Putting It All Together - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 279

on how to play. You may need a website designer to help you generate a quality
website or you might be able to make one yourself using products such as
Dreamweaver.

You will also need to consider the payment side of your system, and whether
people can pay via PayPal or using other methods.

Once you have released your game, it s very important to ensure that you keep

your players up-to-date on what is happening in the game on a regular basis. If
you have server downtime, you should definitely be telling your users about
when the servers will go down and when they will be available again.

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Note

More information about the role of a website designer can be found in Chapter 18.

Continual Improvement
Many games, once written, have only the odd update or patch, and that s it. This

is because the game creator needs to move onto another project. MMOs don

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t
follow the normal game convention. Once they have been created, they need
constant improvement to ensure that players keep coming back and playing.
These changes might be fixes to the balancing of the game (because one
particular faction or character type might be more powerful than others).
This rebalancing takes place throughout the life of the MMO. There is also
the need to create new stories and quests and more importantly new areas.
MMOs are always looking at regular content to ensure those players who play
the game a lot will always have something new. You should ensure you have a
plan for new content and use the story data that you have already written
(history, current and future events) as the basis for your new content.

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