Design for your audience!
A good D&D friend of mine thought Hello Kitty e-mails would annoy me. Boy was he wrong! :) I returned the favor by signing up to the Hello Kitty Online MMO. Whoo boy this thing is bad….Whoever is at Sanrio in charge of this thing needs to scrap and start over. First, installation was very convoluted, required multiple account signups and steps, and a 2.6GB download followed by some patches. What kid is going to go through all that to play this? The game has some nice 2d isometric graphics but it’s obvious they’ve slapped graphics (max resolution 1024x768x16) over a standard MMO engine…Usual quests, confusing combat (what in Hello Kitty inspires a designer to put in combat??!?!) and confusing crafting. Consider, instead, the hugely-popular Animal Crossing series…Chat, collect, decorate. Having played the DS version for hours and hours, that is enough to captivate me when the designs are good enough.
Why this thing isn’t Flash is beyond me. Why it takes 2.6GB is equally as confusing. Why they have 10 steps to get this going is laughable. Epic fail.
Soft Rollout
Aion, among other major MMO’s, suffered from huge crowds at launch. Why not do a soft rollout, where folks who want to be first in line pay more (start at $100, drop by $10 per week of the launch.) Reverse auction mechanics work perfectly, and keep the servers from taking a huge dump and keep queues under control.