CivMC

Technical Debt

Added 2022-03-06 17:02:03 +0000 UTC

To those who are not familiar, technical debt is basically when issues or errors are introduced over time and eventually you have to sit down and fix all the crap that has accumulated.

Unfortunately this is something which has been a big hold-up for us on CivMC. One example is ExilePearl, which I have been working on today. I think we can all agree that essence streaks were confusing and seemingly randomly broken, for reasons I won't bore you on. One thing I already knew is that pearled players were supposed to have their essence streak go against their pearl cost, which simply does not happen. But I have learned something else today - the cost multiplier which we thought increased pearled cost every 270 days on CivClassic, was being calculated based on when the pearled player last logged in. The pearl cost was only multiplied if the pearled player had not logged in for 270 days. If you're like me, this raises some confusion - because on CivClassic if you had not logged in for 60 days, your pearl didn't cost anything. Meaning the cost multiplier did nothing at all.

I'm able to make these kinds of discoveries because I'm heavily scrutinizing each config that I am adjusting for each plugin, instead of just throwing numbers in them and assuming everything is good. Just part of the reason we have yet to set a launch date - we're not confident we won't uncover more issues that need to get fixed.

On another note I just posted the next teaser on the subreddit for one of our balance decisions - three accounts max per person. We had a lot of internal debate about this and moved back and forth over how many alts to allow, but finally settled at three accounts to strike a balance between enabling unique civ gameplay while nerfing players who were able to buy tons of accounts and able to run tons of accounts at once.

-Wing