A Decade of Norrath: 10 more things I wish I had known before building an MMO
March 16th will mark 10 years of SOE's EverQuest, and Massively is here to celebrate! Follow along with us as we countdown to the big day with galleries, developer interviews, staff memories and more! Best of all, on the final day we'll be holding a special contest where you will have the chance to win SOE goodies! Stick with us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the 16th for our complete EQ 10th Anniversary coverage.
Once again we bring you more from the EverQuest team with their thoughts on "10 things I wish I had known before building an MMO". Today's Top 10 list comes from Programmer Chris Hoover. We've also added dozens of new images to our 10th Anniversary gallery, including some from the 10th through 13th expansions. As this gallery continues to grow, you'll notice that they've been labeled and organized into chronological order, separated by the particular expansion's box cover. Check back Wednesday for even more EQ 10th Anniversary coverage, as well as the grand finale contest a week from today!%Gallery-46192%
Chris Hoover
Programmer
Programming for a living ruins your ability to count like normal people.
No matter what you produce, some portion of the player base will absolutely hate it. They will say so loudly in public forums. Some will love it. They will say it less loudly in public forums. Many people won't say anything.
The players will know the intricacies of any system you build far better than you do. They will vocally complain about the shortcomings and remain silent about anything that can be exploited.
Reading bug reports in large doses is depressing. The concise and well written ones point out the shortcomings in the game that you spend your entire day trying to improve. The badly written ones aren't useful in finding the problem and tend to be vitriolic.
When players like the stuff you've put in the game it's an absolutely great feeling!
Strange linking between subsystems ensures that a minor fix to one system will break some other system completely. This link is often discovered by players.
Sometimes there will be things that are broken the entire history of the game and have affected gameplay so much that they simply can't be fixed because of the resulting change to gameplay.
The job is not "playing games all day" as many people think. Often it involves loading the game, setting up a specific situation, testing it, and shutting down again. Repeat until fixed. Perhaps better described as "Playing the same 3 seconds of the game all day."
Working on an MMO destroys your desire to play that MMO. It greatly reduces the desire to play other MMOs as well. I make compensate by playing console games.
The first time you change something in the game and can see the change on the screen is an incredible feeling. I took a screen shot and sent it to everybody I knew. I still get this feeling, but I've stopped sending screenshots.
