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Andy Stanly
Andy Stanly

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A calculator page is a trust problem before it is a math problem

Building a calculator for a game sounds like the easiest kind of tool: take the formula from the wiki, wire it to inputs, ship it. The formula is the easy part. The hard part is making the number believable.

Nobody trusts a number they cannot check

A calculator that shows one output and no explanation gets abandoned the first time it disagrees with the player's own testing. What made people keep using mine was showing the breakdown: base damage, multipliers, and the intermediate values, in the order the formula applies them.

That single change turned a black box into something a player could argue with, which is exactly what you want.

Defaults are the interface

Most visitors do not want to fill in twenty fields. They want to change one number from a sensible default and see what happens.

So the defaults have to represent a real, recognisable build, not an empty form. The tool becomes useful on first load, before the user types anything.

Rounding and units are where trust dies

Showing four decimal places when the game rounds down looks precise and is wrong. Matching the game's own rounding rules, and saying which ones you matched, is the difference between a tool people cite and a tool people correct.

If you are building one of these, document the DPS calculator assumptions on the page itself. The math is public; the assumptions are yours to disclose.


Notes from shipping a calculator and then answering every complaint about it.

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