When will the endless stream of "wanna-be" MMORPG teams stop pouring in on the help wanted section? Honestly, this is getting silly. Almost every week we can see a brand new MMORPG project started by people whom most likely have no previous track-record developing games. These people need to take the blue pill, and slow down. Actually start and finish a game project before they set out on the MMORPG path. MMORPG don't have the word 'Massive' in it for nothing. A team of "pick-up" developers can never hope to achieve something even close to a commercial MMORPG, and should not even aim towards that end. I'm not saying it's impossible for indie developers to create a MMORPG. On the contrary, I believe it is quite possible if you relize what I stated above to aim lower. Start out small. Well, a short rambling I wanted to get off my chest...

I like MMORPGs....

You're preaching to the choir.

I had no previously track record... infact, Frostwinds was not only my first commercial project, but also the first project I distributed. And if my porting goes well, it will soon run on Linux and Mac aswell (difficulty+=(1/0);). [grin]

I think the problem with the 'Help Wanted' MMORPG teams is that most of them lack the level of insanity to dedicate their free time (friday nights, weekends, free hours here and there) to working on a project that could flopside at anytime.

Agree with Thevenin. Not everybody here working on a MMORPG is totally incompetent. Our game is chugging along and we have professionals ( ie people that actually get paid to program in their day jobs ) on our team as well as students. As long as you have a half decent core team a project like this can certainly be a valuable experience. Our team is totally voluntary and nobody is paid to work on it. That hasn't prevented us from attracting both qualified developers as well as big name hosting companies willing to host our game servers.

Making a MMORPG is mostly about the content and player interaction. The engine stuff, while difficult, is not noticable more difficult than much other programming. Sure there is some 'issues' with networking and keeping things in sync but again, it's not 'impossible' to figure out. And there is some database/sql stuff but that is pretty trival to figure out as well. Ooohhh, 'Insert' to insert into the database, 'Update' to update stuff, wow that's really impossible to figure out...

Start by writing an IRC server/client. Everything else can build on that. Just make a mess of /<command> type commands. After a while you will have a nice solid network that you can issue commands over. After that just build the GUI client :).

The content is what makes the game worth playing and it's much harder to organize and develop. Any monkey can program and it's often harder to tell bad programming from good programming ( although sometimes it's bleeding obvious ). However, it's *much* easier to tell if a piece of art work is crap or a music track is horrible.

If people feel defeated before they start then their project is doomed right off the bat. I find it better to offer some helpful advice and let them go on their merry way. Most times their projects will halt when the realize they don't have the skill to continue on. But half the battle is realizing what skills you are missing, so in the failed project, knowledge was gained. All in all sounds like a worthy aim...

/me goes back to working on the faction system.