Live Development Team Responsibilities

Let's explore each of the responsibilities in a little more detail:

• Maintaining the game ” Maintenance is a fairly simple process: Identify and fix bugs as they are reported , monitor the game servers for stability and anomalies in the code, and make sure the administrative tools used by player relations and others continue to work as intended.

• New content and tools ” The live development team designs and develops new content and features for inclusion in the game on a regular basis (every two to six weeks) and confabs with the player relations and community relations teams to identify new tools or capabilities needed by those worthy of them. This is the meat of the matter for both the players and the team; regular refreshment of the content is vital to the good health and growth of the game.

• Expansion pack development ” For games with a retail component, it is necessary to keep a steady flow of expansion packs on the shelf. This not only keeps a presence at the retail level to attract a steady stream of new potential subscribers, but allows the retail software to be recompiled and updated, avoiding exceptionally large downloads for new players.

  How often to ship a new box to retail is a matter of resources and how quickly the world-building tools allow for new content to be built. The available evidence seems to suggest shipping an expansion every nine months to a year as optimum. As examples, Sony Online's EverQuest ( EQ ), the largest US game, has been out for a little over three years and already has three expansions with a fourth in development as of January 2002; Ultima Online ( UO ), out for almost five years, has shipped four of them; and Asheron's Call ( AC ), the smallest of the three examples, has been out just over two years and only recently shipped its first expansion.

With all this activity going on, it is necessary to be organized and coordinated to avoid a constant process of "patch, freak out, fix all the bugs that should have been fixed on the test server, and calm down the players who want to hang us all again." The heart of all of this is the publishing process.