A Decade of Norrath: 10 things I wish I had known before building an MMO

by Shawn Schuster Mar 6th 2009 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest, Culture, Events, real-world, Interviews, MMO industry, Humor

March 16th will mark 10 years of SOE's EverQuest, and Massively is here to celebrate! Follow along with us as we countdown to the big day with galleries, developer interviews, staff memories and more! Best of all, on the final day we'll be holding a special contest where you will have the chance to win SOE goodies! Stick with us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the 16th for our complete EQ 10th Anniversary coverage.

Continuing with our countdown to EverQuest's 10th Anniversary, today marks the first of three special articles containing the retrospective thoughts on MMO development from the team that made it so popular. Today's "10 things I wish I had known before building an MMO" starts off with Steve Klug, Lead Programmer for EverQuest. His answers are included just after the cut, and be sure to check out the newest additions to our 10th Anniversary gallery with some exclusive concept art and screenshots from the 14th expansion: Secrets of Faydwer.

Gallery: EQ 10th Anniversary

Steve Klug
Lead Programmer

Servers don't wait for regular business hours to have problems.
Class balance is something that is achieved when my class is more balanced than everyone else's class.
Who would have known that one little square root would make such a difference.
If there are 100 people that all have a different feature that is most important to them and you can only focus on 5 of them, you are ignoring the other 95.
Players are much friendlier in person than on the forums (usually).
Sometimes simple changes can make players just as happy as complex ones.
At least a third of your players will always hate your player character models.
Any long established feature should only be changed with extreme care. Even if you're improving it 1000% over the original, players should not be forced to re-learn it if it can be avoided. (Include an option to revert when practical).
Low hanging fruit hits YOU in the head for 500 damage.
There is no #10. Ask me next year!

Tags: eq, eq-10-year-anniversary, everquest, featured, joystiqfeatures, soe, sony-online-entertainment