I really do think all the game companies that have come out with MMORPGS used this as a blueprint for thier MMO's.. Feel free to comment on it ;)
This is taken from the World of Warcraft Forums. The idenity of the original poster will remain anymonous, heaven forbid they actually find someone invoking independent thought. hehe.. cant wait for Square-Enix to come out with the next REAL RPG that is NOT online :cool: Dont bother looking this one up, they allready ganked this post.. gee I wonder why?
"Congratulations, you and your friends have just founded the newest startup game development firm, but you have no idea where to start. You want to make money and at the same time get the big boys to notice you, all with as little effort as possible. Your only choice should be obvious; make an MMORPG.
With an MMORPG, you won't need to hire any game designers. Instead, you can leave design up to the programmers and level designers. As long as the level designers create a large enough game world, populated with thousands of palette-swapped "monsters" and the programmers implement a standard leveling treadmill ala Everquest, Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, or one of the dozens of other cookie cutter massively multiplayer games, you should be fine. With such a huge world and so many unique "monsters," the players themselves will generate their own content. Storyline? Pacing? Bah! Not needed! Players will spend hundreds of hours killing "monsters" in one of the fifty different environmentally themed zones in order to level their character up to two and countless more until they have a character capable of venturing even six feet into the world. At this rate, it will take players several thousand hours before they realize that you forgot to actually ship a game with your game, all while paying you a handsome fee each and every month.
You see, the key is in false replay value. Your main focus should be tricking players into thinking there is more to your game than the shallow repetition of killing "monsters" and selling "l007". Include some trade skills, such as weapon making, armor making, lumberjacking, or mining. The more trade skills offered, the better. Now players will have even more reason to continue to play your game, as they will have a choice to kill monsters in order to become better combat characters or to kill monsters to become better non-combat characters. Of course, your ideal player will do both, wanting to sample the glory of possessing both the uber mage-warrior-healer-summoner and the crafting-miner-blacksmith, seeing as how both are such radically different play experiences. It helps if you limit the total number of skills available to a single character, this way, players will be forced to create multiple characters and invest the hundreds of hours needed to reap any rewards to experience your varied class system. As long as players have something to do, no matter how vague or meaningless, and as long as it takes a long time, players will do it. After all, Americans are goal-oriented individuals. Who else is going to play this slop other than the dumbed downed American gamers who feel Counterstrike is a work of art? Koreans…
Translating your game can take valuable time and money you would rather spend on yourself. However, you should translate you game into one other language: Korean. Korean gamers are insane, hardcore, and l337 all wrapped into one neat little package. While they may spend time playing quality titles like Starcraft and Warcraft 3 in their local cyber café, they're also responsible for games like Lineage: The Bloodpledge being the most popular MMORPG ever in terms of shear numbers of players. When translating your game, remember to use the same design philosophy you have used with the rest of your game: minimal effort is the key. Translate the basic names of weapons and items, but do not bother with magic prefixes and suffixes. Make sure to have the names of character classes, races, and skills also translated into Korean, but do not bother adding any Korean text support for in game chat. If there's one thing you don't want, it's people communicating.
The chat window should be a small, unimportant, piece of your interface. Draw as much attention away from it as possible by making the rest of the interface colorful and exciting looking (but wholly useless). If people can easily communicate with one another, it just might lead to independent thought. Independent thought could very well lead to your players realizing just how poor your game is as they share common concerns with gameplay. This is something you must avoid at all costs. Keep your chat window small, just large enough to display three to four lines of text. Include an option to enlarge it, but do not bind the action to a key. Forcer players to activate this option via the interface and have the enlarged chat window dominate the screen, giving players no reason to ever activate this feature. In combat, have every message of importance display in the chat window rather than in game. Everything, whether an attack hits or misses, how much damage it does, and how much experience a kill yields should be displayed in your chat window in color coded text. Make messages such as these bright, vibrant colors, reserving gray for messages sent by players. Luckily your game is also being played by Korean gamers, which will keep intelligent conversations to a minimum. While Korean gamers spread love with messages such as "piyo" and "jajajaja," American gamers will be spending any chatting time they have simply complaining about the Koreans. Our Korean friends will be making you more money than you realize. Be nice, charge them a dollar less each month.
Something else important to remember is that a MMORPG costs money. Lots of money. While you may not be paying for game designers, voice actors, or a CGI team, you will need more level designers and tech support than most PC games. Luckily, you can have players pay for all your development costs while your game is still in development. Simply call your alpha test a "beta" and ship the actual beta as the retail version of the game. Then, as you slowly refine existing content and bring new material into the game through patches, players won't think of it as playing an unfinished game, but rather as a live team constantly adding new content to a game, thus making good use of the monthly fee the players are paying.
If you're just now reading this and have yet to take action, you're already behind the game. Following the success of Everquest and Ultima Online, nearly thirty other companies have jumped on the MMORPG bandwagon and have a game due out within the next two years. This means that there will be over thirty of these massively multiplayer games competing for the million or so people who actually play these games. Competition is going to be fierce, but you can come out ahead. By starting today, you can easily have an alpha build (which we call "beta") just as the other guys are coming out with their beta (which we call "final product"). Their final will not only cost money to purchase, but they will also be demanding a monthly fee. Your game however, will currently be free, as it will be in its open beta stage of development. As the market becomes increasingly saturated, keep your product in its beta, continually causing players fed up with paying for sub par games to begin and play yours. This way, you can release your final product immediately after the fall out. As the other games die from an insufficient user base, you'll be there to scoop them all up. With no competition, how can you fail?
Now that success is in your grasp, it's time to plan for the future. The key here is expansion packs. By adding a minimal amount of new content, like a few new classes, races, and "monsters" you can charge $30 for players to experience all of these brilliant additions. You should try to release at least one expansion pack a year. Any more and your players might realize you're only in it for the money. Any less and won't be taking these fools for everything they're worth. Finally, never make a sequel. As the gaming community will realize that you're only a one trick pony when you merely improve the graphics. Instead, keep making expansion packs until they stop turning a profit. Likewise, keep the game going until you no longer turn a profit. The first month you don't bring enough money from the players to support your server cost is time to end it. Now take your mounds of cash and get hired as a consultant for some big gaming company. By teaching them the secrets behind the MMORPG, you can trick the same people into making your richer. God bless America."
