From a designer standpoint, many MMO-elements are like mini-games in and of themselves. You have the obvious leveling game, the questing game, the guild game, the PvP game, the raid game, the tradeskill game, the “press X button at the right time in the right sequence to make Y effect” game, the house decoration game, the auctioning/buying/selling/get_me_better_stuff game, the “get the most achievement possible” game, so-on and so-forth… Many different systems that in an of themselves are their own “games” with all of the necessary rules, mechanics, and rewards, but put together in cohesive fashion in the context of a “world”. Hence, designing for an MMO I would think to be like designing many different types of games while being mindful of the necessary world cohesion.

From a coding standpoint, not only are you putting together various “games” in the MMO, but there’s also the other layers…

Client programming including the basic game loop, rendering, events and event processing, network protocol handling, memory/swap and disk management, loading/unloading assets, etc.

Then there’s server programming, cluster computing, again network protocol stuff (not just between the server and the game client, but inter-server communication mechanisms for handing off client communications for processing on other servers, logging, and database communications), game rules and logic (combat, world positioning, tracking of objects/NPCs,etc), chat (including channels/filtering of spam/etc), activity logging and many database queries (kind of said that already, but it’s worthy of mentioning twice since it’s such a huge part of the system), handling failover for server crash events (bad things do happen), etc. etc.

Then there’s tools programming, which is for things like server resource monitoring and the many many business intelligence data analysis queries that can be done against the massive amounts of data recorded in the database by the server processes. Data is only good if you can ask the right questions, right? I’m going to hold short due to post-length and understate this a bit.

Oh, and let’s not forget the DBA’s role for structuring the database tables, indexes, keys, queries, etc. and coming up with those magical ways to pull up the data that many internal teams need to make intelligent decisions about the future of the product. Again, vastly understated, but I’m hoping I’ve been able to at least hint at how an MMO could be much more difficult than just a standard single player game.

I should put the disclaimer that I’m just an outside observer so by all means you experienced MMO devs can correct me if I’m way off the mark

Not necessarily true…its possible that developers can learn from their mistakes but then make new mistakes instead of replicating old mistakes.

Curse my overthinking of replies!

And Coray, I really hate to fall back on saying that you really don’t understand how tough good MMOs are to make unless you’ve been through the process, but you really don’t understand how tough good MMOs are to make unless you’ve been through the process. Even making a really crappy MMO is an ordeal.

However, I do agree that the majority of people make stuff that sucks, no matter what platform or industry we’re talking about. This is why I feel that relying upon user generated content is precarious at best — not because professionals are so much more skilled than non-professionals, but because at least having a process to vet one’s work increases the odds that it will be marginally less sucky.

But of course I have to take a contrarian point of view to you both because I have a far simpler theory that actually has data to support it.

You see, since the dawn of video game time, the vast majority, upwards of perhaps 95% of games, have sucked balls. It stands to reason that the vast majority of MMO games would also suck balls.

I don’t think experience matters here also, I theorize that on a percentage basis, games have sucked balls at a constant rate which would definitely not happen if people learned from their failures.

I’m not debating if it’s hard to build a game, without a doubt a lot of work is involved in even making a bad game (I would know), but to act like they are radically different and that’s why they suck so often is a bit much.