October 13, 2007

The Taskmasters Dilemna

It's been almost a year since the taskmasters were first introduced to Ashen Empires. At first, they were met with some resistance as some people believed that this would mean more people doing crafts and less people providing the "quality experiences" that fewer tradeskillers meant to the community. Now it seems that everyone's at least had some experience with the taskmasters.

The problem, however, is that the taskmasters still aren't complete. Sure, there are several major skills covered. However, there remain a few that aren't. And some seem downright too demanding.

OneEye commented on the taskmaster design.

OneEye posted in Task Masters:
I've learned my lesson - never put anything in the game as a 'to be done later' feature.

-the reason it was done this way is I am able to hotfix the script behind NPCs who are alredy in the world, but adding an NPC requires a 'take down the server' update.

The impression I'm getting from this is that, at the very least, getting the NPC's in was a goal. As long as the NPC's were already in the world, OneEye could add the logic while the server was running and then simply announce that the taskmasters were ready. The alternative would have been that we would have had to wait for an update to see a new taskmaster or two.

So you have to ask yourself, which method would you have preferred? I can see the benefit of both.

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