We Can Fix That with Data

Joe Ludwig’s 10 ways to improve developer efficiency are a great read, especially for all of you folks out there trying to build your first MMO. The problems Joe is avoiding are ones I’ve seen before, and I suspect they’re very common on newbie teams. While he’s talking about making your game easy to build, my god, it also goes a very long way towards making your game maintainable during live service. I can’t overstate the importance of it.

On data and text files, points 2 and 4: it’s also worth noting that it’s an even bigger win if your designers are at all technically savvy. When I was a full-time data manager dealing with text files, I got shit done fast because I took the time to learn Perl. I took the time to learn Perl because I was tired of doing repetitive tasks in text files, and Perl did the job for me. If the files weren’t easy to process, fellow data mangers would be stuck doing those repetitive tasks manually until the end of time. (On a technical note: I understand that Perl isn’t cool anymore, but Python’s regular expression support sucks ass. At least, it did the last time I checked. See also this comic.)

On fast reboots, point 9: this is also valuable in live service. Your servers will crash, you may have to do what we delicately call “scheduled maintenance;” the less time the servers are down, the less time people will have to gunk up your message boards and hate you.