Mobs have two names: one for displaying to players and use in game and another name that’s used inside the database mostly for making developer’s lives easier.
For example: The popolions in east siaulai woods is called “Popolion” but in the database their name is actually “Popolion_Blue”. The skill uses their database name instead of their actual display names.
Now let me try to explain how the skill works:
In a computer, every character is actually a number. The reason for that is because computers only understand 0’s and 1’s and those are used in the computer as binaries but represented to us, humans, as decimals (or whatever other base you want). So when you read the character “a” in a game, that character is nothing but a number (in binary) to the computer.
The most common programming languages of today use what we call an ASCII table to convert the number (saved in computer) to a character (displayed to us, humans). basically what the ASCII table does is say what number represents what character.
If you take a look at an ASCII table, there are a bunch of symbols that also have numeric representations. But for now, let’s stick with the letters of our alphabet:
http://www.asciitable.com/index/asciifull.gif
So if you look at the Char “a” in the table (in last column), you’ll see it has the decimal value (notated as the ‘Dec’ column in the table) of 97. Also note that “a” and “A” are two different characters thus they have different decimal values.
Now let’s focus on the Gematria skill. Basically what it does is this:
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Take the monsters database name.
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“Convert” every character in the monster’s name to their respective numbers in ASCII table.
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If the number is bigger than 100, divide it by 100 and take the rest of that division (this is called the “mod” operation in programming, represented by the “%” symbol, where division is represented by the slash “/” symbol).
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Sum up all numbers, divide it by 10, and take the rest (again, mod operation).
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This is the final number for the skill.
So now let’s see if this works:
I tested Gematria on a popolion in east siaulai woods. His database name is “Popolion_Blue” and remember the algorithm is case-sensitive.
This is the screenshot of the numbers being computed:
Now look back up at the ASCII table. The first character is “P” which gives us a decimal number of 80. The second character is “o”, which should give us a number of 111, but remember we need to take the rest of the division by 100? So that gives us the exact number in the screenshot: 11. Next character is “p”, remember it is case-sensitive, and following same logic as before, this gives us number 12. If you keep going on, you’ll see the numbers match the ASCII table perfectly.
Just a little note there that the last number is horizontally flipped because of the skill animation, it is number 01.
Now we have to sum up all these values exactly as in the screenshot. We get a total result of 367. 367 % 10 = 7. So now let’s check if our result is correct:
And it is! Amazing how our little kabbalist friend can calculate all those numbers so fast.
Now, I haven’t tested Notarikon (mostly because I didn’t take it in my build), but according to description and some common sense, I believe it should follow the same logic but take only the first and last characters of a mob’s database name, sum them up, and take the rest of the division by 10.
Now, why does all that matter? Well, if the skill works exactly the same way in pvp and takes the actual player name to make the calculation, you can spend some time thinking of your character’s name as to both Notarikon and Gematria always result into 1. Is that really important? Nope, completely not. But hey, we can always piss off some innocent kabbalists!
You asked about players with Korean or Jap symbols in their names, but it really doesn’t matter much because those symbols will just get translated back into numbers exactly the same way using an extended ASCII table.