Re: NP bug fixed

Rich Skrenta (skrenta@pbm.com)
Wed, 15 Jul 1998 19:40:40 -0700 (PDT)

Sure, it's possible to patch the database. The issues are:

- I often screw up, and cause worse damage than the
original bug.

- Players who had knowledge of the bug-affected faction's
state through game play (vision, deduction, etc.) would
sometimes be unpleasantly surprised to find that the
faction in question had inventory/capabilities they didn't
at the end of the previous turn.

- Unless I can mechanistically determine who was wronged by
a bug, and compensate everyone affected, only "squeaky wheels"
are compensated. Sometime I do not have sufficient historical
DB context to determine what happened to who.

Bugs are bad, but there is sometimes a consistency to them that
meddling GM-ism doesn't possess. I don't want to try to hide behind
a lazy-shield here, but I endured sufficient hate mail during the
playtests and G1 after making changes that I am _extremely_ hesitant
to make any changes to a running game.

The same goes for answering random probing questions about the
game system. I used to peek into the code to answer tough
questions about the rules. Sometimes I made mistakes and gave
players the wrong answers. Other players didn't ask me in the first
place, and spent game resources performing experiments to see
how things worked. I have concerns about fairness.

BTW, in 212 weeks of Olympia play, I've never missed a single weekly
turn. One week a couple of years ago I had to stay up through the
night until 8am fixing a fried disk, but the turn went out the
following morning.

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