MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES 155
Lead, a Customer Support Lead, and the Team Leads from the development
team. They will work together before, during, and after the launch to address
player concerns, gameplay balance issues, and any critical bugs that affect the
gameplay experience.
9.5 POST-PRODUCTION
On launch day, everyone is in the office. There is a still a full QA team, and
everyone is ready to work long hours. Once the game launches, the team
immediately starts monitoring hardware performance, the economy, which
classes are getting more damage, the community sources like the forums, and
anything else that occurs in the game. Adjustments are made to any areas on the
fly to preserve the gameplay experience for live players. Engineers address bugs
as they come up. The feedback loop is extremely important in order to make
a quick decision on which issues are high priority and need to be addressed
right away. The priority is dramatically affected by the frequency that a bug
may occur. For example, if 20 players out of 30 lose 10 pieces of gold when they
buy something, this is a higher priority bug than a bug that deletes an item in
inventory that happens once every two thousand times a player does a very rare
sequence of keystrokes.
9.6 CHAPTER SUMMARY
Producing an MMO has many of the same challenges of production other
games, and many of the techniques discussed in this book can be applied to
MMO development. However, there are some unique issues that need to be
thought about in each phase of development, in order to ensure that the game
is technically sound and well-designed so that it can be enjoyed by thousands of
players at once. This chapter highlighted many issues to consider during the pre-
production, production, and post-production phases.
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