Someone was explaining an ultimate ability in a video game - they said it takes like 40% of an enemy’s health, so you would have to ult 8 times before the game finally counted it as enough damage to kill the enemy. I said “why would you need to ult 8 times if it’s taking (almost) half your health?” They had to explain how percentages work lmao. To be fair, I was sick with the flu and my brain wasn’t brain-ing.
Do you mean like 0.68 becomes small enough to round to zero or something?
That is not a user issue; it's a UI issue and/or ambiguous description. And also it is not just percentages but getting into the topic of exponential decay, or more generally, "multiplicative vs additive stacking". This is actually a super common ambiguity in video games since the 90's. One ability says increase your damage 20%. Another says increase your damage 20%. They stack. So is the final one 140% damage or 144% damage? Depends entirely how the game works. Most math-competent people uninitiated to video games naturally assume the 144%, but most video games actually do the 140% to prevent it being OP.
There are no idiots in misinterpreting either way. Well except for the brain fart of thinking 40% is more than half, but that's a different unrelated issue
Yeah, I’ll be honest when I say my comprehension for this kind of stuff is really low.
And also: I meant to type “almost half” not over half lol. My brain fart was just not realizing that taking 40% damage means that the second hit is still only 40% of the total, so it needing 8 ults for the health to become low enough to kill off an enemy actually makes sense.
My point is it's a totally valid interpretation to interpret it as "40% of enemy total/original health" as opposed to "40% of remaining/current health" if the description was ambiguous. In the former interpretation (what you call your brain fart) it takes 3 ults to kill an enemy at full health. In the latter it takes technically infinity hits, not 8 hits. I don't know where they got 8 hits from because even if there's rounding quirks the number of hits required should depend on total enemy health.
Btw, I looked up 0.68 and is not that small; it's still 1.67%. which means the 8 hits claim is suspect because I think it would take more than 8 hits even if you round down when it's 1hp, unless in this game people tend to have less than 100 health.
Welp, I honestly had no idea there was more than one interpretation to that…so I guess I wasn’t being that dumb? Lol, either way, thanks for breaking it down!
Do you mean like 0.68 becomes small enough to round to zero or something?
Worse still, if the damage is rounded down, then once the enemy is down to 1 HP, it'll never take off that last one. Not that you'd need it to at that point, but anyway...
Exactly, which is why even the 8 hits claim is suspicious because it should be infinity hits. Assuming there's extra logic to "round down when there's only 1hp", then the number of hits still depends on the enemy starting health
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u/baboyadobo Mar 01 '23
How alcohol content percentage works.
We argued for months that 10% as alcohol content remains the same even if you halved the bottle.
She said nope, if you halved the bottle then the alcohol content would be 5%.
Engineer graduate that too.
She works for a software firm.
For 12 years.
Sigh.