StarQuest #10: The Great Rebalance

Originally Posted on Jul 31, 2015

It's been over 6 months since the last update here, so I guess it's well past time for an addition. I have actually sat down to write a post several times since I last added anything, but I've never been able to do it. It is my goal to tell the history of StarQuest as objectively as possible, and I knew that it would be impossible for me to write this section in a 100% objective fashion. The core feature of this period of SQ's history (about the next three posts) is the conflict between myself and Stealthy. It's easy to write objectively about events to which you were a bystander, but hard to objectively write about a conflict in which you were a principal party. I thought it would be easier to write as time passed and I gained perspective on events, and I have indeed gained some perspective, but it has reached the point where I need to write this stuff down or else I'm going to forget it entirely. So please note that, while I am doing my best to be objective, in this case is not easy. Take this post, and the two that follow it, with a grain of salt.


Right then. As I said in the last post, starting in January, with the Mojang issues and Bungee behind us, we realized that it was high time for a gameplay rebalance. And by "we" I mostly mean Stealthy; he had the foresight. I thought things were fine; I was happy to have things stable and a decent player count. He was the observant one; he saw the economy issues in a way that I never would have, and opened my eyes to the way that pirates were treating our new players. He was excellent at seeing hard truths that I was blind to. Even after he pointed the issues out to me, I took a long time to see them; Wolf and I had designed StarQuest as it was, and I thought it was working great. Nevertheless, he persisted, and I was eventually brought around to his point of view. The economy was a broken mess, and we were losing a huge portion of our new players to pirates who hunted them out of the gate. Stealthy proposed drastic changes, like a redesigned ranking system, designated new player "safe areas", and the contract-only economy system. I thought they were stupid, and instead argued for instituting small "band-aid" changes to the existing systems. Those largely failed. We made refugees negative kills, but they were still raided and looted. We adjusted the store prices but it wasn't enough. Once again, I eventually came around to Stealthy's point of view and realized that more drastic changes were required. Stealthy wanted to create "StarQuest 3.0" as an entirely separate game from the existing StarQuest 2.0 and run them side-by-side. Players would then be able to choose which they wanted to play on. I was against splitting our playerbase, didn't think that our server machine could support the load, and didn't want to create a whole new server structure. Instead, I fought for a "rolling change"; the new features would be integrated into SQ slowly over a period of months, and the old features would be phased out. Stealthy and Wolf agreed to it, though I don't think Stealthy was ever convinced that it was the right course of action.


So we began to code. The project would have three parts. First was the Contracts system, for the economy overhaul. We would run it side by side with the spawn-run system for awhile to test it, and then eventually phase out spawn runs entirely. Next was the new rank structure, for the rank system overhaul, solving economic issues and piracy issues in one large swoop. Third was a redesigned player-to-player trading system. I named the new initiative "Project Willow", for the new rank structure that was its key feature. The old rank structure looked like a fork; it had two paths from the start. The new one had so many branches that it resembled a willow tree; hundreds of options spreading down from the top, forming a large canopy.


But, with the beginning of the coding came the beginning of the divisions that would eventually lead to the downfall of our team. Wolf had long since lost his passion for StarQuest work, and mostly functioned as a tiebreaker between Stealthy and I. He did work on StarQuest things occasionally, but extremely slowly, much to my annoyance. Stealthy also did not code very much. Though he was a professional-level developer (ex-microsoft) he saw himself as more of an advisor than a developer. I, on the other hand, saw him as an extremely skilled developer who would be exceptionally valuable in writing good code for our game. This difference in perspective is what led to our rift.


Next time: The stealthily fought conflict with Stealthy