Confessions from a former MMORPG Dev

[Trixer]

Hello Everyone!

Over a decade ago when I started my career into technology. I was a young aspiring early twenties geek that would have done anything to work in video games.  After passing some network certs and applying at tons of mmorpg studios, this little no name one picked me up that was making a religious mmorpg.   I won't mention the studio or the game name, but as far as I understand the game is still progressing.   I am the furthest person from religious but I cut my hair threw on a suit and my best attitude and went in for my interview because I wanted to work in the game industry and would take anything.  This wasn't even the craziest game studio I had applied for.

I worked total time with this studio for about three and half years and left on very good term with them. My on paper job was administration of the servers that hosted the game, as well as communicating problems and needs to the dev team and executive members.  Even though I was pretty low on the food chain I got to be privy to a lot of meetings and communication so I could be sure to voice any concerns I might have. 

I see so many truly awesome game ideas on these forums. I wanted to offer some things that I learned during my time employed with this company and working  on an mmorpg, from about half way developed all the way up to and through launch.  

This list of advice is not ordered in a number of importance all of them are equally valid.

 

1.  Design for 10k players.  Not more or less.  Intersect can handle it, regardless of your doubts 

 

2.  Virtual servers networking translation becomes a bottleneck at about higher workloads players. Virtual is great for dev and test servers but use real server hardware and make a real server for your launch (bite the bullet on the expense and most hosting companies will do "co-location" where you can send them a server and they will host it in the data center for a laughable fee)

 

3.  If you build it they will come.  Be honest about what your game is and can do, don't worry about pre orders or dumb stuff like that and I promise you no matter how off the books your idea is players will come.  I mean I was part of an mmorpg that was all about the bible, and it saw numbers I would have never guessed.  (about 6k players steady at all times logged in and around 45k players registered)

 

4.  Design your maps like you are building an mmorpg not a single player game. Wide passage ways and open areas.  Don't make shops that only hold 10 players, it will bottle neck your players game play and this is bad

 

5. Content content content  Many of you know this already but players will eat your content at a rate that is directly inverse to the amount of sleep you should have gotten spending six days designing content that only takes fifteen minutes to swallow.  Your team needs to be composed of content creators at a ratio of 3:1. Meaning you should have 3 people designing quests and making maps for every 1 person that is designing and creating hardcore game mechanics. 

6. Do not turn down a writer in any form.  If any person offers to write quests, lore, or put words on paper that describe aspects of your game world, you need to let them.  Writers will become more valuable then artists or programmers and are masters of recycling content.  Take a moment and reflect and think about how much is written in an mmorpg. If you count it up, it's a lot of times the largest part of development (even over art).

7. Sounds are just as important as writing. Do not let your sound guy/girl go upraised, you do not know what you have lost until it is gone!!!! (experience speaking)

8. There is no real difference in stability between a properly administrated windows server and a properly administrated *nix server (one could argue there is a huge difference in security though, which is why i would always recommend *nix, but just to dispel a myth. )

 

 

That is roughly all I can think of, but if more things come to mind I will add them to the list! Thanks for reading this, if anyone has any questions let me know!

[Gilgamesh]

Excellent post, sometimes we miss simple concepts of a game (and game making) and make big mistakes (like I did with the small shop stuff) that could be easily avoided.