Occasionally Wildfire Games merges balancing patches by community members.
Wildfire Games had always added authors to the credits when their first patch landed.
However there is no Balancing category in the credits, so some players were not added easily.
For example this happened with Grugnas and borg-.
Grugnas was added to the programming creidts when writing some JS patch.
borg- was added to programming as well since we didn't create a balancing category.
Now in D2392 I'm facing the same problem again with ValihrAnt who proposes a balancing patch but that I cannot commit without either breaking the credits policy (by either omitting him or adding him to a wrong category).
Hence I wrote out all people who created balancing patches so that we have a category where we can add authors that wrote a balancing patch but not programming or art patch.
Before we can lis all people there, we have to specify when someone is added to the list and when not.
The most practical definition I found seems to be:
An author is added in the balancing credits list if
(1) he created a copyrighted work committed in the repository and
(2) the patch was created with the intent to adapt the existing game balance, without introducing a new code/unit feature or artwork.
This is to distinguish contributions to the programming category that modified some simulation code that influences the balance as well but was not programmed to modify the balance but to implement a missing feature.
For example the authors of simulation components, fcxSanya implemented Trade and Barter, leper implemented the Heal component (rP11536) did that to develop the game, not to balance it primarily;
whereas a patch only changing numbers in templates is not adding anything new but - a balancing patch.
Another example are artists like enrique, LordGood and Stan adding new buildings that may or may not end up being buildable.
They are often not really reviewed for balancing impact and thus would not satisfy the category of people doing balancing work despite it affecting balance.
However a gameplay feature addition (e.g. new simulation component) may still qualify as a balancing patch if there is evidence that the author tried to actually performed balancing work and if intent to balance is noticeable.
So the list is most likely incomplete since I only looked at commits in the entity template folders and didn't determine for every simulation commit in how far balancing was considered.
The second change in this diff the addition of some programming author that had not been present in the list currently, see #5444.