The following video by Josh Strife Hayes is well sourced and researched. It is chock full of details, big and small of things that could go wrong in MMO design. I could list some of the most salient, but really I would not do it justice. If the best lessons are learned from failures, then I think this is a masterclass and I recommend everyone watch it.
[youtube]F3ZMly9YAPA[/youtube]
https://youtu.be/F3ZMly9YAPA
—
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
We've watched all that guy's videos and discussed 'em internally, yeah.
Great examples of what not to do!
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
The first time I saw this part I misread it.
I thought you had said it was a murderclass.
That's what I get for reading forum first thing in the morning when my eyes aren't fully operational yet ...
But yeah ... New World is what you get when you trainwreck on an exploding bridge over the abyss of recursive error.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I thought that one mistake by the new community manager, misunderstanding the player's sarcasm about getting 300k gold and congratulating him, was totally something anyone could do. If the left hand isn't aware of what the right hand is doing, something like that is so totally understandable and I could see the same mistake being made by anybody. I suppose this is why community managers need to be up on all the details and should probably have a seat at nearly all meetings, or at least access to meeting minutes.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I can see how that would happen, yeah.
I don't mind admitting that MWM has made similar mistakes. The system we used to communicate previously had a lot of departments totally unable to communicate with each other. We switched to a private Discord about the same time I joined the team, and one of the first things we did was made sure everybody could cross-talk in most channels. There's still sometimes a bad habit of not using the "public" (internally public, anyway) channels to discuss things, but at least now we can metaphorically stick our heads into each other's departments and touch base with each other.
[color=red]PR Team, Forum Moderator, Live Response Team[/color]
I've worked in a myriad of career fields and man, the number of times I've seen, heard, or suggested that management should talk to the workers to really understand what's going on, I wouldn't need to have worked all those jobs. Seriously, get familiar with what people at the bottom level are dealing with, from retail to a playerbase. It definitely seems like there's a consistent disconnect somewhere.
In addition to that, the number of offices within a large entity, be it corporate or government, that seems to have no fair notion of what another department is doing used to be unbelievable. Now? Now I believe just about anything is possible.
Communication is key, people.