What was your biggest mystake

[Sunchaser]

I read some time ago this postmortem and i found it very informative
http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php

I am curious, (if you want to share),
what was your biggest mystake you made, for example, that made a lot of players leave,
or in some way made game perfoming bad, or unbalanced the game...


 

[codestryke]

Had a very popular game running with no source of income in the game so I introduced a premium membership to help cover the costs (at the time it was 1,200 a month I was paying for bandwidth). Some  players purchased premium but the server was still lagging and now I had paying customers that were complaining about the lag. Not taking the time to think things though like I should of I came up with the WORST thing I could of done. I limited non premiums to only playing the game for 30 minutes a day. Took all of 2 rounds to go from about 4-5 thousands of player signups to 1-2 thousand.

I made many mistakes after that as well and the site kept losing members, ah well we live and we learn

[Sunchaser]

1200 $ a month? You were losing money then?

[MystressNyx]

Oh yes, the out of pocket cost for him was ridiculous on that game for years. Damn those labors of love. lol

[kazurian]

Just out of interest, is that game still running?

[MystressNyx]

No, after a great 8 year run, we felt, for many reasons, that it was time to end it earlier this year.

[kazurian]

Awwwwww

I would of loved to play it probably If it had that many members, must have been great!

[codestryke]

When we shut the game down it didn't have near that amount anymore. As posted in another thread I made horrible mistakes running and admin'ing the game and I lost a lot of players because of it. The game was called BordelloBattles and even though it alludes to a pimp game it most defiantly wasn't. When BB started there was us and the original PimpWarz both very different types of games. After running the game for over 8 years it only came to me after it was shut down, it wasn't a pimp game it was actually a tycoon game with a bordello theme.

I won't take all the blame though, someone created a clone of PimpWarz sold it, it got out and well now there is about a 1000+ pimp sites out there. Trying to tell people that BordelloBattles was NOT a pimp game all they needed to see was the name or our graphic and they right away associated our game with a pimp game without logging in.

We do have plans though to re-theme the site next year, I just can't let go of the engine, to many years, to much blood and sweat thrown into that engine to let it die. But like all code right now I just can't stand to look at it LOL

[Sunchaser]

he he, at the end you coded too much  and you need a rest 

[jannesiera]

Had a very popular game running with no source of income in the game so I introduced a premium membership to help cover the costs (at the time it was 1,200 a month I was paying for bandwidth). Some  players purchased premium but the server was still lagging and now I had paying customers that were complaining about the lag. Not taking the time to think things though like I should of I came up with the WORST thing I could of done. I limited non premiums to only playing the game for 30 minutes a day. Took all of 2 rounds to go from about 4-5 thousands of player signups to 1-2 thousand.

I made many mistakes after that as well and the site kept losing members, ah well we live and we learn

Sometimes, I here some scary things here...