Survival of the Survival Guide

dangerpin

Member
As I understand it, a great number of the stats and monster information used in Mafia are taken from Kittiwake's Monster Survival Guide, recently Kittiwake, who had only been occasionally updating information in the recent past, resigned from the game entirely leaving lots of question marks about new and updated monsters. Recently an offer went out on the Mafia thread on the Scary Forums from another member of Kittiwake's clan, Hardcore Oxygenation, quoted here.

Residium said:
if anyone is interested in taking over the moxie guide from kitti, you can contact me, him or anyone else from HCO and we can see if we can hook you up with the needed information on how to do so.

It seems it would be in our best interests to, as a group, keep the Monster Survival Guide running. It is, as I understand it, the source from which Mafia gets all its monster HP and stat information. I always appreciated having the HP of a monster available to me in my hit by hit decision making, especially when trying to maximize my combats in HCO.

We have quite a bit of the needed information already available to us from our logs. Though I have to admit that this early in my West-Coast morning, my brain is having a difficult time wrapping itself around the precise way to compute Attack and Defense numbers given all the variables, but I'm sure I could come up with an appropriate algorithm given time and practice.

What do you all think about this?
 

fewyn

Administrator
Staff member
I'd be willing to run a script while in combat or something and then upload the results or something. Not sure how Kittiwake actually gathers the data though.
 
Well, in this thread on HCO, Residium, Macman104, and holatuwol are discussing how to upgrade the logs and status reports to increase the amount of spading information produced by kolmafia. And it looks to me from the descriptions in the recent changelogs that hola is already implementing a number of things produced from that discussion.

I've seen mafia log parsers posted on the HCO forums, and though my memory is failing me, I think probably on the AFH and main forums as well. Probably the best way to quasi-automate this would be to start from those log parsers, figure out what more information would be needed to tease out monster stats, and add that information to the spading/log discussion. Then, willing spaders could submit their logs to a volunteer compiler, who could run the parser and update a monster stat repository. This data could probably also be used to update Yiab's item drop info, meat drop ranges, etc. Doing any of that is way beyond my computational ken, however.

Other options:

1) the Fight Optimizer custom combat script autospades monster hp. Someone could try to make a parser of the autospade logs generated by people running that script.

2) Most new mobs have at least substat/experience information on the wiki. Substat is a usually good proxy for monster att/def. If the format is adequately standardized (I don't know), mafia updates could take the information it uses from the wiki rather than Kittiwake's guide. Of course, such information is only as good as the wiki, which people might trust less than a respected spader who is citing empirical evidence.
 

dangerpin

Member
I think we just need to fill in the blank spots with some information and then see about refining it from there. There are so many areas where Mafia doesn't even try to tell me what I'm up against.

Another thought is that people are all over the place in where they adventure, it would be nice if we could direct our attention at certain areas and work on them for a while. Seeing something like This Week's Spade-The Oasis, next week will be Hippy War Camp. Something that generally follows along with normal play but allows us to all focus on a single area and make the job of inputting the information for Veracity or Hola a lot easier.
 
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