{"id":38575,"date":"2018-08-07T14:15:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T14:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/news\/2018\/08\/random_heres_how_animal_crossing_characters_read_your_lovingly-crafted_mail"},"modified":"2018-08-07T14:15:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-07T14:15:00","slug":"random-heres-how-animal-crossing-characters-read-your-lovingly-crafted-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/08\/07\/random-heres-how-animal-crossing-characters-read-your-lovingly-crafted-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"Random: Here&#8217;s How Animal Crossing Characters Read Your Lovingly-Crafted Mail"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/923260bc11c2a\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/923260bc11c2a\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<aside class=\"picture strip\">\n<div class=\"img\"><a title=\"Animal\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/923260bc11c2a\/animal.original.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/923260bc11c2a\/animal.900x.jpg\" alt=\"Animal\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<p>When you&#8217;re not casually shopping for new pieces of furniture, or worrying about the ever-growing potential of hefty mortgage debt, one of the features available to players in\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/3ds\/animal_crossing_new_leaf\"><strong>Animal Crossing<\/strong><\/a> allows you to send completely customised letters to your favourite animalistic chums. From there, you&#8217;ll then receive a reply which somehow seems to register certain elements of what you said and give you a gift in the process. But how on Earth does this actually work?<\/p>\n<p>Well, James Chambers, a\u00a0software security researcher, has been digging into the game&#8217;s files and coding to try and find out. The results make a lot of sense, but are surprising at the same time &#8211; essentially, the game reads the characters inputted by the player and gives that letter a score based on a number of factors. These factors include things such as correct use of punctuation, whether or not someone has spammed the same letter over and over again, and several more.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"object object-tweet\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p><span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">A: Checks for punctuation at the end of sentences, and capital letters. A &#8216;.&#8217;, &#8216;?&#8217;, or &#8216;!&#8217; symbol at the end of the letter grants 20 points. After that, every punctuation mark must be followed by a capital letter within 3 spaces (+10 or -10 each occurrence)<\/span>\u2014 James Chambers (@jamchamb_) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jamchamb_\/status\/1025977661535989760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 5, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<aside class=\"object object-tweet\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p><span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">C: This checks for the first (non-space) character in the letter. If it&#8217;s a capital letter, gives +20 points. If not, -10 points.<\/span>\u2014 James Chambers (@jamchamb_) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jamchamb_\/status\/1025977663473831936?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 5, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<aside class=\"object object-tweet\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p><span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">E: Checks ratio of spaces to non-spaces in the letter. If it&#8217;s all spaces, or (n_spaces * 100 \/ n_other) is less than 20, gives -20 points. Otherwise, +20 points.<\/span>\u2014 James Chambers (@jamchamb_) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jamchamb_\/status\/1025977665474519040?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 5, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<aside class=\"object object-tweet\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\"><p><span lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">G: Checks each group of 32 characters for at least one space. Deducts 20 points for each group that doesn&#8217;t have one.<\/span>\u2014 James Chambers (@jamchamb_) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jamchamb_\/status\/1025977667286384640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 5, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/aside>\n<p>When all of these points are totalled up, the overall score determines the response you&#8217;ll receive from the NPC. If you score over 100 points, your reply will be positive and have a random chance of receiving a gift, but any scores below 50 will receive a negative reply.<\/p>\n<p>The score also reportedly affects the number of friendship points you earn with the recipient; a bad letter has a base score of -1, while good letters have a base score of 3. Attaching a present boosts the score by 3, however, so you can actually get at least 1 point with a letter made up of complete nonsense.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s certainly an interesting find, although it does take away a little bit of the magic somewhat. Either way, at least now you know that those little critters in your games console aren&#8217;t coming to life to read your mail&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you&#8217;re not casually shopping for new pieces of furniture, or worrying about the ever-growing potential of hefty mortgage debt, one of the features available to players in\u00a0Animal Crossing allows you to send completely customised letters to your favourite animalistic chums. From there, you&#8217;ll then receive a reply which somehow seems to register certain elements [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}