Chapter 12. The Live Development Team

KEY TOPICS

• Live Development Team Responsibilities

• The Publishing Process

• The Publishing Plan

• Patch Creation and Publishing Schedules

• The Live Test Server

• How Often Should You Publish?

• Critical Bugs and Exploits

• Bug-Fixing Versus Nerfing

• Planning and Implementing Major Expansions

• Implementing an Expansion

Sometime from one to six months after launch, the live development team will take over responsibility for the game from the development team proper. By this time, the game should be stable, the initial crush of subscribers absorbed, and the intake of new subscribers settled out to a low, but consistent, level. The live development team should have a relatively calm environment in which to begin its work.

And there is a lot of work to be done. The overall responsibilities of the live development team are three-fold :

• Maintain the game's current content and tools

• Design and add new content and tools on a regular basis

• Design and develop major game expansions (either retail or download)