Altered Alterations

After many months of fairly sane games, I managed to have two stable games go completely insane in the span of a week!

First, people got smart and took so much advantage of the Places of Worship imbalance that somebody managed to get millions of followers, and the game became seriously lopsided. D’oh.

So in the next game I fixed that bug, but introduced a worse one: everybody got the effects of their Places, and Places of every Faith who came before them in sequence. Imagine the confusion for the guy at the end of the list! Unfortunately, this is a bug that is only noticable on some players after it’s been running for a few ticks, so it went unfixed for about 12 hours. Mess mess mess.

Anyway, there was a mass influx of holiness all over the place - it was ridiculous. I’ve fixed the bug now, and tried to push things towards normal artificially. Things are continuing to return back to normal on their own now, but I apologize for the ineveitable permanent damage the bug did to people’s testing activities.

I know this is indeed the kind of thing that happens in a Beta, and people understand that. However, this is the kind of thing that made people give up on Asylum during Beta before it became stable, so it annoys me when stuff like this slips through. In any case, I’ll be mindful of that kind of bug in the future, and try to do less coding at 3am. I’ve also started a fresh new world for those who are interested.

Year ye, all faithful. The Engineering continues strong, and the masses are growing. Since my last post, there’s been 8 new versions, which have included some really huge balance improvements, among other things. People of course are still finding amusing ways to wreak havoc, but less so than before.

Speaking of havoc, people have actually been attacking each other, which is exciting. I think this is partially because they’re enjoying stealing artifacts from people who have been hoarding them, but it’s also fun to get more interaction.

Speaking of interaction, I have the much-neglected Covenants system on my radar. I want to have as much group-forming and interplay in Faith as there has been in Asylum. People will also be more inclined to invite new players if they can then work together in the game (although that has some potential abuse implications.)

Speaking of invites, they’re going well - there are more than 50 people testing now, which is awesome. The gradual growth has allowed me to systematically fix things that get out of hand one by one. I’ve been manually giving people invites so far, but that’s getting freaking annoying. Naturally, the system will be automatically assigning then fairly soon - I just don’t know exactly how yet. Also, the ability to send an invite to somebody who doesn’t yet have an Altering Time account would be good.

Speaking of good, there’s been good feedback on the Forum and in the bug system, and people seem to be engaged with the development process. People are taking an active part in how the game turns out, and letting me know what they feel is important. Play still feels a bit slow to me (a complaint I’ve gotten less of recently) so I’ll keep hacking away at that issue. I want there to be more new activities to do in the later game - maybe more incentives to change things throughout the game.

Speaking of things, things on the technical side have progressed a fair amount since Faith started development. The amazing Dreamhost has given me the technologies MySQL 5 and PHP 5. Dynamic Ajax technology has become mainstream too. Faith doesn’t really take advantage of any of these technologies, but as I learn them more thoroughly I’ll be retrofitting Faith with them. Ajax is particularly exciting - it’s the technology behind the magic “pin” buttons on the Affairs page that instantly update when clicked. The new MySQL version should help me keep things stay orderly as the Faith database grows towards 100,000 items.

Speaking of databases, I’m currently sitting in Databases class at SFU. Yawn. If I hadn’t been a database programmer by profession for 3 years already, this class would probably be more interesting. Maybe I’ll learn something by the time it’s finished.

Speaking of finished…