Why do developers of MMOs release products that have design flaws in such numbers?

Kinchyle

Another thread not worth creating. Why ask us? Ask the friggin devs!

Loktofeit

Originally posted by Quizzical

In many, many situations in game design, there is no "this is the right way to do it".  Rather, there are only trade-offs.  You can do this, or you can do that, but you cannot do both.  Some of your players will want you do have done this, and others to have done that, and many on each side will think it is obvious that their side is right.

Let's take the examples in the original post.  Some people liked being able to raid enemy cities in WoW.  Others got annoyed that they couldn't progress until the enemy griefers got bored and decided to leave.  Some people liked raiding in WoW.  Others disliked raiding for its own sake and hated how the only way to get the best gear was to schedule their real-life around an activity that they hated.  Would Guild Wars 2 be more successful if it had WoW-style raiding?  It's likely that it would be less.

Sometimes the trade-offs are more subtle.  Some people around here want a seamless world.  It's pretty easy to make a seamless world if that's your top priority.  But there are trade-offs, and loading screens aren't added to the game because developers think players like to sit and stare at loading screens.  If you don't have loading screens, then you can't assume that players can have arbitrarily much stuff loaded.  Having to limit what the client can load and how quickly limits what you can do in a bunch of different ways.

And that's even if we ignore the budget.  There are a lot of things that one could say, yes, that would be cool.  But it would add $1 million to the cost to make the game.  That's fine if you believe that adding the feature will bring in another $2 million in revenue, but not if it will only bring in another $100k.

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Now, there are some things that are not a result of trade-offs in intentional game design, but are simply bugs.  And some games are a lot better at fixing those bugs than others.  But I don't think that you're mainly concerned with bugs.

+1

Well said, Quizzical.

Wizardry

Time lines ,i guess would be the best answer.

I think eveyone was wondering what was taking GW2 so long,they claimed they were doing lots of tweaking.I believe they couldn't get things finished and just left content out.

I do follow what the OP is saying,he is not saying a certain desgin is a flaw,but how you implement each design.He uised the example of copying Wow but leaving out it's most popular facet and yes that would be considered a design flaw if looking at it from that perspective.

What i see developers doing right now is looking for ways to deliver the cheapest,most cost effective product,they are not trying to build a heart felt game that the lead guy is totally proud of.That is why you will see ideas left out.It does not mean they won't eventually be there,it is just means that developers are defintiely rushing products out to start making monmey.