Official News - page 3

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED

by Hazed

Back in the real life world, what really happened was that Bella added the code for another build for Industrial planets: oil production. This build has both positive and negative effects. On the plus side, it adds two production point to the Industrial-level commodity of your choice; unfortunately, it also causes disaffection to increase by 2% because of unhappiness about pollution and other environmental concerns. You can see the details of the new build in the Idiot's Guide.

Bella set up a new field in the planet records to store the disaffection value caused by oil production. Unfortunately she forgot to zero it out to start off with, so every planet had a random value in there - some of which were large enough to make the planet's disaffection very high, which triggered the Galaxy-wide riots. Bella did test this, but by chance her test planet ended up with a random zero here - so the problem didn't show up!

Luckily, she logged on not long after the reset and realized what she had done, so she swiftly fixed the code to zero the values, and compensated everybody for their losses.

This kind of problem is a consequence of playing a game which is still being developed. The advantage is that you get to experience the new stuff as it goes in, and sometimes have your ideas implemented, but the disadvantage of course is that sometimes things go wrong. We have a test team to check over new code so usually players don't get affected by bugs - but on this occasion, the side-effects were not confined to the test team!

At least it's more exciting than playing a moribund game which has been abandoned by its programmers...

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