Why MMORPGs Work (or Don't Work)
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Betas should be a time to incorporate the other important aspects of the game into the design, as well as to weed out any of those pesky bugs that crop up during gameplay. Beta should not, however, be a time to redesign the game. If the concept is flawed, then the game designers should return to the drawing board and the planning phases and find out where they went wrong, but they certainly shouldn't be redesigning the game concept on the fly, based upon player feed-back or their own troubled consciences. In truth, if the game design, and not just the numbers, is flawed, then the game is flawed, and no amount of tweaking with it during beta is going to make the process easier or less time-consuming in the end. The planning stage should have taken into account the various problems and offered solutions to them before the beta stage of the game, and if they didn't, then there is a problem.
Unfortunately, most gaming companies or independent publishers don't have an infinite pocket book upon which to draw their funding, and labor isn't cheap. But this is precisely the reason that I believe that planning is so fundamental to the design stage of every game. If you cannot answer the simplest questions from the beginning--if every planned aspect of the game isn't set in stone before the first line of code is written, it sets the stage for disaster. That isn't to say that something cannot be added, or that ideas cannot be replanned and redesigned based on new technology, but if that isn't incorporated into the plan from the very beginning, you'll be stuck at the drawing board forever.
