Monster Rebalancing
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/featuredarticles/?action=view&article_id=195
Monster Rebalancing
By Alicia Brown and Orion
Why, in a game that's over three years old, would you want to change the levels, experience and difficulty of the monsters that people hunt to advance themselves?
Asheron's Call has always been a dynamic game; it thrives because it continuously issues new challenges to players that keep them engaged and on their toes in the ever-evolving land of Dereth. But in recent months, additions and changes that had been made over the past year began, almost of their own accord, to highlight some very large disparities in the player-vs.-monster aspect of the game. Something had to be done.
The AC team decided to focus on changing the locations of misplaced monsters and returning some form of unity to the spawns on Dereth. Toward that end, considerable effort was put forth in this timeframe to change the location of the spawns of many of the monsters that cover Dereth. But that was not enough. To draw people out of their dungeon hovels and into the sunlight again, they decided to change the hunting dynamic. Specifically, they elected to adopt some ideas that had been pitched to them 15 months earlier by former AC Live Producer Ken Troop, but which had had to be placed on hold while the story of Gaerlan was unfolding. The ideas finally resurfaced last December.
Ken had suggested creating hunting grounds where players could go to pit their hunting experience against foes geared to their respective levels. As previously discussed in the article Monsters Returning Home, this idea was implemented during February 2003. But Ken also wanted to create areas that were solely dedicated to certain monster types, starting with the lowest levels of the creature and working up to the highest.
Some of these changes were implemented during February, but the majority would have to wait for the March event. And when it came to actually putting this notion into operation, the team opted for fewer large areas dedicated to certain creature types than Ken had initially suggested. Instead, they offered areas that were inherently more interesting - areas that were "seasoned" with other creatures vying for control.
Moving the creatures was step one. So what was step two?
Once the team started to move the creatures, they found it necessary to examine the level of difficulty involved in defeating them in the game. Among other factors, it was necessary to consider the original climate for which they had been designed and to determine if, and where, others of their kind might be needed.
Orion has therefore spent a lot of time over the past few months working on the rebalancing efforts. He began by building a spreadsheet to house all the relevant information involved with these creatures, then started to balance them against a set of characters that were designed to represent a less-than-optimal player template (so the creatures would not be made too difficult for them to defeat with skillful play).
From the information developed from Orion's efforts, Spd came to realize that there were easily a thousand files or more that needed to be updated. "This fact in itself was daunting for both Orion as the Designer and for me as the Integrator," Spd said, "not to mention the nightmare that hand-editing a thousand files would mean for Test!" Orion went further and made up a spreadsheet for all the monster stats with formulas for computing experience and level, which he then turned over to Spd.
Spd decided to create a script that would take all the stats of Orion's new monsters and edit those monsters' files with the necessary changes. This both lowered the chance of human error in making the changes and made it easier to fix problems found by Test. As Orion provided the stats that would be needed to update his monster script, Spd outlined the various tasks that the script would need to perform.
Normally Spd would copy the information he needed from the spreadsheet to a text file in the specific format that scripts can read. "But I decided, instead," he said, "to make my job a lot more difficult - by enabling the script to read directly from the spreadsheet, instead of some intermediate file."
The initial expenditure of this time meant that whoever ultimately ran the "MonsterMash" script would be able to save much of their time and effort by running the program directly against the spreadsheet. It took Spd about a week to write the entire script in this fashion while simultaneously laboring on integration and some content work. The spreadsheet-and-script combo represents a new valuable tool that should allow the team to update spreads of monsters faster than ever before.