I think a lot of you have noticed, iPhone players are buying servers and are failing horribly. Of course, other players are too. Before buying a server there are lots of things you should actually think about ahead of time. Make sure you don't waste your time and money.
1. Don't hire staff you don't need. You're giving yourself more work by making yourself babysit bored staff. Does an under development server need any non dev staff? No. You don't need GPs, events teams, FAQs or any of that. You're going to have more staff and visitors than actual players. If someone is causing problems, just ban them. Don't hire GPs, if someone is acting up they are probably trying to distract you or gain attention. Don't hire an events team. If the main part of the server isn't finished, you don't need events.
2. Don't spend your time making staff tools, player/staff houses, events, or anything that isn't actually part of the game play. Spend all your time working on what's needed. Everyone should have something to do. So theres really no point in most staff tools at the beginning. And for events, no players are randomly gonna come on the server just because you're hosting. Theres other servers with events and more players. They could just go there. Events are fine if you have content finished and a player count more than just staff.
3. Make sure people will actually wanna play your server. If you're gonna make a modern server, please make it different from Era. Why would someone wanna play a clone? If you're going to make a generic level up RPG, make it different from Zodiac. If you're going for something different, make sure it's something fun with some goals. Nobody is gonna play a "hang out" server if they could do that on a regular server.
4. Make sure you know what you actually want made. It would be even more helpful if you actually had developing experience. Learn stuff off of graal.net before you buy it. Long term dev experience as staff on another server actually being worked on may help a bunch.
5. Don't give staff rights they don't need and make backups. This is more important than actually hiring useless staff. They can actually mess your server up. Imagine all of your levels being deleted. If someone didn't have those rights, they may have been saved. If someone you did trust had those rights, you should have had backups! Also, you should never allow your staff to give out items or probably give their selves stuff. In some cases, scripters need to test NPCs. But theres no reasons for most people to actually get free stuff without earning it. Plus, you don't need them giving a fair advantage in game play.
If I missed anymore big mistakes for new server owners, please share!
07-14-2010, 06:53 PM
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