Yakslapper: are the WvW titles unreasonable?

There was a thread on /r/GuildWars2 earlier today in which the poster lamented the fact that getting the Yakslapper achievement does not, in fact, reward you with the title "Yakslapper", but rather the much less interesting "Ultimate Interceptor". One of the comments there mentioned that the requirement was 1,000,000 kills.

One million kills.

That struck me as pretty damn high, so I went to check. GW2Wiki confirms this number, but doesn't give its sources, and I can't find any other . The problem with the GW2 achievement system is that it doesn't show you what the numbers are for higher tiers (nor the current tier, but that can be easily guessed), and so this figure seems to be based on pure extrapolation from the surrounding achievements. For example, I'm on Tier 2 of 5 at the moment, with 256 kills. You can tell that Tier 2 is probably 1,000 kills.

1,000 doylak kills, while high, is hardly unachievable given that the game has been out for several months now, and therefore I feel that I have to trust the figure for the next tier of 10,000. So far, so good.

At this point we hit the real problem with that wiki page: we simply do not know whether the next figures of 10,000 and 1,000,000 are accurate. That the wiki doesn't have the achievement point rankings for Tiers 4 and 5 is irrelevant because it doesn't have it for Tier 3 either, which we've already assumed to be accurate.

For now, let's assume that the page is correct and that to get the title requires 1,000,000 dolyak kills. Is this even possible?

First of all, how fast can one kill a dolyak? I'm going to set a really, really high estimate at 1 per minute. Let's say that you're a dagger/dagger Elementalist with Lightning Flash, permaswiftness and a full dps-burst spec. This would just about let you travel from camp to camp, killing a Dolyak at each, in about a minute. Hell, let's say that all you have to do is tag the doylak and another group travelling behind you will finish it off. We're stretching it here, but this is a possible, if not plausible, scenario.

According to the NHS, the average adult needs between six and nine hours of sleep a night. Let's assume that our would-be-Yakslapper falls at the lower end of that spectrum, and let's add an extra hour a day for meals and exercise and the like (yes, this is below the recommended amount for healthy living, but, let's face it, the majority of people working office jobs probably fail that requirement anyway). This leaves us with 17 hours a day with which to kill dolyaks. That's 1020 kills a day.

If the target is one million kills, that's 980 days, or roughly two years and eight months. Two years and eight months, doing nothing else whatsoever except kill dolyaks at an impossibly fast rate.

As a point of comparison, let's look at some other achievements you could get in the same time.

Excluding holidays, of course. It's also probably more expensive than killing Dolyaks, but on the other hand the government won't give you a loan to help you with your dream of getting a title in an MMO (I think).

Assuming that everyone you marry dies on their wedding night, and allowing one day for the ceremony itself, you can get married in the UK every 16 days.

This achievement is arguably more difficult, as it requires a wet-nurse (or some other way around the postnatal infertility), and, presumably, to be female.

Again, this requires you to be in England or Wales, and your victim must not die. Pleading guilty may also help you here.

Walking form Ulaanbaatar to Paris also counts towards this achievement.

So, yeah. It's probably not worth it.

~Roxton.

Bootnote:

All this is of course assuming that the 1,000,000 figure is correct, which we can't be sure of. And even if it is, there's always the possibility that ANet might lower it. But as it stands, it's a horrible, horrible achievement which should not ever be completed.

By the way, if one ran a bot which played continuously at the rate calculated above, it would still take almost two years.

How much energy does scrolling a mouse-wheel produce?

I've seen this image a few times in the last couple of days, and because I'm avoiding writing a research essay on Old English literature I thought I'd work out just how much energy scrolling a mouse-wheel actually generates.

The first thing to do is to work out how many times I scroll my mouse-wheel in a given period of time. To do this, I downloaded the Mousotron 7.0 from BlackSunSoftware, which records the number of mouse scrolls you make, along with a huge amount of other mouse-related data. I then tried to replicate an average use of my computer: I read Cracked.com; checked the news; replied to some emails; and did a little bit of work on my game. I also counted the number of mouse scroll 'clicks' (you know what I mean: the little bumps the wheel makes as it rotates) that were required to make a full rotation. I did this by putting a little highlighter ink on part of the wheel, and then counting the clicks as I rotated it. For my mouse, a Razor Naga, it took 24 LED-illuminated clicks before the highlighter ink reappeared.

After almost an hour of mucking around I stopped procrastinating and looked at the counter:

After 56 minutes the scroll-count stood at 1317, which is 54.875 full rotations - about 1 a minute, or 0.102 rad/s (1rps = 2*pi rad/s). Of course, I don't know if this is a usual figure for everyone, but, as I say, it was a pretty usual hour of slacking for me.

From here on I'm going to be showing my calculations in WolframAlpha, because that gives people a good way to check my maths. So, first of all, rotational kinetic energy:

This requires us to calculate the moment of inertia and the angular velocity of the mouse-wheel. The moment of inertia is

and uses the mass of the mouse-wheel and its radius. The diameter of the wheel is is almost exactly an inch, so the radius would be 0.0125m. I'm not really in the mood to dismantle my mouse to work out exactly what the mass is, but I'm guessing around 5g: a UK 2p coin is about 7g and has approximately the same diameter. It's thinner, but is also made of copper while the mouse-wheel is made of some kind of rubbery plastic. The width of the wheel is about 1cm. Therefore the moment of inertia is about 3.9 gcm².

Therefore the rotational kinetic energy generated by the mouse-wheel in a second is 2.0567*10^-9 J, or about 2 nanojoules. If we scale this up to an hour, that's about 7.4 microjoules, or the energy a mosquito needs to fly for about 46 seconds. To put that in perspective, my mouse requires about a quarter of a Watt to function: that's 0.25J/second, which is around 36,000 times more energy than the mouse-wheel produced in an hour of web-browsing.

Another example: if 9gag.com gets 5.5 million visitors per day, and each of those visitors spends a whole hour on the site, then the scrolling each day would generate around 40J, enough to power my mouse for two minutes and 40 seconds.

In conclusion, therefore, the energy used by scrolling the mouse-wheel is at best utterly insignificant. Yes, I'm aware that I'm missing the point.

Of course, these are all rough estimates. It's also worth noting that I've assumed a perfect conversion from kinetic to electrical energy, ignoring any inefficiencies that would boundless be present in the kind of tiny generator one would have to fit into a mouse to make this work at all. As far as I remember bike dynamos are around 80% efficient at best - I have no idea what kind of efficiencies are possible on such a small scale.