Operation
The operation phase 1 begins when people start paying to enter the virtual world. It ends when people stop paying, or when the resources needed to support them would be better employed (that is, make more money) elsewhere.
During the operation phase, the original design and development team (the dev team) typically hands over control to a new set of developers (the live team). The rationale is that the battle-hardened dev team can move on to other projects (say, creating the next expansion), leaving the less experienced live team responsible for the maintenance and long-term improvement of the virtual world. This is not always the case, however; Dark Age of Camelot, for example, retained its dev team for the operation phase, rather than putting the very people who knew the project best to work elsewhere.
So what exactly does a live team do? Its tasks include the following:
Customer and community support.
Network and technical support.
Feature development and enhancement.
Maintain overall quality of gameplay in response to player cunning.
Keep in step with technology (for example, new platforms, new video cards).
Occasionally, market (the virtual world and its intellectual properties).
The size of the development team for a commercial virtual world varies; generally speaking, the further into the project, the more people are involved. Although some companies may claim that they can produce a world capable of handling 100,000 players with only a designer, a programmer, and a clip art package, the reality is somewhat different. As a rough idea, a year or so into the production phase there will typically be around 30 people in the dev team split 5:10:15 for designers, programmers, and artists/animators.
Why mention this now? Because the live team will be three to four times larger than the dev team! It’ll have similar numbers of designers and programmers (maybe fewer artists 2), but add a hundred or more people in customer and community support.
For virtual worlds, the work only really begins at the operation phase. Time and time again, this is something that developers fail to understand—especially if they have long-time exposure to the fire-and-forget approach of the regular computer games industry. Virtual worlds, despite their origins, are not regular computer games—or necessarily any kind of game at all (what they are instead is discussed in Chapter 6, “It’s Not a Game, It’s a…”).