I was linked to an article with the following tagline: “Doubts raised on the value of public betas.” It’s essentially a commentary on open betas not being useful to the development process. It’s interesting, because I thought we’d figured this whole thing out back in about 2004. I’m not a panel, but I can say fairly definitively that open betas are very useful, in roughly these statistically-irrelevant percentages: Continue Reading »

An innocent post declaring official forums a necessary evil led to some controversy. Garthilk, a guy who actually runs very good fansites like WHA, basically called me out and asked me to list 3 things that official forums do that fansite forums can’t. I’ll do him one better by talking briefly about 3 things official forums can do that unofficial forums can’t, and 3 things unofficial forums can do that official forums can’t. I honestly believe both are necessary, and neither is actually evil. Continue Reading »

One of the rarely mentioned, but incredibly important, aspects of MMO game development is updating the game. When someone does certain aspects of updating very well, it highlights the importance of it. What I’m talking about at the moment is update agility — responding to real, game altering issues in a timely manner. Continue Reading »

Make it easy to come back. If someone has quit your game (See: Lesson #26), make it so easy to come back they can’t believe they quit in the first place. I’ll apologize right now for not making this lesson short and sweet like I usually do, but this one’s worth elaborating on. I’ll start with what you shouldn’t do, then I’ll give a few ideas for what you could do to make coming back easier than ever. Continue Reading »

Make cancellation easy. Seriously, don’t make it difficult in the least. The worst thing you can possibly do is make someone call to cancel their subscription. It may yield you an extra month of their subscription money since people are generally lazy, but it will leave such a horrible taste in their mouth that they will NEVER come back. Ever. Feel free to ask for brief (key word #1), voluntary (key word #2) feedback, maybe a series of check boxes that they can select for why they quit. But, make it a simple, easy to understand, quick, painless process. If you do, the player will be infinitely more likely to come back if and when they get the itch.