The Star Wars Galaxies official sit has been updated with a dev diary by game designer Thomas "Hanse" Eidson. The dev diary focuses on a behind the scenes look at how monsters are balanced.

Howdy, folks! I'm Thomas "Hanse" Eidson, a game designer on the Star Wars Galaxies team. In this second designer diary, I will outline the process behind creature balance, the first design feature I worked on as a system designer.

When I was first brought onto the team a little over a year ago, I was tasked with looking over Non-Player Character (NPC) balance. Normal creatures were too easy to fight at some levels and too hard at others.

At the time, Helios explained that very few stats were used in combat for NPC's. The feature had to be published soon and I was to review and revise them quickly. I chose a simple stat to modify - their hit points (HP).

When approaching a systemic issue such as creature balance, you would not normally modify only one statistic. Modifying one statistic for creature balance makes your creatures bland and boring during combat. Our current game does not rely on a single statistic for combat. We use a master data table that is level based, which means the statistics rise as the level increases.

Read the dev diary here.