Server Projects (WIP)

So you’ve spent the last couple of weeks or months just learning the ropes and all the kinds of cool things you can make the game do, and you’re only now starting to realize just how endless the possibilities truly are. Then you might stop yourself for a moment. How come there aren’t that many extensive custom servers around?

The harsh truth about WoW modding is that the overwhelming majority of custom projects fail and never launch. These aren’t only projects started by modding novices, it has included some of the most technically proficient people in our scene who very well knew the tools at their disposal and the limitations imposed by the game itself.

With all the time and effort spent on getting our scene to where it as, why is this?

Why Modding Projects is so hard

This section will outline the most common signs I see in custom projects that fail.

Overambitious

This is what the overwhelming majority of issues facing custom projects come down to.

New and inexperienced developers who have just come to realize the possibilities that modding offers run the highest risk of falling to this, but even experienced developers do it as well.

It is very hard from the outset to understand how much work actually goes in to creating extensive customization for a game like WoW, and it’s extremely hard for an inexperienced developer to know what kinds of mods take so long to develop.

Being ambitious is not a bad thing, but it’s important to understand that very few servers start out in their most ambitious form. It’s important to be able to conceptualize a significantly scaled down version of the server of your dreams to have any chance of realizing it.

There is a reason there isn’t a myriad of custom expansions or completely custom stat overhauls created for this game, and that’s not because nobody tried before or weren’t competent enough to know how to do it.

Lonewolves

WoW modding is a type of hobby that tends to attract people who enjoy working alone. This isn’t on its own a bad thing, plenty of lonewolves have created incredible tools and even servers for this game. However, extensive custom modifications are, even with the best of our tools, often not realistic for a single developer to pull together in a couple of months or even years.

If you want to create the server of your dreams, it’s very likely that you will have to start to think about how to get other developers interested in your project to have any chance of completing it. This often involves some willingness to share creative control of your project with others, as very few people just want to create content for someone else.

Modding for Fun

Modding wow can be a fun and even relaxing hobby to do when keeping things small in scope, but to create an actual custom project for other people to play is closer to having a second job or two.

Creating projects like this is real work not all that unlike creating games from scratch, and much of your time will be spent debugging problems and figuring out how to work around the limitations of the game.

I’ve seen many projects fall into what’s commonly called “feature-creep”, where a developer will finish a feature only so far that it is actually interesting and enjoyable to work on, then drop it for something else once it becomes too frustrating or boring.

For some types of projects, this isn’t actually a bad approach, and I personally use it for some of my pet projects that are all very small in scope. However, for a larger project this type of approach isn’t realistic, and taking endless breaks from an ever expanding pile of features will eventually make them almost impossible to return to, because you cease to see any point of completing any of them.

Too Theoretical

Many server ideas are sketched entirely inside a game designers head before a single line of code has been written, and quickly turns into a complex network of assumptions and reasoning with no basis in reality.

Basing your entire servers idea around a concept that you haven’t even tried out a smaller prototype of is a recipe for disaster, and a bunch of systems that aren’t going to work out either in isolation or together.

Most ideas we humans get are stupid, and we need rigorous ways to rule out the few nuggets that are actually good. For designing video games, the only method we can reliably use is to actually playtest our ideas before committing to them fully.

Don’t rely extensively on complicated systems that only exist in your own head without playtesting them in a simpler scenario.

Summary

If you have any experience with creative work in game design or any other fields, these points are probably not news, WoW servers suffer from about the same problems as any other creative work or hobby. However, MMORPGs are some of the most complex types of games you can create, and the amount of ready-made modules, tools and assets from the base game can be an especially dangerous trap for new developers looking for ways to implement the virtual world of their dreams.

Games like World of Warcraft can be a fantastic springboard to try out both extensive and experimental ideas on top of, but it will never do all the hard work for you, and most successful projects take many years to develop even for established teams.