[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Jessica Mulligan]

At 07:35 PM 12/10/2002 -0800, Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com wrote:

> Anyway, I'm not sure where you think they are wet behind the ears?
> In the dynamics of implementing network code - if so, I don't see
> a problem there, it ain't that hard. If its in balancing gameplay
> dynamics, I'd argue they are experts. Warcraft, Starcraft and
> Diablo all show that they are really pretty good at balancing
> diverse ability sets and creating an interesting and rewarding
> game.

Raph is right; they are wet behind the ears when it comes to
persistent worlds.  It doesn't matter how many P2P games they've
done or that they are masters of that style; P2P games are not
Persistent Worlds.  It is one thing to design a system that merely
chooses one PC in a session as the 'master' and lets it run the
session; it is quite another to build out a client/server
architecture that requires an ability to hold and discern 3,000
simultaneous connections per server cluster and has servers that
must keep track of all simultaneous users and display the proper
data and results to them and they move and interact.

And as I noted in another reply, customer service, player relations,
community relations, billing and account adminisitration and NetOps
is even more different and has far more impact in a PW than on
something relatively simply (comparatively) like battle.net, where
the CS is pretty much non-existent.



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