10-12-2003, 07:25 AM
I don't think you should "clean up" the archive, just put a disclaimer on it. Most of its value is the state of knowledge of Diablo in late 1997... some of it is now known to be wrong, or some shows how primitive D research was at first.
For instance, in my post on the archive, I conclude that there does seem to be an auto-hit percentage, that to-hit numbers do go on a one-to-one slope of hit probability (generally), which are things we take for granted now; however, I also make some other conclusion that is wrong (I've forgotten it now). Of course, Da O'Toth and Jarulf later do research and do a better job... but the Archive can show how much we did NOT know in those early days. Fortunately for me, I am not the only one who had some misinformation in there, I think Bostic had a post where one of his statements advocated Hit Recovery items, and the DSF people later realized that these items did not work. (Also embarassing, I used Raymond's during testing so that my test character could stand there and take all the hits; no one challenged this at the time, but as the DSF got more sophisticated, it would not accept results using trainers as valid.)
So, IMO "cleaning it up" could ruin it.
A lot of the stuff that is still valid is the team-strategy posts, e.g. Aahz and Woody. Maybe the still-real-useful stuff could be extracted and made a separate link.
One note, tho, is that it is possible that the entire Archive did not make it to the Plain Guide-- a couple of the files were bigger than the geocities editor allowed (ah, those primitive days.) I dunno if Lemm has the copies of all the files, and whether all the files still exist somewhere. It's possible that the files exist on my old computer, which fortunately is still hooked up and works (last I checked, about 6 months ago). I dunno if Varaya kept the files after giving me permission to host them.
One thing that should be changed in the Archive, Varaya had a link for "contact me" which was an email link. When I took it over, I changed it to the van_damned at hotmail addy, which I rarely check anymore. You guys should change this email link. I also put in a note that the email was changed, so you should update or remove that too. But maybe I'm getting too far ahead here...
-Van
For instance, in my post on the archive, I conclude that there does seem to be an auto-hit percentage, that to-hit numbers do go on a one-to-one slope of hit probability (generally), which are things we take for granted now; however, I also make some other conclusion that is wrong (I've forgotten it now). Of course, Da O'Toth and Jarulf later do research and do a better job... but the Archive can show how much we did NOT know in those early days. Fortunately for me, I am not the only one who had some misinformation in there, I think Bostic had a post where one of his statements advocated Hit Recovery items, and the DSF people later realized that these items did not work. (Also embarassing, I used Raymond's during testing so that my test character could stand there and take all the hits; no one challenged this at the time, but as the DSF got more sophisticated, it would not accept results using trainers as valid.)
So, IMO "cleaning it up" could ruin it.
A lot of the stuff that is still valid is the team-strategy posts, e.g. Aahz and Woody. Maybe the still-real-useful stuff could be extracted and made a separate link.
One note, tho, is that it is possible that the entire Archive did not make it to the Plain Guide-- a couple of the files were bigger than the geocities editor allowed (ah, those primitive days.) I dunno if Lemm has the copies of all the files, and whether all the files still exist somewhere. It's possible that the files exist on my old computer, which fortunately is still hooked up and works (last I checked, about 6 months ago). I dunno if Varaya kept the files after giving me permission to host them.
One thing that should be changed in the Archive, Varaya had a link for "contact me" which was an email link. When I took it over, I changed it to the van_damned at hotmail addy, which I rarely check anymore. You guys should change this email link. I also put in a note that the email was changed, so you should update or remove that too. But maybe I'm getting too far ahead here...
-Van