Doctor Jekyll and Mister Yap

I realized today that I have a split personality.

My normal, non-Clan Lord persona is one of an optimist, living by Yappy's Maxim.  I recently experienced a RL flood in my apartment building: a pipe on an upper floor broke and water seeped through all of the tenant's apartments and triggered the fire alarm.  As the local fire department checked the apartments for damages, one of my neighbors complained about the inconvenience and hassle of having the fire department present.  I spoke Yappy's Maxim: "if this is as bad as our day gets, then we're having a pretty good day."  I added that if our building's fire alarm is going to trigger, then I would much rather have the fire department present looking for water rather than looking for fire.

However, when it comes to Clan Lord scripts and design, I had an epiphany that I am – at heart – a pessimistic curmudgeon.  I don't look at an area or an item or a script and think of how awesome it is, but instead I find myself thinking "how can this be abused?  How can this break?  How can this be exploited?  What's wrong with it?"  This realization came to me while reviewing my code for parting words: while the functionality of the code was fine, it wasn't very efficient in the way that it handled itself (it would reinitialize itself every time the function was called instead of initializing itself once).  Addressing this problem is high on this weekend's fix-it list.

Another example of my pessimism surfaced during a discussion of libraries outside of town.  My initial reaction was not "oh cool, a library far from town!" but was instead "not cool – why would we want a library so far from town?"  I hold the opinion that, because Clan Lord's population is small, I see no benefit from dividing an-already-small population by placing libraries on nearby islands.  The libraries of Puddleby keep players returning to town, and if we were to decentralize the logoff-for-experience locations, then I feel that our diminishing community would ultimately suffer from such design.

I admit that I am a little nonplussed by this self-discovery.  How can one with such a positive attitude in life have such a negative approach to game design?  I wonder what Robert Louis Stevenson would have to say about Mister Yap!