   Advice and Encouragement
  Most topics here end the same way- a guy posts announcing his new ambitious project, gets flamed and then quits his project. Its becoming a sad case of affairs, and its about time some advice was given. No, not the type of advice they normally hear, but advice from a person who's had personal experience and success in starting a massive online project, and turning it into a real, fun job.Let's begin, shall we?Advice on Starting Online Projects    1)NEVERanswer back. Take this example:Poster- New MMORPG. Need members.Flamer- Oh shut up NoOB. Blah Blah...The Wrong Way to Answer    :Poster- Why do you flame me? My project is this and that, we're working on this and that, we're going to pay them on this and that...  The Wright Way to Answer    :Poster- Dear Flamer,Thank you for your feedback, however negative. Rest assured that we as a team have taken in your comments with great consideration....    Even if you can't get into the tough english, atleast answer back with something similiar. The whole point is to ignore the flamer's "flame" and show him that you ignored it- in such a way that he can't accuse you of ignoring it.Hopefully this helped a bit.You can ask Coredoom, the leader of Merlord Studios. Flamed till he dropped dead- with a little help from a few friends, he go back on his feet and now everything seems to be well.Here's an excerpt from a 13-yearold male who showed extreme maturity when answering back:Hey, thnx for the advice, I'll register a domain name right now and I'll start on the website tomorrow. See, I am webmaster/game programmer, the only problem is, I'm not the greatest in either fields, so, although I can progam with HTML and C++, I can't program with them very well. I am learning though and a basic website should be up by next sunday at the very latest. I refuse to give out my full name (last name) to complete strangers because some people on the net are messed in the head and could abuse information of me to their own benifet.What I will tell you is that I am a 13-year old male who lives in Ontario, Canada. Despite my somewhat young age I am a verry good gamer and I have great ideas for games, and I can do them on my own, they just won't be as good and the graphics would be so bad you wouldn't know what your doing. I hope people aren't turned away due to my age, but I guess if you are I can't blame you, I probably would be too. And now I guess the name is un-negotiable(sp?) because I have to register a domain name. And also due to my somewhat young age I do NOT have a credit card and I can not copywrite any names. That's kind of where other people come in, you see, with the help of other people we would be able to make pretty good games, and we could charge people for them and make a profit, and with that profit we could copywrite a name and get a .com url instead of the .cjb.net I am forced to use now. If you are still interested, or have any further(sp?) questions, please contact me at macgyver_o@hotmail.com.Sorry for such a long post but if at least one person replies and joins NoLiGa it was worth it.Edit-~- we now have a domain name... www.noliga.cjb.netAs there may be nothing there right now, check back some time late tomorrow (around 5 or 6EST) and there will be some stuff. I will even upload a demo of a game I am working on if enough people request it.Thnx---McG   Advice #2    Talk about your game! Half the people out there don't have one. If you don't have anything to show, then just admit it. Say you want to starta team- not get more members for an already existing one.Encouragement    Don't get down just because a bunch of childish flamers attacked you without mercy. I personally went through this.For about 0.2 seconds. The first line of idiot flamers that came at me over 7 months ago were completely silenced by my proffessional, unique way of answering back. They felt lost- what to say?I can tell you- under all the pressure and all the "violence", I managed. Here I am- not only on my way to releasing a game, but also working at securing publishers, running my own website, and most precious of all: working with a team of 30 great guys    .I'm trying to find the old topics, but 7 months is a long time- nearly forgot their topic names even. Will try to find them to show you how I handled with the immature folk.P.S. Nothing's impossible. Every game developer- even Ensemble Studios or Stainless Steel Studios- had to start somewhere. They began like you- like us.For further encouragement, check out some other successful game teams!Reverie EntertainmentA team of 8 people and they managed a whole lot! Its simply because they perservered. I am a huge fan and supported of their team, which sprouted out of http://aok.heavengames.com! They didn't even have the good gamedev start you guys can have!Wildfire Games. Alright, who doesn't know wildfire? A massive team- making a fantastic, top of the line (as good as any game on the market) game for FREE. Yes, free.Which brings me to another argument. When a flamer tells you that nobody will join you because you're not planning on paying your members, IGNORE HIM    . Wildfire Games proved that this analysis is totally 100% wrong.Mammoth Games. And ofcourse, my own Mammoth Games. Its successful because of hard- work and pure dedication to the project. We've still got alot to do, but we will succeed. Check it out. P.S. Stop by our forums. I do hate only having 30 registered users.PlaneShift. As you can see by visiting the website, definately a successful team. Proves that RPGs CAN be a success, if you're up to it.In summary, ignore your flamers- not by actually ignoring them, but by answering back in the most suitable way- without flaming back. If you flame, you get made fun of.Don't let a flamer destroy your team. He's jealous- trust me, he's 100% jealous. He couldn't make a team if it was given to him and shoved up his arse!Finally, a message to would-be game developers:PERSEVERE AND NEVER GIVE UP-AND IGNORE FLAMERS    and...Please start coming up with more novel ideas. MMORPGs are the hardest thing to make. I know they're successful, but you need a team of hundreds of people to do it!I suggest an RTS game. Look at Reverie- they did it with 8 people.[edited by - Mammoth Games on March 22, 2004 11:41:55 AM][edited by - Mammoth Games on March 22, 2004 10:24:16 PM]
  Unfortunatly there aren''t much flames in this forum - most are posts pointing out that people have their limitations. It''s not because a post isn''t over-enthousiastic about some new wild adventure a 10-yr old started that that is a flame. Most of the time it''s just people telling people to keep in mind that they are not God.Even worse these posts are to often ignored because others tend to see every post as a flame. The only result is that the 10-yr old has to learn it all the hard way : creating 250k bad stuff (most of it you can''t call programs, not to mention games) before they get to their one good one - because indeed, it is possible to create a great game on a tight budget with the right dedication - but not after reading a book called "learn programming in 24 hours". It takes a lot longer than most of these kids who come here demanding people to program (or draw or whatever) for ''m realise ! Posts like this just make people ignore well-meant advice.   The Monkey is back ! ;  I haven't seen real flames around the help wanted forums for a couple of weeks.. I think every "flame" made here is at least halfly constructive and as such, should be appreciated.   [edited by - Tertsi on March 22, 2004 12:36:03 PM];  Great post Mammoth Games.  When working on your project the only person you have to impress is yourself ( unless of course you are looking for a publisher  ).  There are people here that are willing to give good advice in a mature way so the trick is to have a good filter to read those.  There are good projects out there that you can either try to join or watch to see how they operate. I would like to add our project PlaneShift to your list Mammoth. We are not quite at the mainstream level yet but we are certainly working to get there.  One of these days it might be nice to have an irc session with some of these projects to let people ask questions about how to start up and work in a successful online team.    -------Andrew PlaneShift - A MMORPG in development.;  inflated ego ;quote:Original post by Tertsi  I think every "flame" made here is at least halfly constructive and as such, should be appreciated.hear, hear!some people (such as the OP) think that anything other than complete and total support is a flame, when in fact many of them are just pointing out that the poster''s goals are pretty far-fetched considering their experience.if people would read the FAQ, and browse previous posts, to get an idea of how to formulate a decent "help wanted" post (and learn to set realistic goals), all the nothing-is-impossible-and-don''t-tell-the-12-year-old-he-can''t-make-an-MMORPG-by-himself-with-ten-random-strangers-from-the-internet-even-though-he-only-knows-HTML-(and-has-no-money-for-servers) thinking people could stop calling everyone else flamers...i doubt that any of those three or four teams listed above are headed up by someone who has nothing more than a vague game idea based off the last game they played (with "improvements"), ten minutes of experience with cut-n-pasting javascript, and determination to be "lead game designer" while having absolutely no other skills.there are plenty of posts here that don''t get the alleged "flames"; check out those to see how to form a good post. hell, i remember recently seeing one for an MMORPG that nobody complained about, because the poster was realistic, and showed actual work towards his goal, instead of vague descriptions of something not completely unlike EQ and a promise of "payment" from the "company" when the game is "published". ;  Well, in some ways you''re right. But the flamers know this- why shove it into the guy''s face? Eventually he''ll realize it, and he might gain some experience out of it. ;  P.S. Added Planeshift. Definately a good team. ;  Not bad advice, well some of it (do you really think people quit their projects because of flames, or because they actually find out just how big a task it usually is for them?), but since this is a HELP WANTED forum your post is well out of place.If you have good advice to give, why not write an article for the site? If it''s good, I''ll even point to it in the Forum FAQ    Marc. 