What topics do you want to read … followups

Thanks for everyone who voted in the survey (What topics do you want to read more about?) – very helpful.

You can help by rating the posts from now on whenever you see one that you greatly prefer / greatly dislike (I’ve added a plugin that lets you rate each post from 1 star to 5 stars without reloading the page or having to login etc).

Your top votes:

• MMO operations issues / running online games (80%)
• MMO programming (75%)
• MMO design issues / inventing online games (75%)

So, you all want to know more about how to make and then run an MMO, huh? :)

But … don’t want any more Casual MMO analysis (15%) nor anything to do with Social Networking (5%), even though MMOs are really the world’s most advanced Social Networks and depend upon it for their revenue. Interesting.

So, I guess this reflects an interest in more of the MMORPG / $50 million budget side of the MMO industry? a.k.a. “how do you even spend that much money in a sensible way”?

A few generic areas there I’ve long been meaning to write about:

• Mistakes in MMO design
• Mistakes in MMO programming
• Classic (and not-so-classic) MMO server architectures
• What “running an MMO” looks like (staff, job roles, hardware, software, processes)
• Better ways of running an MMO (mostly: different approaches to process and to software)

Is that along the right lines? If not, let me know (comment on this post, or grab my email from the About page) – suggestions / requests welcome too, although do that for information only, don’t expect me to automatically fulfil them!

And, as mattb pointed out, there’s at least one person wanting more on Component / Entity Systems. That’s tricky. The ES posts so far took a very long time to write (contrary to what some people have said, an awful lot of research and cross-checking went into them, in an attempt to clarify what has historically been a very murky and poorly-described subject, and prone to confusion and misinformation). Until recently it also looked like I was going to have an opportunity to see another ES go into production for a major MMO, and I was hoping to wait and see how that went before coming back to the topic. That ain’t going to happen now, which leaves me with several directions I could go in. Feedback needed, guys – what needs saying that isn’t already said? I’ve got one interesting post left that explains the whole “Future of MMO” part (although I think it’s pretty obvious already what that will contain), but I’m sure there’s a lot more advice and thoughts I could throw out if there’s specific areas people are looking at (except not source code – I’ve tried blogging source before, this is the wrong medium for that).