Places of Insanity

February 21, 2006 • 1 min read


This an old status update on my web-based game Engineering Faith.

After many months of fairly sane games, I managed to have two stable games go completely insane in the span of a week!

First, people got smart and took so much advantage of the Places of Worship imbalance that somebody managed to get millions of followers, and the game became seriously lopsided. D’oh.

So in the next game I fixed that bug, but introduced a worse one: everybody got the effects of their Places, and Places of every Faith who came before them in sequence. Imagine the confusion for the guy at the end of the list! Unfortunately, this is a bug that is only noticable on some players after it’s been running for a few ticks, so it went unfixed for about 12 hours. Mess mess mess.

Anyway, there was a mass influx of holiness all over the place - it was ridiculous. I’ve fixed the bug now, and tried to push things towards normal artificially. Things are continuing to return back to normal on their own now, but I apologize for the ineveitable permanent damage the bug did to people’s testing activities.

I know this is indeed the kind of thing that happens in a Beta, and people understand that. However, this is the kind of thing that made people give up on Asylum during Beta before it became stable, so it annoys me when stuff like this slips through. In any case, I’ll be mindful of that kind of bug in the future, and try to do less coding at 3am. I’ve also started a fresh new world for those who are interested.


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© Allen Pike. 👋🏼 You can contact me, or check out Steamclock.