I thought of this .5 seconds ago and I think it will help out a lot of people on the bumpy road to Playerworld Making and the tough buisness that goes along with it. The easiest way we can do this is explain our pasts with failed projects (no real names if it's going to be deemed infraction-worthy content due to harassing people or some nonsense,) and what you think you did wrong; what you should have done.
I guarantee everyone will be able to learn a thing or two from everyone else's experience.
I'll start it up, if you're confused, reading my fairy tales should help a bit.
On my first server, Horrification, I learned a lot. At first, I thought I should take everyone on hard-ass and make them work to the breaking point, get as much pushed out of them as I could. After just three staff almost instantly quitting, I saw going Army-Officer on them wasn't going to work if I wanted to go anywhere, and I took my next few staff on gently, telling them not to rush and to work at a calm pace. This really improved there activity, but yet, they still left...because they got bored because they really weren't pressed to work on anything.
So, then I get one of my star staff, who are still on the team today. I finally figure that I need to kind of mix it up a bit, I need to be nice at times, but then there needs to be a point where they need to work, but it all needs to be done without sounding too commanding or rude, or they'll lose interest or desire to work with me on my projects.
I had lots of things going through my mind as to what to do. Handing out lots of work, especially to the graphics artists, which is perhaps the biggest fault, as they are tough to grab and hold for long. I was thinking about release dates, I wanted to push quickly and get hosted at some sort of special date, and aimed at Christmas Time. But, I soon learned my ideas weren't going to work out as well as I thought.
My scripters denied many of my requests due to the difficulty of there creation. An entire part of the server demolished, which they put hard work into but could not complete due to the harsh difficulty of some parts in it. I lucked out, the scripters stayed because they had many other things there created by them and the server had hundreds of classes, weapons and NPCs.
Now, still, even though I managed to get a good staff team, and even got lucky with the patience of these members, I still failed to succeed. Work was flying out with new content everyday, yet it stopped. Why? A slew of new hosted servers came out, and boom, there went our dreams. One of them was so high-quality we felt that we were nothing to this new server, and decided to scrap the project. Two weeks later? It's off the list.
What I Learned:
-Don't give up hope. Just because the new server rocks hard doesn't mean yours can't rock harder.
-Stay in reasonable bounds. Your new idea for a server is awesome, but great scripters like Zero, or great levelers like Crono, will 99.99 percent not be on your team. If you are .01 percent you are paying a lot of money out of your PayPal for those deeds, and you are a rich, 27-year old man living in a mansion with slaves you toss gold coins to if they wash their hands before they leave the bathroom, and have a beautiful, 25-year old wife who loves to cook food.
-Have some kind of heart. Jeez, it's a bunch of people working for you, I mean
you, the guy snacking on doritos while everyone else is finding methods to your madness.
Obviously these are more administration-related. It would be nice to see developer-related experiences
03-28-2008, 01:56 AM
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