Category: Gaming

I’m a gamer. I game.

Defeat Not Death

Gaming

There is a really great post over on the Tattered Page that I want to post about, but my head isn’t very clear today and I have too many meetings to attend, so I’m going to put that off and return to a subject I have hit before…

I want to touch again on “the Death Mechanic”. No, that is not a new horror film, nor is it a job title. It is the unfortunate moniker given to the question “How does your game handle player defeat?” Sadly, too many games have, possibly due to the moniker, limited this to player death. And so, as I’ve said before, I feel games need to feature alot more variety in player defeat so that not everything equates to death. One specific thing I would like to see in games, especially in PvP, is player defeat resulting in a temporarily unconscious/immobile player who then returns to full health but with a penalty, like a limp (slower movement) or an injured arm (slower attacks) or even a head injury (lower accuracy). In this way, defeat stings, but since the defeated player would “catch a second wind” and put him up to full health, they’d also be given a temporary boon to attempt to avoid repeated ass kickings (since, logically, if a player lost a fight, he would have done some kind of damage to his opponent before going down).

The main reason I want to see this type of change is to throw a wrench into the current game dynamic. How would PvP and even PvE be affected if a player had to be defeated (reduced to zero hit points), say, three times before they were more permanently removed from the action (knocked out for 3 minutes instead of 10 seconds)? What if players couldn’t actually kill other players, only knock them out and loot them, unless both players (attacker and target) were both flagged to allow death, but experience or other rewards for PvP were greater when flagged? Then throw possible permanent death into the mix… Perhaps not every outcome would be desirable, but it certainly would be different from the bulk of current games.

I really think that many games have boxed themselves into a corner with their death mechanics. Think about it… if a player dies as part of normal activity of the game, what must you do? First, you have to create, both in function and in lore, a way for players to return from the dead. Sure, you could just go the first person shooter route and just have people respawn *bam* with no reason, but this isn’t an FPS, this is an MMORPG. Role Playing Game. In addition to that, since you have defined defeated as dead, hit points are really life points (or blood points). The character is being hit and bleeding to death, so now you need magical healing (or at least, people have come to expect it).

So, lets take hit points back, all the way to the beginning, back when they were not intended to mean your life literally, but were meant to be the character’s ability to move and avoid death by rolling with blows, taking a punch. Now, only critical hits are actual bleeding hits (and they’ll carry with them a damage over time component unless bandaged), and the rest just means you are taking blows or ducking out of the way tiring yourself out. Now, instead of magical healing, players can hit you with toughness, invigoration, agility… and these things will increase your hit points because they are extending the amount of ducking and taking blows you can do.

Yes, in the actual function of “healing” in the game not much will change, but once you disassociate the combat from bleeding and death, it opens up many other possibilities for how to handle defeat in the game and the directions your story can take. As I’ve mentioned before, wouldn’t it be cool if when you are attacking an enemy city and your group wiped out, they captured you instead of you being dead and resurrecting/respawning? I think it would…

The Whole Wide World

Gaming

If you have played any MMO, you have likely run into a quest that needed you to circumnavigate the world to finish it. Visit some guru in a far off place or take a note to an officer in some city’s army, whatever. You have also likely found a time when you wanted to group with someone who you grouped with yesterday, but today find them to be on another continent. If the game had no travel assistance, like run speed enhancements or teleports or griffin mounts, you probably got a bit annoyed at the twenty or thirty or sixty minutes all this running around was going to take you.

And, if you are like most people out there, you probably wanted them to fix the travel issue with instant travel teleports so that you only had to travel a couple minutes to a portal, port, then a couple minutes to your destination, at most.

In my opinion, though, the problem here has been misidentified and the solution is completely ass backward. The problem is not the travel time, the problem is that you have to travel.

Travel should, to me, be a non-trivial task, like it is in the real world. If you need to run errands in your life, don’t you try to get a few of them together and make one travel loop getting them all done and returning home at the end? I know I do, and that’s because I don’t want to go out and come back for each item, especially if those items are far away. To that end, I try to do things near home if I can, or if I find I’m always going far away for stuff to move my home closers to my interests.

This is the problem with most games: not enough content close to “home” for the player. There should be content for solo, groups, raids, PvE, PvP, every level, every class, whatever boundaries exist in the game within a reasonable distance from “home”. Now, what is a reasonable distance is another argument altogether, but for now we’ll just vaguely say that reasonable is “a travel time for which the majority of players feel no disappointment in making both there and back”.

A long while back, I started down the road in my design thought processes of what I refer to as a “town-centric” design. (If you are so inclided, you can go read the thread and my posts over at the MMO Round Table.) And I still hold that, in my opinion, this is the best way to design a game: start with the player’s home and radiate content out from there. At some point if a player tires of one town, they can move to another town, at which point they will have all the content they need around the new town, all within a reasonable distance from the new town.

I love travel in games, and sometimes just for travel’s sake, but I hate when travel becomes a barrier to fun.

Voice Chat for Games

Gaming

Okay, let us begin, as always, with a disclaimer… I hate Ventrilo and all the other software voice chat stuff people use for MMOs and whatnot. There is just something I feel is clunky about using a tool that is outside the game, and if there is one thing I am a big proponent of is putting tools in the game for the players (any game without an in-game notepad annoys me, I don’t want my desk covered in notes, let me put them in the game).

To that end, what I would really like to see is a move toward “realistic” voice chat in game. I wouldn’t do away with text chat entirely, because text works much better than voice for managing multiple rooms or private chats. And, to a degree, I don’t mind if interaction with NPCs for quests and stuff has to stay text based, that’ll come later if a game can manage what I want.

The first step is to build a sound engine and structures within the game engine to support distance with sounds. For a simplified system, lets just say there are 4 levels of sound: Whisper, Normal, Loud, Yell. Roughly equating these to distances: 5 feet, 15 feet, 30 feet, 100 feet (this might need some adjusting as this is just off the top of my head stuff). Every sound effect in the game has a sound level attached to it. When a sound plays, the appropriate distance from the sound emitter is calculated and the sound will be played for every listening object (mostly players) in that range, at the appropriate level. What that last clause means is that something said at “Normal” level doesn’t just travel 15 feet and stop, it travels 15 feet at Normal, and then another 7.5 at Whisper. A Yell would travel 100 feet at Yell, 50 feet at Loud, 25 feet at Normal, and 12.5 feet at Whisper. Then, you build “echo” objects that will repeat any sound they “hear”
modified by the properties of the echo object. If you have been in caves you’ll know that sometimes an echo can actually come back at you louder than the original sound, or distorted, not always just softer.

Okay, now that you have it so sound plays at distance and have echoes, the next step is to make NPCs react to sound. Imagine what games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft would be like if your footsteps made sound and the monsters could hear you. Pretty cool, eh? You can bet suddenly people would stop running and jumping to get everywhere.
Now, the final step of my plan… Voice Chat. The player logs in and sets levels in the options for Whisper, Normal, Loud and Yell by speaking into there microphone at the different levels. This way, when the player Yells into his mic, the game will play his sound back in the game as a Yell… 100 feet, then 50, then 25, then 12.5. Everyone in those ranges just heard him, good or bad.

After that, you can get real tricky by utiliting modified echo objects linked together to work like a walkie-talkie or cell phone. I whisper at my end, and even though you are 500 yards away my whisper comes out your end as a whisper (perhaps even with static or other sound modifications added to it).

I know this won’t be easy, as its not a simple sound stream, but I’d love to see it done. Anything that moves MMOs away from the feel of a graphical chat room and adds more spacial awareness is good to me.

The Illusion of Virtual Reality

Gaming

Over at the MMO Round Table boards, we’ve got a lovely little thread going about what people hate about MMOs in general or one MMO in specific. One of the points brought up by Kendricke is the lack of NPCs on boats, which reminded me of the one and only time I ever got to speak with an MMO game developer (read the thread to see my post).

This has lead me down a train of thought about illusion is games. World of Warcraft has admitted to doing it, and spectacularly I might add. Ever flown the griffon? Some of what you see isn’t really… real. That’s why there will be no flying mounts available in the original game, only in the new expansion lands. Because if you could fly in the old world, you’d be able to fly right up to those matte paintings that make you think you are really seeing what you aren’t seeing.

Other games inexplicably, haven’t used it in places I would consider pretty obvious… like the boats. In just about every game I know that has boats, the boats have no crew. The reasons are simple enough, crew = NPCs, and NPCs can’t do things like zones, and boats, being objects themselves, can’t have pathing lines on them. Essentially, the boat itself is an NPC (usually just not targettable or fightable), and the game doesn’t support having NPCs ride other NPCs. But it doesn’t have to. The boat is a model. The model has moving parts (sails, rudders, oars, whatever). So why not fake the crew by making them part of the model. We are talking advanced stuff here, just tiny things like putting a captain at the wheel, a guy in the crow’s nest, a couple of guys in the rigging, maybe a cook down in the mess/hold area, perhaps a swab scrubbing the deck. Why not? Would it really be that hard?

Once you start down this road, it opens up so many new ideas… like, you know those buildings in town that are there just for effect? The ones you can’t go into? What if, instead of being just dark and lifeless, during much of the day and early night, have an NPC “spawn” in front of the window of another window, only this one with an animated texture that occasionally shows a person walk by, or flickering light… or if the normal window texture is a closed shuttered window, the new window NPC could be a matte painting of an open window that shows the interior of the room.

So many things, so many little touches, could be added to a game to make them feel more alive instead of the rigid merchant filled ghost towns they usually are.

Removing Barriers

Gaming

The wife and I have been discussing the future of our gaming. First and foremost has been the question of where to continue our gaming. Do we want to move to console gaming or stick with PCs? It is not an easy question, and of course we can not afford to do both.

The main pro on our pros and cons list for sticking with PCs is MMOs. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, my interest in the existing games is waning. While talking things over with the wife, I came to the realization that the biggest hurdle for us in most games is the fact that we have to play together if we want to play together. Did that make sense?

See, sometimes I have to work and the wife wants to play, but if she plays with her main character and this happens too many days in a row, she will out-level me (unless we are at max level) and now I will need to play catch up in order for us to play together and both of us have fun. The key being both of us having fun… being too low is never fun, swinging weapons and casting and not affecting much, neither is being too high, swatting away monsters without fear of losing. City of Heroes solved that; halfway at first with side kicking, and then the rest of the way later with Mentoring. It’s not a perfect system, but it worked well enough that when we were playing CoH, the wife and I never had to worry much about who leveled when. Of course, as I have said a few times in this blog, we stopped playing CoH when the graphics engine upgrade for CoV was just enough to force us to turn the details down just enough to make the game unappealing.

The alternative in most games is for us to play a secondary character when we can not play together, but personally, I think this causes more problems than it solves. What happens when I have been having a blast with my secondary for five days and now when the wife wants to play I still would rather play my second? It also serves to hinder a player/character relationship. If my best friend is on, I would rather see him and him see me than for me to have to look for one of his seven characters and him to keep an eye out for my five. It is a further disconnect from how real life works. Not that I am saying I want to emulate life 100%… holding a job and paying a mortgage in game as well as real life would be frustrating.

What is the solution?

My thoughts would be to begin designing any system with either a sidekick/mentor construct in mind, or with an eye on removing or reducing playability gaps between players. I am going to try to focus on the playability gaps…

First step, remove the direct link between player level and player power. Still have experience points in a game, earned when fighting or questing or crafting or anywhere the game can determine you have completed some defined task and reward you for it. Have levels with some mathematical formula for determining experience needed to level. 100 exp for level 1 (because everyone starts at level 0), 300 for 2, 600 for 3, 1200 for 4… until you reach some point where you just say “every level beyond X takes Y experience” where X could be 50 and Y could be 10,000,000 or something. No level cap. If someone wants to grind to level 999,999,999 so be it, if that is what they enjoy. But, you do not want to entirely remove player level’s ability to affect player power, because then people who like grinding will complain that grinding is pointless, so with every level you earn a “skill point”. And since experience is rewarded for more than combat, it would be possible for a crafting minded player to still be able to grind out those 999,999,999 levels by making swords instead of using, if they were so inclined. Once this link is severed, there is no reason not to allow players of any level to play together in groups.

Skill points are the second step. You can earn them with leveling. We will also allow people to earn them with training, similar to the way EVE Online skill training works, you select a skill to train the “next point” in and the point takes time, both in and out of game, with two major changes. One, allow people to train more than one skill at a time. The way that would work is, say a skill takes 1 hour to train, and you have 5 of those types of skills, so, in EVE Online world, you would have to log in (or still be logged in) each hour to switch skills. We would let someone select all 5 skills and in five hours they would all go up one point. Time of training times number of skills in training equals length of time for point. Oh, and training stops if your account expires, but will start again the moment the account is made active again picking up right where it left off. Now, if you are training a skill and then level and buy the skill you have been training, the time you have spent training will be applied to the next point. So, say you have that 1 hour skill training for 30 minutes, and then buy the point. The next point of the skill, which normally would have taken 2 hours to train, will now show only 1 and a half hours remaining. Two, unlike EVE, if training completes and there is no change made by the user, training will continue into the next point of the skill(s) selected. So, yes, conceivably, someone could start a character, set all skills to train and then not log in for a year and return with a fairly well decked out level 0 character. If they really want to pay for a game for a year and not play, more power to them.

So, what are the skills? Well, skills would allow you to use items or perform tasks, there can and will be huge hierarchy trees of skills, special and advanced skills that must be quested or learned from a master (maybe even allow that master to be another player). But how important will they be? This will vary… some skills would have to be proprietary, meaning you have to have the skill (and possibly even of a certain level) to use or do something. Other skills would be “untrained” skills, for example, in a fantasy setting wielding a sword could be an untrained skill, meaning that everyone can swing a sword, but gaining levels in swordplay and other advance skills will make your character “better” at sword use by affecting calculations (perhaps each level of skill gives you a +1 bonus to some section of the “to hit” formula that allows you to be more accurate) or by opening special moves (the use and timing of which can translate into “player skill” allowing players who practice with their combat to become more effective so that they might be able to trump the numerical calculated predictability of standard “auto-attack” combat). Of course, skills are not all combat related… there can and would be crafting, social, and other skill trees.

Back to the leveling… with the multitude of ways to gain experience, do we need to worry about power leveling? No, because, honestly, who cares? If a player wishes to become the “apprentice” to a local tailor and grind out eleventy billion hats so that he can gain a bunch of skill points, why not? If someone wants to “squire” for a powerful knight assisting him in combat while the knight does most of the real fighting work, why not? You could even encourage power leveling through an apprentice/master (or sidekick/mentor) system! While the squire is fighting with the knight, any skills he has set for training (you know, the timed training, not level based earning) that the knight uses he will get a training bonus, very small at first but growing larger the more a skill is used. So, while the knight and squire are out grinding experience killing monsters, eventually the squire would ratchet up to a double (or even triple) training rate, and he would be cranking out the combat skills at twice (or thrice) the normal rate, as long as they remained grouped (so yes, the bonus would be lost between gaming sessions, but we would give it like a 15 or 30 minute cool down window to account for temporary loss of connection).

But what about classes, you might be asking… especially since I wrote a post a while back about staying with classes, and another on my version of a class system. I still think players should have to pick starting attributes, and I think they should still have to pick a class, for lack of a better term, and award them with a bonus to certain skills when it comes to training. And I would even still do that by grouping the skills into sets and having the players rank the sets. And yes, I would still allow players to change their set rankings later in game (through quest or something). Would this allow players to game the system? Sure. They could rank combat the highest and train combat, then change ranks to merchant skills and train crafting. But, to me, it would not matter… no matter what system you come up with, some players will learn how to game it, how to maximize the systems to minimize risk and time and effort, because it is what they like to do. It’s on the shoulders of the designer to make game play and the world a compelling enough distraction that it keeps the player’s focus off the mechanics and off the desire to game it.

The Hidden Effects of RMT

Gaming

It started (this time) with Lum, and then spread to Psychochild and from there to Grouchy Gnome, Moorgard, Cael, and Nick over at My 2 Copper: Real Money Transactions.

For now, let’s leave out discussions of my feelings on RMT’s effects on games, let’s leave out discussions of game design, let’s leave out the possible reasons people do it (lack of time, boredom, etc.). Instead, I’m going to talk about the hidden effects of RMT, specifically one that no one talks about.

I have two friends, well, I have more than two friends, jeez, I’m not a recluse, but for this discussion it only pertains to two of my friends. One of them is like me, we play the games for the games themselves, if something takes twenty hours it takes twenty hours. The other one buys gold. Basically, the second friend is usually a late adopter of games, or he’s distracted by other new games and “falls behind”, so he buys gold to catch up. He also does so once he reaches the “end game” because he doesn’t like farming. To sum up, one of my friends RMTs call him Brad, and the other doesn’t call him Mike.

The three of us are sitting in a bar talking over a table of beers. Mike and I are laughing and telling stories. Quests that went wrong, encounters that went down the shitter, PvP where we were handed our asses, funny monster pathing stories, and basically everything under the sun that comes from playing the game the boring traditional way, most of it involving failures of spectacular effort on our part. “This one time, I was out pulling in Mistmoore and I didn’t realize I’d agro’d a second mob from up top. So the group is fighting along some extra pulls from the front when the entire freakin’ Castle comes charging out! Holy Christ! There were like three hundred mobs and it was total chaos, so I grab agro on most of them and start running in a big damn circle…” Hilarity ensues. Brad nods, listens and laughs. He even has a story or two of his own, but Mike and I completely dominate the story telling and largely because most of our stories come from all the game that Brad skipped because with his bought gold he didn’t need to play it, or the uber items he scored with his bought gold made the encounters so easy the only story he could tell is how he sliced through everything like a hot knife through warm butter and he almost died when that mob ten levels higher than him showed up and he almost ran out of hitpoints on the three minute run for the zone line.

Now, of course this isn’t true in all cases. Once we finally all get up to raid level in games, the field levels a bit, because you usually can’t RMT past “end game” content unless you are buying characters, which Brad doesn’t do.

Why do I care? Brad comes to me one day and says, “Man, you guys always have great stories to tell. I wish I had those.”

There you have it… RMT ruins the time you spend with your friends drinking beers and talking about the game. And really, you have a job to get ahead in life, aren’t our games and hobbies intended to be done for the memories? Of course, that can go both ways… if I RMT’d too, Brad and I might be talking about all the high level content we were killing while Mike sat there with his little stories of low level quests, loser. So, in the end, my conclusion is… RMT or not, it doesn’t really matter, but make sure that you and your friends are all on similar pages so that no one gets left out.

To Wii or not to Wii

Gaming

That is the question… sort of.

I was a console kid growing up. We had a PC, and I loved the Sierra games: King’s Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and the rest. But I still longed for the days of my Atari and marathon sessions of Yar’s Revenge and Pitfall. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) changed all that. I finally got one and spent endless days playing Super Mario Bros. and Pro Wrestling, Duck Hunt, and every other game I could get my hands on.

After the NES, well, I never got into the Sega Genesis or any of the other systems, and by the time my NES broke, the PC had finally caught up, and in my opinion, surpassed the consoles. It was computers all the way after that.

A couple years back, I was gifted with a Nintendo GameCube for my birthday, and I enjoyed a number of the games I got, but I was really still a PC guy, so I never got too far into it. And while I thought the PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and Xbox were cool systems… I was still a PC guy.

These days, my career is computers, steeped in programming, and frankly, many days I get home and don’t really want to sit in front of the keyboard. My PC at home has fallen behind… and I think that perhaps gaming technology, video cards and processor needs, are excalating too quickly. I really don’t have the desire or the extra cash to keep up any more. So, my eyes have turned back towards consoles.

Thanks to this article at the New York Times, I definately think I’m going to hold off on the PS3. I’m hearing good things about the Xbox 360, except that whole thing where lots of people have to return theirs due to hardware and firmware issues. I am, however, extremely interested in the Nintendo Wii. First off, I’ve always loved the Mario and Zelda games, then there is the fact that people are already confirming that it is 100% backward compatible with GameCube games, but the most interesting feature is the ability to download old NES, Super NES and N64 games from the past. That’s just awesome.

Now, I didn’t go camp out and pick one up this weekend, but I figure in the next month or so I’ll be able to snag one. So, I guess the answer to the question is… To Wii.

EVE: Worlds Collide

Gaming

I have been playing EVE Online again. This time a bit more aggressively that before. I’m doing more combat, and only doing mining as an AFK task when I have better things to do. One thing I really enjoy about the game now is that they have added more agent missions to the game since I last played. Before it was either “Do this supply run.” or “Go here and kill a few pirates.” Now the missions have a little story.

One of them, and one of the more infamous ones, is Worlds Collide. Two cartels are fighting and a supply ship has been caught in the middle. They want you to rescue the crew from the disabled ship. And most people will tell you that this mission is nearly impossible. Which is it, if you get it “too soon”.

However, one of the main reasons people find it so hard is that the mission is actually a departure from the usual stuff you do in the game. Even with a little more story, many missions are still of the “take this there” or “kill these guys” types. So when you are told the story of two cartels at war and the disabled ship, most people’s first thought is to kill them all and save the crew of the disabled vessel. But if you read the story, if you pay attention to the details, your contact tells you that concerning the two warring cartels… they don’t care, they’d sooner just sit back and watch them destroy each other, except for that stuck crew.

When you approach the mission point, the first one, you find yourself with two gates to choose from and a half dozen or so fighters on each side. The key here though is that you are between the gates, and while the gates are 45km away, the fighting factions are 90km away. Its a race. You could fight them, but you don’t have to. You can just run to the gate and warp to the next area.

Either gate you take warps you into a shit-storm. One side is admittedly easier than the other, but both sides are still rough. With the frigate that most people are likely to be piloting at the point in the game where they get this mission, fighting isn’t really an option. In fact, surviving at all isn’t that high on the probability list either. But, while you do warp into a hornets’ nest, you also are within 16km of the next gate. Again, you don’t have to fight. Just defend and run.

If you make the next jump, the final area is your disabled vessel with about a dozen fighters flying around… but these aren’t the rough customers of the last area, in fact, these hijackers are the kind that practically explode if you breathe on them too hard. Make your moves, draw them out, fight them, its a fairly easy win.

And that’s essentially what your agent tells you to do… rescue the crew, forget the cartels.

One of my favorite missions so far. Strategy over brute force.

Raiding is stupid

Gaming

It is. It really is. And if you are offended by that statement, its because you don’t really care about raiding, but you see it as a way to keep the really good loot out of the hands of people not willing to put forth the effort. You aren’t raiding because its a good story.

The main reason I say that raiding is stupid is that the way current MMOs are designed, raid encounters just do not make any sense at all. Seriously. If I were a sixty foot tall winged god surrounded by eighty people, you can bet your ass that I would not waste my time beating on the glowing regenerating turtle in a hard shell while the remainder of them killed me. I’d use my wings to sweep aside my attackers, I’d divide them and step on them. I’d kill the healers first and pick the rest off at my leisure…. because… I. Am. A. GOD.

The idea of mere mortals, even equipped with super uber weapons of doom, ganging up to kill gods is just… stupid. Especially when the gods just stand there and take it like the two dollar whore they are coded to be. I could actually buy it if it was just a group of six or even ten people, with a use of strategy and tactics… but have you ever seen people work together in large groups? Either most of them turn off their brains, follow orders, and many of them lose/die, or they are complete and utter chaos.

Raid content is insulting in the basicness of its design.

Frankly, I don’t play games to be archer number seven in a war someone else is leading. I don’t play to be a part of healing bank two, or even to be the “main tank”. When I play a game, I’m looking for narrative, and I’m looking to be the hero, not to be fire support for the hero. No one in the history of fantasy has ever said “My favorite character in Lord of the Rings is Glormindar, which is the name I gave to the guy who was standing about twenty feet away from Aragorn and was killed when the Nazgul arrived. He was fuckin’ sweet!” If you play games to be a cog in someone else’s wheel, well… I feel sorry for you. I really do.

The Pitfalls of Design

Gaming

As a gamer, I have often found myself uttering things that begin with “It can’t be that hard to…” followed by something that logically it can’t be that hard to design. For example, in many MMO games, friend lists usually have a hard cap, some games go high to start with while other games begin at 10 or 20. Later on, people will want more friends on their list and will say “It can’t be that hard to increase the size from 10 to 20.” And logically, they are right. In a perfect world, you’d just go into the code where the MaxFriendListSize variable is and change it from 10 to 20, or 50, or 200.

As a programmer, I have often found myself nearly exploding in a fiery ball of hate when a boss or customer says things that begin with “It can’t be that hard to…”, because honestly, if it wasn’t hard, we wouldn’t even be having the conversation we were having for them to be able to say that, I would have just done it. The problem is, that when designing a program, you literally can’t think of everything. You know, yes it wouldn’t be hard at all if there was in fact a MaxFriendListSize variable, but we didn’t think of that when writing the program because that number, 10, was only supposed to appear in one place, however, over time it ended up in 22 modules and one lazy coder even used that number to hack some other part of the program and when we changed it from 10 to 20 on one of our internal test servers the character models all doubled in size… grrr…

Seriously… This is exactly how programming works sometimes. You sit down and design out 500 features of your program, then, 18 months later, you realize that you need feature 501, but the best way to do number 501 involves redesigning 47 other features because 501 needs outputs or to share variables with some of those features, or 501 just kicked off an idea of a much more efficient design template that would make a number of other features work better.

Nothing, and I mean nothing in programming is ever easy. Its like getting to the end of writing a novel and deciding that “well, I don’t think the brother should be the killer, it should be the police officer” and now you have to rewrite half to book to make it all make sense.