Failure to Launch

Failures are part and parcel of design sometimes. Change and new features are always exciting in the short term, but ensuring that these implementations are done correctly makes a huge positive difference in the long term. It sound like hokey folk wisdom, but it really is true.

Unfortunately, being picky about implementation sometimes results in weeks like this past one. Over the past few days, in between settling down from the end of vacation and handling basic administrative Nodeka stuff, I've managed to:

- overhaul valkyrie songs to a group role, add a new song, improve their pet

- implement the trickiest AI section of the mission structure for the Scar

Pretty good deal, and all according to my previously drawn designs. Problem is, I didn't like either of them, and so neither went live.

My problem with the song implementation was part aesthetic and part mechanical. I designed them to be strong and useful while avoiding the obvious pitfalls (example: look, rite of virility for our whole group, now we can pile onto one helpless chump and flank him before he can withdraw). Problem is, in play, the songs felt clunky and a bit contrived, and they all felt very similar to each other as well.

The Scar mission AI was a different beast. It worked, but in testing I didn't like the balance at all. Limitations in my design were making it too easy to get really great rewards without having to participate in much player combat participation at all, once a smart player figured out the system's underlying mechanics. The mechanics are invisible, as with the invasion (and much more complex than the invasion's as well), but even if they worked for now as a "new feature", I didn't want to put them out unless they were really correct for the long term.

Thus, both got the DELETE button treatment, figuratively. In the short term, that sucks - I'm stuck with a small body of work that I don't want to put live, and you're stuck without the immediate updates. In the long term, however, it's excellent news. The experience exposed a number of flaws with my valkyrie song design which will allow me to rewrite them to be much more elegant and rewarding in the end; similarly, I managed to pinpoint a precise set of issues with the Scar design which will allow me to reshape it to fit the area's goals (promote competition, pk activity, and sneakiness in a way which is accessible to players of all sizes) better.