Since the rebalancing, we've seen a lot of discussion about characters - in particular archers - who are having a tough time hitting creatures that they shouldn't be having any trouble hitting. Was something wrong with our data? I combed the files, checked, double-checked and triple-checked the calculations; everything looked good on paper. But as we have seen before, sometimes calculations on paper do not necessarily translate well into reality. So we went into the code and started working through the calculations the same way that the combat system would.

And we found the problem.

See, when a player attacks a creature (or for that matter when a player attacks another player or a creature attacks a player), the target of the attack applies certain modifiers to their defense skill based on things like: How encumbered are they? Are they exhausted? Are they attacking their attacker (or someone else)? What height are they attacking at, and how does that compare to the height of the incoming blow? In the rebalancing, we made some assumptions about the maximum combined effect of all these modifiers - and we assumed wrong.