Operating an MMO Matters as Much as Designing It | Stephen Clarke-Willson

Stephen Clarke-Willson is the Game Director of Guild Wars at ArenaNet. He joined the studio in 2004 as a contractor, adding music to the original game. He then moved into server programming, where he worked on Guild Wars Factions and its observer mode. Later he led the server team and became studio technical director across Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Today he leads the original game, which recently relaunched on Steam as Guild Wars Reforged.Before ArenaNet, Stephen was a producer at Virgin Interactive. His games there included The 7th Guest, Dune II, Cool Spot and Disney's Aladdin for the Sega Genesis. He holds a PhD, and his first job was building mission planning systems for the B-2 bomber at Northrop. In this episode, he explains how Guild Wars updates while people are still playing and what happens when a release goes wrong. He also covers bots and exploits, and what a real Ready Player One world would need to run.Chapters:00:00 Intro and the Ready Player One vision01:17 Focusing on one live game06:48 How Guild Wars began10:22 Updating a game while it's live13:31 Hotfixes and keeping the world running18:57 Rollbacks and lost items23:28 Player behaviour and stress tests30:38 Exploits and moderation34:07 Why MMO players stay36:18 How MMO servers work43:43 Building the first online worlds47:28 Imagining Ready Player One50:43 Discoverability and algorithms54:08 Proximity chat59:15 Botting and cheating1:06:13 Early database setup1:09:29 Backups and restores1:10:31 Keeping an MMO alive1:12:54 AI in MMO development1:22:46 Advice for new game developershttps://www.linkedin.com/in/drstephencw/