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Date:    2016 Jul 30 17:13
From:    dentin
Subject: Scroll scribing
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's been a lot of second guessing and other drama going on with the
scroll dent, and amazingly enough, someone actually asked me to detail my
thought processes on it.  Without any further ado:

I've been really AFK because of work, and haven't been paying much
attention to things.  I'd heard whisperings of scroll scribing being
overpowered for probably two months, but it never seemed like that big a
problem, so I didn't investigate.

However, eventually things like hexaheal scrolls started to get my
attention.  The occasional hugely overpowered scroll was supposed to be
allowed (through hard work and demonic power), but people weren't supposed
to have a lot of them.  Even so, I didn't dig into it too much - the nice
thing about consumables is that they eventually get consumed and disappear.

I decided there was an actual problem when the bot detector triggered on
Wyrm botting scrolls at the fireplace in ash.  When I saw what he was
doing, I immediately changed the ability to scribe while fighting. That was
an oversight, was never intended, and was clearly and obviously a bug.  I
immediately made that change on the server codebase instead of the dev
codebase, but I don't think it got booted in for a couple of days.

A few hours later I took a closer look at just how much over max mana
people were able to get with absorb eq, and decided to cap it. If I could
have made it taper down exponentially I would probably have left it in -
but doing that would completely crater demonic power.

Lastly, I'd just like to say that I don't enjoy denting things just for the
hell of it.  Every time I have to make a dent that I know will be
unpopular, it's like a punch in the gut, because that means I
somehow/somewhere let a mistake get through.  It's because I wasn't good
enough, I couldn't see far enough ahead, to guess all the ways in which
something might break or have bad behavior.  I often think real hard about
whether it's really worth it to fix bugs if it's going to mean a dent, and
I often try to find ways to make it less painful for people.

That said, I will not have AA become another hidden worlds, where the
addition of a single skill completely and utterly destroyed all class
balance. Ultimately, if I think something is going to cause long-term
damage to the game, I have no choice but to change it, no matter how much I
might not want to.

-dentin


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