Resources - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 301

which introduces you to the game world, or in game videos used on the
website for promotional purposes. You can even have videos while the
players are travelling between worlds, or for set pieces/instances in the
game. Most MMOs will have at least the intro video and game-play
videos on their websites, unfortunately not many have further in-game
videos to help tell the story to the players. This is a great shame as it ' sa

fantastic way of continuing to tell the story of the game and is much
easier for the players to understand than using lots of text. The only
downside to doing this is the time and cost to implement it, which is
why many MMOs have not gone down this route in-game.
n QA: Quality Assurance, or game testers, are an extremely important
aspect of any game. They are the people who will test various parts of
your game over and over again. They will test the game in many ways to
ensure that they can replicate what the users would do. Unfortunately,
MMOs are notoriously difficult to test. Unlike a linear game, where you
pretty much know where the players will go and what they are likely to
do, an MMO has so much depth that it can be difficult to replicate
everything players could do within the game; in fact, it

s generally
impossible. When looking for testers, it is usually better to get people to
help who were not involved in the game

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s development, as they can
usually find bugs that someone developing the game might easily miss.
n Customer Services: If you are thinking of creating an MMO where
money will change hands, you should have someone (or a collection of
people) who will look after customer queries. This might include dealing
with payment creating or payment issues, such as someone not getting a
particular service that they have paid for.
n Events Manager: Once an MMO is up and running, that isn

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t the end of
the game-creation process, unlike traditional games where you can make
a game, sell it, and not make any more content for it (ignoring DLC in
this instance). An MMO requires constant maintenance and, more
importantly, new features. MMO players are more likely to invest more
time and effort into a game over a period of time, and if you want to
keep these players coming back, you need to consider creating or setting
up new content and, in this case, events.