General Discussion

MMORPG's are companies and gamers are their stakeholders (Wiki defines stakeholder as an individual with a legitimate interest in a given situation). A lot of player time and money is invested into these games, giving the player a legitimate interest in the games they play. This includes having the right to be concerned for the well being of their game. It seems like companies take a push approach to game development in that they do not listen to their stakeholders. Instead, they push updates onto players and expect them to learn to like the new content. A pull approach seems like the ideal situation where the new content reflects the majority of players suggestions.  But yet they seem to defy logic.

when you goto buy a game you done say "wow, the wall glitch has been fixed and they have a very low rate of people falling through the world"

you say "Wow! I can fly a dragon and raid huge dungeons with my friends"

the fact is 100% man power on the statbility issue would be wasted. Content designers would be useless, artists, modelers, skinners all that. They need something to do. 100 programmers working on one thing is also going to be a huge mess

OP, I would highly suggest you read the book The Mythical Man-Month.  If you read it and fully understand it, come back here and try again.

Originally posted by FreddyNoNose

OP, I would highly suggest you read the book The Mythical Man-Month.  If you read it and fully understand it, come back here and try again.

I don't see how my suggestion would feed the flames to burn up an entire organization. However, I did enjoy reading what information I found online about the man-month. To reiterate, fix what is broken... Once the basics are fixed, take it to " a whole nuther level." The Appreciative Inquiry Theory comes to mind. The fact is, there has been great progress made in MMORPGs. However, I do feel there is still a disconnect between the game designers and consumers.

did you just use a serif font on a forum at a default size?  whatever you did it fricking hurts to read I had to paste it into note pad.

since you seem to be outside of the IT industry or even lower level tech in general(made painfully obvious by what you consider fuzzy logic, along with your suggestions).   I propose an excercise that completely help you realize why developers can't focus all their programming resources on one project:

Step one get a few friends together and learn basic HTML.  doesn't need to be much just enough to link a few pages together.   essentially enough for your group to make a website with formating.

Step two after you get about about as many pages together as you have people hand it to someone to mess up in any way possible short of completely destroying it.

step three get you and your friends to fix it.

a very simplified task compared to what happens, but you'll quickly run into problems I promise you that.

Paul here is a better analogy.

If one guy can pull a log up a hill slowly.
and two can pull the same log up much faster.
three is Much faster.

My following this logic.. using 400 people, you should be able to move to logs almost instantly.

this is the same for a peice of code and programmers, 1 is slow, 2 helps quite a bit, 3 is still an improvment but if you get an entire team of 20 people on it, there is no room and you start going slower as people are tripping over eachother.

So if it takes one women nine months to produces a baby, give her 8 helpers and it will be done in 1 month!

I believe what you have tried to explain in your creative analogies is The Law of Diminishing Returns. I enjoy the irony.

Few bugs should make it to release and if they do, squishing them should be a top priority.

There is a saying in the entertainment industry "give the public what it wants"  Now, I will admit that sometimes the public doesn't really know what it wants or even what the impact will be for what it is asking - so some time should be set aside every so often to talk with the developers about the most pressing desires of the game's community and what the developers thoughts on them are.  If it is feasible and you know your player base wants it - why the hell wouldn't you make it priority over something else you are working on that you think will make them happy?