... and many miles to go before I sleep

The midnight oil burns, a dusty thin trail of soot and smoke spiraling around the speakers on my monitor and rising to hover just out of reach of the investigative cat. Exhausted. I am devoid of even the spark of energy it would take to snuff out the lamp. The day was long, furious, highly focused and maddeningly productive.

I should explain perhaps, for those of you who missed the first reel. At midnight, February first, we declared a total halt to all coding and production, froze the state of the game progress in midair, handcuffed our coding team far away from their keyboards, and entered a singular mindset called 'Balance the Game'.

This state of affairs is just about as fun as putting ones head in an empty oil drum while a friend stands to one side and beats on the metal skin until your ears bleed and your hair melts away. It's right up there with slamming your fingers in a car door. Right up there with swallowing a chunk of wasabi mustard that you are told is guacamole. In other words, t'is not fun at all.

How can a game that has been in development for over half a decade be out of balance..? Oh, quite simple, I assure you. Each time an activity is brought in, the ubiquitous promise prayers are muttered, '... and we'll make sure to take this into account when we balance.' The penitent is banking on being far out of range and off my radar by that time, so of course the prayer goes into thin air and the promise immediately forgotten.

Now if this were one or two minor aspects of an already well-tuned machine, it'd be no problem to reach in and adjust the distributor cap slightly, haul out the WD-40, and bring things into tune. But trust me on this - the last time this game was balanced was just a few minutes after the Internet was invented.

We had a pretty neat game once upon a time, but it was only minorly rich with features and could be mistaken for any other MUD on the net in several glaring ways.

So we stripped out all skills and stats and added in a custom abiltiies system, and the players liked it a lot - the promise prayer was invoked with full belief that we'd be attending to balance immediately.

They liked that so much that we moved to a custom materials base - from the prior 50 or so, we offered nearly 600 substances from which to make objects, and the players liked that a lot - and the promise prayer was exchanged in grins in the office corridors.

Well, material-based objects went over so well that we added in material-based weaponry - the promise prayer was whispered.

We added in materials-based wearables, and all players were happy with them - and the promise prayer was muttered to the sky.

We added in an entirely custom-written combat system, replete with body damage visibility and body part targeting, and the players were nuts about it - and the promise prayer was uttered fervently several times.

Things were going so well, so we added in a brand new custom written magic system, vastly flexible and highly user configurable - and the promise prayer was invoked loudly and with great expectation that -any day now- we'd be able to balance the game.

We added organizations - clans, guilds, kingdoms - yet again the promise prayer.

We added an elevation-based wilderness map which made it so folks don't see around corners on roads or over mountain tops - again the promise prayer.

Feature after feature, customization upon customization, exceptional offering after exceptional offering - mind you, this all took place over the course of several -very- busy years.

Like all good promises, the promise prayer eventually had to be kept. Players were complaining that the only way to make it through life was as a magic caster, or one approach highly outweighed another, given prior choices. Even with unlimited levels in which to make adjustments, the visibility of the adjustment options simply wasn't there, and the balance within those options most certainly wasn't there.

So I pulled the plug. Froze the code. Stopped all progress. Scared all the staffers. Grabbed a few dozen spreadsheets and database dumps, crawled under my desk and stared at stuff. (See prior posts for way too much detail.)

Several interesting things happened during the ten days between the freeze and the first major balance pass. First, we found out just how off-kilter some of our assumptions were (and for this, I apologize to all past players of Karinth).

Second, I learned much more about the intricacies of the stance, style and move system than I'd ever had a clue about. It increased my level of appreciation for the truly huge talent of our coder team over the years. I've seen and been involved in each of those modules from a design standpoint, but I'd not had the opportunity to really sit down with the results and dig into them - delicious!

A third thing happened, and I hope it is a temporary condition. Almost all of our players ran into hiding. Change is not a good thing, and change in the middle of a game which you're playing is even worse, no matter that the fact of our beta state is constantly in their faces.

So the first major wave of change is in and it is time to sit back and watch, wait, hope and, yes - invoke the promise prayer just a bit more. Difference is this time the prayer will be answered by real action within days, not years.