment refers to the page, it actually refers to how it was written previously, not my version. Seud0 (talk) 19:16, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I'd like to chime in as well. We're still getting used to gamepedia, so checking the talk pages is still not common for me. I'll get on that. Second of, the first comment wasn't neglected for a year, but "only" 2 weeks. (Still not ok).

HarbingerOfMe (talk) 19:37, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

About point 3, I've edited the page to move stacking limits to its own section, so readers who quickly want to know which items have a hard limit can see it ~Seud 176.159.86.214 07:09, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Broken images

Your Photobucket subscription expired24.218.173.57 03:03, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi, this page doesn't use Photobucket (?). The math extension used to generate graphs (what the broken images would be otherwise) which is currently broken after the backend media host migration. They're working on it. Grendal27 (talk) 22:23, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Honestly this page is terrible.

Bring back the tables, I don't want to have to keep going to item pages. The fandom version is superior for the average user. Seems this wiki suffers the same issues of any other wiki, power tripping editors who think their way is best. But seriously. look at this page today, none of the formulae. It's impossible to know what anything does without reading a whole bunch of stuff, instead of a simple look-up table like fandom.

Hyperbolic Stacking Makes no sense based on this formula. Please confirm.

Basically what the title says. Please check my math. The formula used for hyperbolic scaling above does not conform to what would be expected. For example, assuming you have 1 item with 13% stacking. At 1, using the formula already on this page you get something like 11 or 12%. I did some messing around with polynomials and it looks like the accurate formula would be 1-(1-.13)^x. I understand that this may have been changed in the past for the sake of better gameplay. That's fine, but I wasn't able to confirm quickly as I do not have the artifact I would need to do so. I will go ahead and do that now.