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How Not To Make An MMOG
garylian writes "Some of the folks here might remember a Massive game called 'Mourning' that went into development and never really went anywhere. Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete. Some former fans have a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Highlights from the article include the fact that one of the game backers was a internet porn-lord!" From the article:"The game was going nowhere, no one really believed in its success. We all knew it was going to fail, but we were kind of reluctant in admiting it. Those who realized this and had better opportunities, left. Those who were blinded by different reasons or had no other choices, remained till the end (or maybe had different reasons.) It's not that we didn't try to change this direction the game was heading to... We did, but no one was listening to us. " The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt.
Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete.
Which makes it different from other MMORPGs... how?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Summary, we didn't have a design document and as such we could not deliver.
Any medium to large development is going to fail unless their is an underlying document which sets forth the goals. Any such project will be further compromised if those in charge are not competent to know this. Of course if they are paranoid someone will steal their ideas if they are ever written down that should be a red flag as well.
For what its worth, quite a few games get to market only to meander and fail because there is no post-launch plan or worse there are conflicting goals among the people running the show. A good game design document should lay out what happens before, during, and after. Just as with any other project if you don't know what should happen when it probably never will.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I got the same impression. Also, consider this question:
Q: OK, well let's talk about the man behind the money. Who is David Jasinski and what was his role in the development of RoT?
You'll notice this is the first mention of the names David or Jasinski in the entire interview. Either it's an extremely well-prepared interviewer, a case of two former employees interviewing each other, or one former employee interviewing himself. After this, the interviewer starts calling him "Dave" which indicates a level of familiarity.
I looked for a bit of background and it's in plain sight on the homepage:
Friday, December 9th, 2005: Spoonbender recieved an email from one of the former developers of Mourning a few months ago asking what had happened to the game. At that point the game had been taken offline and the forums were down. Spoon sent off an email detailing his experience with the developers and with the game itself, and the former developer replied with a few stories of his own. Spoon forwarded the email to Shintuk, Shintuk to Jdodger, and JD showed it to me. JD then conducted an interview with the former developer. His insights and personal stories about the behind-the-scenes events during his time working on the project constitute the best and most accurate picture we have of who was to blame for the mismanagement that Mourning suffers from. He will talk at length about Ado's 'unconventional' game designing style, Ego's tragic inability to grasp the true problems until it was too late, and even individual incidents with the development team that illustrate both the potential Mourning had and how that potential was, with almost criminal negligence, squandered.
I feel that it is nessecary that those that followed Mourning and devoted time and money to its success see where their time and money went. In short, they should know the truth.
You can read the interview and draw your own conclusions.
So that provides some background. Rebuttal from "Adonys" can be found here.
The whole things reminds me of Battlecruiser.
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Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.
Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.
But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!
Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.
I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game".
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
From never recieving pre ordered copies of the game, to the game shipping on just run of the mill blank cd-r's, the game was plaqued with horrendus management.
Go try to read the official Mourning forums. Notice how they only go back to a certain date? They've deleted their forum database more than once. Not just a typical pruning but completely cleaned it cause so many of the fans, players, and even development team staff & moderators spoke out aganist it.
Imagine if one day a huge portion of say, SOE's player base (for any game, just as an example) spoke out aganist a huge list of problems, failures and broken promises. In this huge group of people is several key people in your production team, a good portion of your long time forum and community moderators, and even some of your own sponsors. Now imagine SOE just basically giving all those people a big middle finger, deleting the forums, and then rule over the "new" forums with an iron nazi fist (quite literally, meaning NO negative opinions). If you can piture all that, that is exactly what it was like for the Mourning players.
Aw Frell this