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.

A game is only as strong as its weakest feature. Games are more often judged by their weaknesses than their strengths, just like anything else. Any incomplete feature or complete but crappy feature will leave a bad taste in players’ mouths. Reviewers will dwell on anything that isn’t up to par in your game far more than they will dwell on all the positives. Do not be afraid to get rid of features, even if you’ve already implemented them. This goes for more than just features: If a quest sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If a zone sucks, fix it or get rid of it. If anything sucks, fix it or get rid of it. It may make you shed a tear for all that lost work, but it’s better than leaving it in.

Know when to stop. Beta is not a time for you to pack in new features that you weren’t sure you could get into the game, it’s a time for you to polish all of your core features and ensure that everything that will be in the game at launch is up to snuff. If you find yourself with the desire to add that neat little feature you always wanted, ask yourself two questions: 1) Is everything currently in the game polished and ready to go for paying players? 2) Do we have time to implement this feature and get it polished to a fine sheen? If the answer to either of those questions is “no,” under no circumstances should you try to implement it. Know when to stop, and quit while you’re ahead.

Inconvenience does not make a game harder, it makes it less convenient. Tedium does not equal difficulty. Making something unnecessarily complex, tedious, or in some way inconvenient doesn’t make the game more challenging or more fun. Is having an extremely limited amount of inventory space fun or challenging? No, it’s tedious. It’s not fun gameplay for most people, even if there are some freaks out there who want to painstakingly manage their inventory and consider the absence of that unfun. Don’t design for those people unless you are making a niche game. Make a game challenging via gameplay, not tedious barriers to fun.

Just because you have a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to implement it. Sometimes a good idea isn’t completely cohesive with the core focus of the game. Sometimes a good idea is very difficult and time-consuming to implement, and that time would be better spent on other things. Sometimes a good idea is cohesive and may not necessarily take forever to implement on its own, but preexisting systems would not mesh very well with it. Whatever the case may be, just because someone has a good idea does not mean it should be or even can be implemented. Remember, when someone who can make calls does not include your good idea in a game, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or that they simply don’t like it; there are usually other reasons that it doesn’t get implemented.