BOTW #4

Crunch (don't worry, I'll continue to keep /bug reports anonymous) reports in the comments that due to the way he trained that any poisoning is fatal to him! Yet another thing wrong with poison, apparently. Things like this are good to know, since getting rid of falling as a cure is a goal, and I'm likely to overlook edge cases like that.

BOTW #3: Creature Experience

We get a fair amount of bug reports about creature experience/difficulties, which is great! Getting experience right is really hard, especially at higher levels, and reports are a good way to look for potential problem areas. 

For example, there were some bugs about the new Ash ferals in general, particularly blight ferals due to their darkus. One intent of blight ferals was to reward people of that level who have moderate defense, but when I looked at the stats I noticed that luck hits were set to a pretty high level, which goes a long way to undermine that goal. I won't have that fixed this update, but it is on the list.

However we also get a lot of reports I don't choose to act on, at least not right away. A lot of times something can seem really hard because a certain training style doesn't fit that particular creature. Or the group doesn't have the right mix to counter it. It can be really hard for one person (the designer included) to judge what the "right" experience level is. So the feedback from lots of different types really helps.

While I'm on the topic I might as well repeat what I've said a few times. I tend to shoot for lower levels of experience when I initially design. The main reason for this is players get a lot less upset (in fact they usually don't even notice) when experience is tweaked up. But they get very annoyed when it is reduced. We can also get away with new areas being under-rewarding in terms of experience since the reward of exploring is still there. Everyone can tend to have their fun as long as things get adjusted in a prompt manner. I could do a lot better on the "prompt" part. 

BOTW #2

So apparently there is a bug that sometimes causes people to repeat what they last said when they start a morph. I ran into this in testing, made a change, and couldn't reproduce it. (Remember folks, make a reproducible test case before you "fix" the bug.) Unfortunately the bugs I'm getting don't really help me reproduce things. All I've got is that it sometimes happens. What I really need is a 100% reproducible example.

Bug of the Week #1

Someone reports that poisoning seems a lot more common. That comes from the changes mentioned below that I introduced when the Ash Island expansion was released that changed poison snakes to correctly identify when they've hit someone. A lot of changes were made a few months back that went in the other direction, where snakes were poisoning whenever they swung at a player regardless in certain situations. As a result of all the changes poison might be a bit more prevalent overall.

Although...

Runnerup bug: There was a bug that a creature on Ash Island wasn't working as intended anymore. It was a little muddled so I didn't quite understand the problem, but brief testing shows something is indeed wrong although not necessarily what the bug thought was wrong. Both snakes and these creatures use the same elements of the script which changed to increase poisonings, so it is possible there is something else going on. Although the bug for the creature on Ash seems to be that the effect isn't triggering properly, not that it is triggering too much.

Update: The runner-up bug is fixed now. It has nothing to do with my changes, it was in an entirely different script. As far as the more frequent poisoning, maybe some areas need to be tweaked. Whenever I fix long standing bugs I have to realize that all the areas designed in the past 5 years were tweaked and balanced based on that buggy behavior, so I'll keep on eye on it. Although hopefully I can get the energy together to rework poison, which requires a rebalance of all areas with poison anyway.