I asked the staff to relate some funny stories about things we caught in our filter or became what we charitably call learning experiences. I hope you enjoy the stories and, if you were part of them, laugh at the shared experiences from many years working together as a community. Let's start with something relatively recent, shall we?

Who Needs Crits Anyway?

Today during our staff meeting I actually suggested taking away the ability for NPCs to get ranged combat critical hits. It definitely addresses the pile of complaints we have about NPC damage being obscenely spikey. It also would have removed all danger from encounters. Kereth didn't laugh too loudly at me and this idea went away quickly when I realized it was an immanently dumb idea.

I Was Born Awesome

Today we both realized and understood that a random unskilled person could pick up a thunderstick or crossbow and be awesome. We had a hunch this might be the case but it was Excel that delivered the backhand of truth giving us all a bit of pause. We do understand that as a fantasy game not everything is beholden to the real world. We are also not trying to create The Matrix and people shouldn't be able to randomly pick up abilities with no training. We don't have the right kind of computers for that even if you count alchemist-made golems.

Deader Eye

Kereth suggested reducing the chance for player ranged critical hits and increasing the ranged critical damage multiplier. We all like bigger numbers, right? He'd barely made the suggestion before he retracted it.

A change like this would allow people to make 20k or higher critical hits with ranged combat. The best part of this story is probably the audible-across-the-internet eyeroll from Rita our resident ranged combat guru. We're all for giving players more power where they need it but, as far as I know, Tim Allen isn't a staff member.

I Don't Always Test My Code...

Some of you may remember the day Kereth tested a brand new event. It was designed to transport all players except those married in-game to the city of Nineveh. Transporting all players to a single place is kind of weird. War is the only event that currently has that mechanic and it requires a player to join it to be moved.

This event was also unique because those transported players would become drunk and then start hallucinating. I wasn't informed about the core theme of this event, only its operational parameters, so I really couldn't tell you why this event existed. It didn't make it past the testing phase.

This isn't where the story ends because just being weird isn't enough to make it onto this list. No, the reason it made today's list is because it got tested in the live production environment. Yes, that's right, tested in live production!

The test fulfilled the exact specifications. It correctly summoned all players in the game except those with the in-game marriage tag. Players arrived in Nineveh and were made drunk and given hallucinations.

Old school fans of Dungeons and Dragons who dealt with the wish spell probably notice how carefully the previous statements are worded. See, the specification doesn't say that players who are linkdead are excluded nor that poison immunity would prevent the effects. Thus, when this event ran, the city of Nineveh was suddenly filled with drunk and hallucinating players including linkdead characters too. The event even managed to bypass the typical staff member immunities making them drunk and giving them hallucinations too.

Kereth is a champ at owning his mistakes and spent the next couple hours curing people and sending the linkdead folks back to linkdeath. Everyone had a good laugh because, honestly, it was pretty funny. Oh and the development server came into existence roughly a week later too.

Resistance at Terminal Velocity

Wxyz is really passionate about improving the quality of life. ANSI colour and terminals, however, doesn't provide much quality of life for the developer. If you've never had to deal with code pages or Unicode issues then consider yourself lucky.

The resistance command is one of the few left without a colorized option. Wxyz took a stab at fixing it and asked players for feedback. Most folks reported back that it had some missing information and some really weird spacing issues. This is the point at which we realized just how differently Wxyz's home terminal is compared to many of ours.

Terminal colours are mostly uniform even across different operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. The major visible differences are typically the shadoes of those colors and whether or not the tag for blinking text is supported. We learned that, for Wxyz, her terminal by default supports showing black-text-on-black-background as something human readable.

Wxyz wanted to see how my terminal looked, so I shared my screen and ran a command on the development environment showing all possible color combinations. We knew that cross-platform terminals would look different, but my terminal compared to Wxyz's is a great example of the chaos filled gap between expectation and reality. This is why it's so hard to have nice things when it comes to beautiful display output.

Pests as Debug Tools

Ranged ammunition code got reworked years ago. Today we have the capability to simply inject the new item's code and all older items will upgrade gracefully. We also have a tool to seek out older items and ensure they got the updates.

Remember the part about learning processes? Broken items creates logs which a staff member can then use to track down and fix item errors. Items in chests don't load until someone or something walks into the castle room.

Now, armed with this information, it seems the staff at the time ran the castle pest event on all six planets to track down all the broken ranged ammunition. Now as strange as this seems I have to say; don't laugh, it works. We would definitely never do it this way again today.

Weapon Blasters

Did you know that assassin was once pitched as a weapons-based hermetic caster guild? I hadn't heard this one before but I find the idea very intriguing. Maybe some day we'll discuss it further.

Oh hey, what's that sound behind me? Oh hi Ker...Oh no it's really Huja!

Conclusion

Yeah, we're definitely human. Our processes have come a long way over the years. Unified bug tracking, a separate development environment, the automated threading reimbursement system, and much more all exist thanks to the hard work of current and past staff members.

This is the power of passionate volunteers. It's that passion that keeps us going and why we strive to make the game a better place. It's also the power of community and why we're still around after twenty years and tremendous amounts of change in the larger gaming world.

Bonus Round Teaser

The cool thing about the staff is that we all care for each other both in and out of the game. There is actually a story behind the earlier Huja joke that has a lot more meaning than just the popular player meme. Kereth or I might tell that story sometime, but, today is not that day.