International Appreciate an MMO Dev Day

So I've decided it's about time we say thanks to those MMO Developers who actually spend time making the games we (mostly) love to play. It's a pretty thankless task alongside the community managers and you wonder just how they keep themselves motivated and driven when 95% of posts and comments tend to be bile filled tirades claiming the devs cant do their job. And what better way to do so than have a day where you just say... Well "Thanks", so lets do so... And lets make it.. oooh, the last Friday of January so the devs can go out tonight and have a well deserved drink/sleep/meal/film/otherstuffwewonttalkabouthereinpublic.

Having been lucky enough to get to chat to a few of the Mythic developers over the last few months you get reminded that these folks are humans that are as passionate about the games as we are. I don't even want to think how much personal time gets sunk into the job, how often these folks come home and still work hard and then play the same game to hear folks ripping into it simply because they don't understand the development process... I can sit here and I have loads of ideas on how to improve MMO's and games (and I have in my head a fantastic MMO concept but no actual development skills) but I don't know how things work really, I wouldn't know if my idea of a change to a game or addition would have a hugely unknown impact, not to mention the potential pit traps.

These are the people that work over double the standard working week up to launch and after only to find out that the studio is cutting back on developers after launch and they'll soon find themselves on the redundancy line. Having to jump across country (or countries) to move onto a new development role, or the game studio moves officers. As much as I like the idea of developing a game and being part of a team creating live content the stress of it must be unbelievable.

So here's to all the MMO Developers out there. Thank you for putting up with the crap us players put you through and no matter what may get said, we wouldn't be playing fantastic worlds without you.

/Cheer