Alter Aeon 19th anniversary - already?

This week is the 19th anniversary of Alter Aeon. Some time in the middle of January of 1995, I sat down and started writing the first code for what would become a major part of my life, a project that would land me jobs and teach me a lot about software engineering and project management. It actually seems like a long time ago now.

I've traditionally been the one to run the anniversary events, but I think next year I'm going to delegate it to other people. As much as players like events, they make me hate my life. Running an event is much harder work than people seem to realize; most event based things are one shot, so you don't really get to test them very well, and there's always something wrong. The content is one use, or limited use, so you know it probably won't be reused when it's done. I constantly feel like I'm just building things just to throw them away a week later, and that bothers me quite a bit.

All this said, it is almost always a good idea for me to personally run events, because it forces me to improve our codebase to support my ideas. Whenever I build an area, whenever I run an event, I invariably end up needing some trivial piece of code that really improves our ability to script things in the game. A number of really awesome dproc features have come about that way, and this year is no exception, with the addition of truly global data that allows dprocs to talk to each other from anywhere on the server.

Like anything in life, it's a tradeoff. As much as I don't want to run the event next year, I probably will, and the game will be better for it.