Arena talk:Services

Quick questionEdit

...and hopefully a simple one. Does the priest's blessing actually do anything? 24.177.246.235 20:45, 19 July 2008 (EDT)

Taken from the online Guide (link found on Arena page):

Blessing: characters on any action performed within the next twenty-four hours. This can be especially useful to the person that needs just that little extra luck against a stronger or tougher adversary, or just to even the odds. Blessing can make the difference between finishing a quest successfully, or not exiting at all. The cost is dependent upon how much is donated to the temple in question. As with all places, temples may show partiality to those from its own province.

Hope that helps. Vesna 17:26, 25 July 2008 (EDT)

Any Benefit to Drinking Alcohol?Edit

I understand that drinking excessively causes a unique status ailment, indicated by the message "You are drunk." in the status display and a green background to the character portrait. This effect cannot, apparently, be removed by casting "Cure Poison" or by drinking a Potion of Cure Poison. The status appears to go away on its own after a few in-game hours. However, it is not entirely clear what the effect of this intoxication is. Do you know what the harm is in being drunk?

Also, since it costs a positive amount of gold to imbibe, I would expect that there is some benefit, but I have not yet determined one. It does not appear to affect Spell Points or Fatigue. It appears to have no effect other than to build up to drunkenness. Is there any reason to drink alcohol in Arena other than role-playing and potentially imposing a handicap on oneself? Agiar2000 (talk) 17:00, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Alcohol BugEdit

The reason I removed the 'bug' is that it is not a bug that myself and others on the Older Scrolls discord have been able to replicate, with the average number of drinks being 15 to become drunk. This is based on a variety of factors and so can be less or more. Imperialbattlespire (talk) 21:28, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

@KShrimp: I'm curious as to the nature of the alleged bug. What's the issue? I know you're a programmer...can you point me to the problem in the EXE file?

In any event, given issues with bug replication, if there is indeed a bug, I think we need to document exactly how/when it occurs. Otherwise, people are likely to just remove it once again. It's not enough to say that there's a bug with getting drunk, we need to document what the bug is. – Robin Hood ^(talk) 22:15, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Alcohol - More info coming.Edit

I added some general info on alcohol consumption, but I wasn't happy about how non-specific it is. After reading the discussion page and noting the history edits, I decided i should try a little harder to get some details on this topic and fortunately the technical info on OpenTESArena's pages has been very helpful. I just wanted to clarify what I "know", vs what I have tested and "seems" to be true. I can't interpret assembly code for myself, but I can usually devise a way to test if someone else's explanation matches what we find as players. I have found enough information to trust what I'm seeing on this topic without my usual brute-force way of pecking through the hex values.

There are 21 different drinks listed in the code, but the code to pick random ones for the bartender's list uses a code that only picks from the first 16 drinks. (0..15) Because hexadecimal value "15" is equal to decimal "21". It seems like an error. Notes at OpenTESArena say it is "apparently another bug". It's pretty convincing that it was intended to be all 21 drinks, but I don't like calling that a "bug". It's a personal preference, but the game does what the code says to do. As far as I can find, the drinks aren't listed in the manual or the Codex Scientia, so as a player, you wouldn't know there were other possible options. We know it's true that programmers sometimes change their mind about code without removing the old code. (There's code in the game that mentions "Team Leader" and "Team Member" 2, 3, and 4. from the gladiator version of Arena.) Personally, I think this was an oversight, but for consistency, I can't "know" just by looking. I'll probably be editing to include the information as "notes", but moving away from calling it a "bug".

There is a counter for tracking how many drinks will make you drunk. Over time, you recover and the number of drinks in your counter start dropping off. The recovery time for drinks is 1 per game minute. Notes at OpenTESArena speculate that this is probably a bug and it was intended to drop off one per game hour. The result is that if you drink two drinks, it only takes 10 seconds real-time for it to show that you haven't drank any. However, when you are in the Bartender menu, in-game time is paused. When you exit it will be approximately 2 minutes game-time later. Because it isn't "exactly" 2 minutes, I have been able to get drunk with just 2 drinks at a time. The more often you leave the Bartender menu to see if you are drunk, the harder it is to actually get drunk. I'll be updating the section after some more testing. I don't think we need this lengthy of an explanation on the page, but I felt it might be helpful to place it here. --Satribe (talk) 02:15, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Brute force it is! OpenTESArena tends to lean towards "how it should be", while UESP tends to lean towards documenting how the original "is". Only some of the locations are recorded and the rest must be assumed true, or discovered on your own. "Drink counter drops one drink per minute" - My testing shows this to be accurate, but I don't know where the code is. "Drink limit is Endurance divided by 25 (12 if Breton)." - I located the 25 and 12 but my testing shows that these must first be divided by 2.55 which relates to the same thing required for the base stats of characters. So in practice the drink limit is END ÷ 9.804 (or 4.706 for Bretons). This means my info in the previous paragraph is incorrect about drinks falling off because it's two minutes later when you leave the bartender menu. Drinks start falling off AFTER leaving the menu. Using the "2.55" divisor corrected my math problem. "Drunk effect wares off one stage per hour (2hr for Breton)." - I don't know where those are located, but testing shows it's true. I also don't know the code for why the exception is specifically Bretons, but testing shows this to be true. I'd like to hear any theories or head cannon for why Bretons take more to get drunk, but stay drunk longer. "The strength of the effect of being drunk is based on the drink cost times 5." - I haven't located the 5, but testing shows it's true. However, "based" on drink cost" doesn't work as you expect. If your drinking limit is 6 (6 drinks makes you drunk) then the effect will be based off the 6th drink in the bartenders list. If the Bartender has a different list, the effect will probably be different. This means the effect will be either all 5, all 10, or all 15 for all drinks at that inn, based on your limit and the bartender list. PROBEM: There are only 10 drinks in the list. If your drink limit is 11 or greater the results go off script and I can't see where it draws from, but it's no longer drink cost. It can have no effect; a normal effect; an opposite effect; or instant death, depending on the inn. Usually if it has a normal effect it seems to be based on a drink cost of 1 gold and that seems to be true at all the other inns. That, I would classify as a bug. I can't see any reason that would have been intentional. But it's still an assumption. I'm assuming that since it can't pull the multiplier from the drink cost list, it's pulling it from some other area of code, multiplying by anything from 0 to 255. --Satribe (talk) 14:52, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

BlessingEdit

Tested comment about bug where blessing increases monster chance to hit player. That's true. Note on the wiki says (level-1)*5 gold; while on OpenTESArena it says (level+1)*5, but in my brief testing there was no +/-, it was just my character level*5 gold. My level 17 character required 85 gold to change the "blessing" parameter and 10 gold for my level 2 (both Nord). With my lvl 2 character, I tested with donating the maximum amt. of 9999. Based on a 1% increase per blessing level, I also tested donating 500 to try for a 50% increase. In both cases the blessing caused the monster swing to hit ratio to jump from 66% to 100%, while mine didn't seem to move at all. It wasn't thorough, but it's possible that in the attempt for a 50% increase, that my character increased from 30 to 35%. The Lizard Man that I was testing against had a higher agility and higher luck, so he should have I higher ratio than me, but lowering his parameters didn't seem to change anything. I don't have enough information to change anything about Blessings, but i wanted to leave this note primarily to confirm the bug about it helping your enemies. --Satribe (talk) 04:50, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

The original cost formula here listed other variables (even more on the OpenTESArena site), that didn't factor in to any of my tests. I'd like to know why those were listed and if they may account for some scenario that I didn't test. Neither gave specific information how the Blessing is added to the combat formula for determining Hit and Miss ratio. It was clear during my testing that it WAS affecting it, but I was not able to determine how. (Boosting Luck? / Boosting Agility? / Adding directly to the "To Hit" and "To Defend" modifiers?) Because my testing enemy was the same level as my testing character, I ruled that out. - About the bug where you can't receive a blessing. This occurred in both version during my testing process: Start game and load save in front of temple. Receive Blessing and save to secondary location and check the file to see how the blessing values changed. Then reload the primary start and receive a new blessing. After only a few reloads I couldn't receive a blessing until I restarted the game. While not a common scenario, dying and reloading during a few combats would be normal. Since the exact cause is unknown and the Blessing values are hidden, it seemed prudent to mention. --Satribe (talk) 16:30, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Spellbook spells changesEdit

can you change spells after you created them? I was short on money and needed a passwall spell for cheap. TheSeldomConsitentEditor (talk) 13:53, 14 October 2023 (UTC)