[:1]Just to give credit where credit is due...You gotta give it to the GW2Guru community - no matter how obscure the information about GW/GW2 is, someone in the large Guru2 community will find and share it. Visiting their forums, I came across a blog entry, I wouldn't have found on my own:
An Arenanet employee was blogging about why one should not make an mmo (by yourself <- added by me)
GW2 details are sparse and scattered, but I appreciated this article for the massive details involved in making an mmo. Did you have any idea how much work was involved in converting GW to GW2?
Source: http://www.gamedev.net/blog/355/entr...making-an-mmo/
P.S: I did not post this on the front page because its relation to GW2 is rather far. It's also not a news article per-se. So the post here should be appropriate.|||Quote:
And if you're sick in the head enough to enjoy something like working on an MMO, come apply to ArenaNet. I hear we're still looking for a few good senior programmers
I think 2012 might be optimistic.
Nice article, jaded but good.
Minecraft is an MMO right?
-Art|||That guy has the best and most engaging job anyone will ever have. Much of what he says isn't particular to MMOs though, they are true for any system that is large enough - that said, a state-of-the-art MMO is a huge system.
I disagree with him, though. If you are five guys and want to make an MMO - knock yourself out. Literally, probably, but it's not a waste if you learn something by it.|||Quote:
That guy has the best and most engaging job anyone will ever have. Much of what he says isn't particular to MMOs though, they are true for any system that is large enough - that said, a state-of-the-art MMO is a huge system.
Absolutely right.
I do not work in the games industry but the majority of what this guy talks about is my day-to-day existence. I work on an enterprise OS kernel. So when I mess up instead of thousands of gamers being unable to go collect virtual shinies, multi-national corporations are hemorrhaging millions of dollars per minute their server is unavailable.
In my first year on this job (straight out of college), I shut myself in my office and broke down in tears after a call with a customer. They were testing air traffic control software on the newest service pack of our OS and had uncovered a bug. It wasn't even my bug but the enormity of responsibility really crashed down on me at that moment. If I screw this up, planes might fall out of the sky! o.O
Quote:
And if you're sick in the head enough to enjoy something like working on an MMO, come apply to ArenaNet. I hear we're still looking for a few good senior programmers.
Nice article and all but the picture you portrayed is already reality and then some for systems programmers in all kinds of industries. However, you've already excluded most of them from applying for the job with the requirement "5+ years of demonstrable experience in C/C++ within game development". That's going to cut out a whole lot of very qualified programmers that are already very well versed at the majority of issues described in the article.
TLDR - less qq and moar working on GW2 so I can play already. (please?)
Sorry for the lack of sympathy but at least you can talk about your job at a party and people will be interested.|||Quote:
If I screw this up, planes might fall out of the sky! o.O
Wow, I wouldn't want that level of responsability.
Quote:
Sorry for the lack of sympathy but at least you can talk about your job at a party and people will be interested.
Agreed. I've decided (finally) to go ahead and make a game, but not as my main job (unless it really picks up). It's about fun afterall...|||there is a difference between developing an MMO and designing an MMO, i design MMO's as a hobby but i can do it without even one tool. (except for MSword and painshop/MSpaint)
all he is pointing out is that creating an MMO can't be done on your own, even if you have the skills to do that it needs a massive amount of money to put it all together.
then again, an MMO can be done with 60 ppl, the original GW team was made by around 63(?) ppl and only expanded after the first release.|||Quote:
They were testing air traffic control software on the newest service pack of our OS and had uncovered a bug. It wasn't even my bug but the enormity of responsibility really crashed down on me at that moment.
Admittedly, I chuckled. But yeah, responsibility, it sucks.
Quote:
Minecraft is an MMO right?
There's 10 million gazillion different definitions of MMO out there, but by most: no, there's no centralized servers and the world lacks persistence (I'm also unsure whether the term 'massive' applies as I'm not sure how many avatars a Minecraft world can hold simultaneously).|||Quote:
Absolutely right.
TLDR - less qq and moar working on GW2 so I can play already. (please?)
Sorry for the lack of sympathy but at least you can talk about your job at a party and people will be interested.
Ehhm, a couple of things:
1.) You use the word "you" as if I am the one who posted that. So I just wanted to make sure it's not me.
2.) About the sympathy thing, I don't really think he is asking for sympathy. I took it as a slightly grim, but mostly down-to-earth reality based assessment of all the challenges involved in coming up with an MMORPG game. Perhaps it's needed to keep things in perspective. Perhaps not, but I appreciated the article for learning about the challenges of coming up with GW2. It was a minor point, but going from GW1 -> GW2 was NOT just adding persistence to the entire world. I mean what I did not fully appreciate is the technical challenges going from a mostly instanced system using towns and cities as a "match making" foyer so that peeps can then go into their own instance to what GW2 is going to be - mostly persistent. Did you (readers of this thread)?
So in conclusion, I think that anyone working on MMORPGs deserves some level of respect for the complexity they are tackling - even for games that did not fare so well, and games that will shortly be released. If I may go a step further. Any programmer who handles especially the server side of server-client system deserves the respect of peeps here for all the complex stuff they are handling.
P.S.: Note the environment the blogger is posting in. Apparently, gamedev is a site where game developpers meet and blog. There are many people on that site with dreams of coming up with their own MMORPG maybe even thinking that if they work hard enough it's gonna work. Within this setting his post makes sense. It's not directed at us, but at readers of that community to remind them that it takes a lot of dedication, TEAM-WORK, talent, and experience to come up with a massive online game.
I read a previous post from him describing his transition to Anet. Interesting read....|||The "you" is anyone who has a job that is hard but incredibly cool.
I was actually fairly confused about his target audience. He makes it sound like one needs some serious software engineering background for the job and then invites the reader to apply for the senior programming job. So is the target audience someone who is qualified for the job? It seems like anyone qualified for the job would already have an idea of what goes into a big software system like an MMO. Maybe he worded it poorly but it came off as kind of patronizing either way I look at it.
Even companies that have large teams will likely go through learning pains as they launch MMOs. Everything I hear about Trion's Rift is that the game itself is quite good but the system is still plagued with performance and security issues.
In the software industry, it's very much the case that experience is the most valuable thing to have on your CV. You won't get very far without being able to work in a team either. The Games sub-sector doesn't seem very different in that regard.
No comments:
Post a Comment