If you could give 38 just one piece of advice...

Testing budget.

I would say to the administrators and Management listen to you talent. Get the best testing tools you can get for consumer testing.

Once you start letting people in for alpha / beta testing really good tools for the testers and developers interaction will save you so much time and money. It seems like games that fall short on these tools are more prone to miss deadlines, waste time, and don’t get a great game at release.

Testing tools include TIME and People not just software. I was an office manager for a wireless software / hardware R & D company. We found that by giving our talent the best tools, and not skimping on budget, our talent was very happy to put in mad hours. We never missed a deadline.

As a Quality Assurance manager, whenever I start talking to a company about joining I explain that I feel my job is to verify the quality of not just the product but the processes.

Its important to make sure things are taken care of early on so people don't have to worry the processes to get the tasks done. Just to get the task done.

Don't rush the release! We don't need another unfinished game.

I notice that a lot of people are wanting the game not to be rushed. Please understand that most of the time, it's not the creating company's fault the game is released too early... it the marketing.

If I have any advice, I'd like to say for initial release... never lose sight of your vision. Do not succumb to an easy path out. If something is too hard to code or too hard to model, but was important to the original design... keep working at it. Don't just delete it. Too many companies promise X feature in the game, and wind up having it either delayed or deleted just because people had other things to do.

Having your brain-child be aborted must be heart-breaking.

More often though, it's removed because it conflicts with other features in the game.

It's a balancing act.

True, but we've also seen "balancing acts" destroy the "vision" of the game! Starts out one direction and winds up going a completely different way, which is just not good. You wind up with more issues and rats leaving the (what they consider) sinking ship!

I think I understand Valentear's request! I've recently left a game I supported totally for 3 years pre-release because of various issues and changes in direction. Maybe it's "easier" and more "in touch" with what some ppl wanted, as well as easier to make things work, but it destroyed the heart of the game. So terribly sad!

There has to be a way to know what to expect for optimization and all before they seal it in blood then change their minds later. So much for blood!

Well that's just it. So long as the changes doin't change the underlying vision of the game (which, to be perfectly honest, this early in the cycle (or ever) the public shouldn't know anyways ...) then they are fair game to make the overall gameplay a better experience.

Also, don't use the word "Vision"... bad memories

The only Advice I have to give, is make the game YOU want to make. Don't try to make a game that will sell well, make a game that you yourself want to play.

You are more then likely doing that already, but never hurts to say.

Listening to people is fine, but most of the time, people especially mmo players have no idea what they want. And even among the ones that do, their views are just one in the sea of many.

Only one piece hmm? I could drone on for hours about what makes a good game, but one piece

Initiate early contact with guilds and guild leaders and build guilds into the very fabric of the game rather than taking a "tacked on" approach to the idea after core design.

Guilding has become such an integral part of modern MMO's that we should consider basic and advanced guild features and tools to be a given part of fundamental design.