Harley [258120] —
Original article
Rank triggers; a mystery unravelled. Why this title you may wonder? What purpose does this sudden article serve when it covers an element of the game that has not been changed in over a year?
Well, the dreaded day rank triggers were updated was a day the likes of which had not been seen in a long time. A day where players were left completely in the dark regarding details of an update. Sure, we knew a new set had replaced the old networth triggers, but what these included was unbeknownst to the normal, everyday player!
This ended up creating a lengthy discussion - one lasting over 800 replies - which continued until the community believed it had finally uncovered the new triggers. The ranking mystery had been solved, or had it?
First, let's explain what exactly was changed during this update. One of the most important parts was a complete overhaul as to how networth was calculated. Previously, your networth consisted of money made from crimes and items sold back to the system - a figure also represented by the amount of money you could take out with our trusted Loan Shark (a whopping 20%).
The ranking system in place consisted of eight awards going up to $500million, and eleven rank triggers going up to as little as $5billion. This might sound like a lot to some players, but considering the present economy of Torn, they were just too low to represent the wealth of the player base properly. It was simply too easy to obtain all networth ranks and awards.
That's where we arrive at our update; networth would now be a representation of the following items, cited directly from Chedburn's announcement:
- Items in inventory, display case, bazaar, on the market, and in parcels / presents you own.
- Money on hand, in your bank, vaults, Cayman account, trades, poker games, checks, etc.
- Value of all shares, properties and points you own.
- Value of your company if you are the director.
- Loans and unpaid fees that reduce your networth.
The number of networth medals was also ramped up from eight to fourteen, with some consisting of far larger values that are hard to obtain even for Torn's elite. Up to this day, there are still only 94 people who qualify for all networth related awards, and even then, holding a networth sufficient to rank up isn't always enough. Some awards require you to hold your networth for a very lengthy amount of time. To give you an example, if you want to receive the medal for having $100billion networth, you need to maintain this level of wealth for 112 consecutive days!
This brings us on to rank triggers, which, as mentioned before, previously consisted of eleven ranks awarded according to certain amounts of networth. Originally, these could be achieved by simply reaching the value of networth specified, but this all changed when Chedburn announced the following amendments:
An incredibly small snippet in the announcement, but it had to suffice (and so it eventually did).
The first thing people wanted to know is what exactly was meant by that last sentence. As it turned out, it signified that while players would be able to keep their visible rank, behind the scenes, you would have to play the catch-up game to attain further progress. This caused a lot of confusion, and it still does to an incredible extent. It also proved to be a severe hindrance to finding the new hidden modifiers, as people often deemed a claim to a trigger unworthy because they themselves did not rank up due to these ghost triggers.
Our next task was to discover the rough outlines of where these triggers were located, besides the five remaining networth based ones, whose values we were unaware of at the time. It was one big mess comparing dozens of personal stats in my mailbox, chats, the forums and even discord and irc (internet relay chat). And all of this was complicated further by the fact that some people still refused to give up on the idea that ghost triggers were just a myth.
Until that is, the fateful day came. After a whopping ten pages of discussion and four months after the thread's creation, FIN ranked up and made the following post:
It was the first, daring mention of battle stats being identified as the mysterious hidden set of triggers. However, it would be some time until it was brought up again since many were convinced that using battle stats as a ranking trigger would just be silly!
It took another month of replies until we finally started realising battle stats was actually a very viable option for our mysterious hidden modifier. Not too long after, we started getting a rough idea of where these were based as well; ending a long search for what could have possibly been that hidden modifier Chedburn announced all that time ago!
Now it was time to get back to those infernal networth triggers. No one seemed to be able to pinpoint exact locations, and previous triggers were repeatedly deemed invalid, leaving us more and more in the dark.
But after five long months, hundreds of replies, and countless hours wasted looking in the wrong direction; there was a breakthrough. A bug report was made by someone in the committee claiming that his ranks were not triggering, and this resulted in the following post by Chedburn:
When that post was made a lot of people figuratively sank through the floor, as it meant that months of research had to be thrown out of the window. But for some, this was an extra motivation to revive a by now, old dying thread, which barely saw any new replies.
As the conversation started back up, the rate at which possible new triggers were identified increased dramatically. Within a month of the above report, a list was compiled with all networth triggers listed, with Wolverine taking the wheel for the lower end ones as well as the lower end battle stats.
At this point, everyone was satisfied with the results we had found, and the following table listing all the possible ways to obtain ranks was published:
However, as you can see the battle stat triggers still show a large range of possible values, meaning that people were still left in the dark regarding the exact numbers required.
Another few months went by in relative silence, as most people were quite happy to know roughly when they'd rank up. This continued until an interesting conversation took place with the developer behind Torn Stats, IceBlueFire. He had just made an improved version of his scoring system; a value used to determine how you'd fare in fights with other people, based on how balanced your stats are.
It should be noted that IceBlueFire's score and Torn's score are completely unrelated, and also that there are a lot of discrepancies on larger unbalances. But it was during this conversation - one which involved a little ranting about his score - that a sudden and jarring realisation came. Torn's creator had once mentioned that he too had developed a score, one which was based on how balanced your stats are, to properly determine who would be a good opponent for your mission. What if Torn had used this score to determine the battle stats triggers as well? Would that even be remotely possible?
After starting up the thread again and doing some more research this was rapidly confirmed, and a fairly accurate representation of when people would trigger a new rank was finally made. However, it should be noted that these calculations are not as accurate as they could be, since they are based on extremely unbalanced stats, and to this day the exactness of this data is still being worked on.
Nevertheless, this discovery leads me to conclude that after a long journey, we as players are now fairly confident to say that each of Torn's elusive rank triggers has finally been found!
Or have they..?
Well, the dreaded day rank triggers were updated was a day the likes of which had not been seen in a long time. A day where players were left completely in the dark regarding details of an update. Sure, we knew a new set had replaced the old networth triggers, but what these included was unbeknownst to the normal, everyday player!
This ended up creating a lengthy discussion - one lasting over 800 replies - which continued until the community believed it had finally uncovered the new triggers. The ranking mystery had been solved, or had it?
First, let's explain what exactly was changed during this update. One of the most important parts was a complete overhaul as to how networth was calculated. Previously, your networth consisted of money made from crimes and items sold back to the system - a figure also represented by the amount of money you could take out with our trusted Loan Shark (a whopping 20%).
The ranking system in place consisted of eight awards going up to $500million, and eleven rank triggers going up to as little as $5billion. This might sound like a lot to some players, but considering the present economy of Torn, they were just too low to represent the wealth of the player base properly. It was simply too easy to obtain all networth ranks and awards.
That's where we arrive at our update; networth would now be a representation of the following items, cited directly from Chedburn's announcement:
- Items in inventory, display case, bazaar, on the market, and in parcels / presents you own.
- Money on hand, in your bank, vaults, Cayman account, trades, poker games, checks, etc.
- Value of all shares, properties and points you own.
- Value of your company if you are the director.
- Loans and unpaid fees that reduce your networth.
The number of networth medals was also ramped up from eight to fourteen, with some consisting of far larger values that are hard to obtain even for Torn's elite. Up to this day, there are still only 94 people who qualify for all networth related awards, and even then, holding a networth sufficient to rank up isn't always enough. Some awards require you to hold your networth for a very lengthy amount of time. To give you an example, if you want to receive the medal for having $100billion networth, you need to maintain this level of wealth for 112 consecutive days!
This brings us on to rank triggers, which, as mentioned before, previously consisted of eleven ranks awarded according to certain amounts of networth. Originally, these could be achieved by simply reaching the value of networth specified, but this all changed when Chedburn announced the following amendments:
An incredibly small snippet in the announcement, but it had to suffice (and so it eventually did).
The first thing people wanted to know is what exactly was meant by that last sentence. As it turned out, it signified that while players would be able to keep their visible rank, behind the scenes, you would have to play the catch-up game to attain further progress. This caused a lot of confusion, and it still does to an incredible extent. It also proved to be a severe hindrance to finding the new hidden modifiers, as people often deemed a claim to a trigger unworthy because they themselves did not rank up due to these ghost triggers.
Our next task was to discover the rough outlines of where these triggers were located, besides the five remaining networth based ones, whose values we were unaware of at the time. It was one big mess comparing dozens of personal stats in my mailbox, chats, the forums and even discord and irc (internet relay chat). And all of this was complicated further by the fact that some people still refused to give up on the idea that ghost triggers were just a myth.
Until that is, the fateful day came. After a whopping ten pages of discussion and four months after the thread's creation, FIN ranked up and made the following post:
It was the first, daring mention of battle stats being identified as the mysterious hidden set of triggers. However, it would be some time until it was brought up again since many were convinced that using battle stats as a ranking trigger would just be silly!
It took another month of replies until we finally started realising battle stats was actually a very viable option for our mysterious hidden modifier. Not too long after, we started getting a rough idea of where these were based as well; ending a long search for what could have possibly been that hidden modifier Chedburn announced all that time ago!
Now it was time to get back to those infernal networth triggers. No one seemed to be able to pinpoint exact locations, and previous triggers were repeatedly deemed invalid, leaving us more and more in the dark.
But after five long months, hundreds of replies, and countless hours wasted looking in the wrong direction; there was a breakthrough. A bug report was made by someone in the committee claiming that his ranks were not triggering, and this resulted in the following post by Chedburn:
When that post was made a lot of people figuratively sank through the floor, as it meant that months of research had to be thrown out of the window. But for some, this was an extra motivation to revive a by now, old dying thread, which barely saw any new replies.
As the conversation started back up, the rate at which possible new triggers were identified increased dramatically. Within a month of the above report, a list was compiled with all networth triggers listed, with Wolverine taking the wheel for the lower end ones as well as the lower end battle stats.
At this point, everyone was satisfied with the results we had found, and the following table listing all the possible ways to obtain ranks was published:
However, as you can see the battle stat triggers still show a large range of possible values, meaning that people were still left in the dark regarding the exact numbers required.
Another few months went by in relative silence, as most people were quite happy to know roughly when they'd rank up. This continued until an interesting conversation took place with the developer behind Torn Stats, IceBlueFire. He had just made an improved version of his scoring system; a value used to determine how you'd fare in fights with other people, based on how balanced your stats are.
It should be noted that IceBlueFire's score and Torn's score are completely unrelated, and also that there are a lot of discrepancies on larger unbalances. But it was during this conversation - one which involved a little ranting about his score - that a sudden and jarring realisation came. Torn's creator had once mentioned that he too had developed a score, one which was based on how balanced your stats are, to properly determine who would be a good opponent for your mission. What if Torn had used this score to determine the battle stats triggers as well? Would that even be remotely possible?
After starting up the thread again and doing some more research this was rapidly confirmed, and a fairly accurate representation of when people would trigger a new rank was finally made. However, it should be noted that these calculations are not as accurate as they could be, since they are based on extremely unbalanced stats, and to this day the exactness of this data is still being worked on.
Nevertheless, this discovery leads me to conclude that after a long journey, we as players are now fairly confident to say that each of Torn's elusive rank triggers has finally been found!
Or have they..?
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