http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/4416/General-Timesink-Why-MMOs-Take-So-Long.html

Enjoyable article!

Heh.

The article makes MMOs sound like they are designed by idiots who aren't able to hire appropriate staffing, have knee-jerk reactions to tester/player feedback, apply band-aid solutions to problematic features, and who aren't able to see their own product from the point of view of the player.

Hell, most of what the article touches on isn't even specific to MMOs, but multi-player games in general.

Actually ya. For all sorts of organizations we tend to attribute the actions within that organization to be something special. Like, you walk into a wal-mart and just see the nice clean shelves all stocked with products and you think it's some sort of super organized army that takes care of it. Then you go work there for a summer and see that it's just people throwing things onto pallets and other people throwing them up on shelves. Or like how you feel surprised when you see your high school English teacher out on a date. I imagine that MMO developing is just another job filled with mostly normal people.  I think the issues mentioned in the article sound perfectly realistic. If you spend months designing a system from the inside out, I don't it's far fetched that you might miss that it would be hard to grasp for someone who has never seen it before.

No, it's just that you have to remember that they're human like the rest of us and making an MMO is very tricky. The author was just pointing out some common pitfalls.

I remember that, though he ended up in jail because she was underage.

It is amusing how the author tries to make it seem like core design is done mid-project as a matter of course. Granted, some studios have a tendency to keep going back to the drawing board and take forever to release a product, but sometimes its necessary. Problem is doing so too many times.

Actually, the diagram he showed near the beginning is one I've seen in my college computer science courses. It's a simple fact that the design of any large program will be altered in development. It doesn't matter if it's an MMO or an accounting system. That doesn't mean that you're supposed to redesign the entire thing of course, but you have to be prepared to make changes. Maybe you have to have some programming experience to realize this, but nothing he said in that article is at all far fetched; in fact, I'd say it's very common. My father makes complaints that obviously stem from the same pitfalls about the electronic medical records systems he has to use.