Amateur / Independent (m)MORPG Team management

Question

I would like to ask you all a question about how I should be going about creating and especially maintaining an Amateur/Independent team for quite a big project.

I'm specially interested about common pitfalls like who to Not accept on a team for example but also any information about how to build and maintain a team of non (or very little) payed people for a project that might advance but slo(oo)wly.

Oh yes, before you downvote me for wanting to create a MMORPG, I already have created the game + server (up and running), coded the last 3 years by myself (ie. this is not a modified Ryzom or something likewise)

You can check it out here: www.mindoki.com

So now I'd love to build a team helping me out with things like creating talents, testing, making quests, taking care of the community, scripting, website (forum) etc. etc. etc.

For the story, a guy helped me for like 6 months creating a team doing graphics, plot and sound but not one of them was able to either follow a 'template' (using a texture set up and a pre made skeleton) or finish even Anything.

So how should I structure the "team", how should I recruit (should / must I handle all recruiting myself?) and what are the common caveats in such team management?

Thanks!

[EDIT] I removed the edit, it messed up the initial question (which is 'What's the Do:s and Don't:s in amateur team management')

Answer 1

Questions about money and ownership aside, I have only one piece of advice that I found handy when dealing with a volunteer effort I worked with before:

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

• Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Answer 2

Well after a few minutes of play, I would say it's going to be hard to get people working for you without paying them a proper wage.

This kind of project really needs people that are fully motivated to work on it; the problem is that you've pretty much developed the game yourself and anyone helping out will probably feel much less 'involved' with the project and hence less motivated.

There are also a few points that have to be made :

• The game is ugly (no offence) - IMO people will be more reluctant setting aside their free time to work on an ugly game.
• The game is in french (and also with some spelling mistakes I might add :P) - You have done the right thing putting the site in english, but the main language really must be english in game.
• The game doesn't seem to offer anything new (I haven't tested it enough yet).

Overall I'd say you've done a great job, but it's a very personal game and I think it'll be hard for others to get on-board; that's why I suggest making the whole game more accessible.

I would also recommend that if you can't pay people, you need to find a workflow which makes it stupidly easy for people to add quests, translate stuff, etc. The big problem is motivation and competence. At first you'll have to review everything yourself, but as you get good contributors you can delegate that work.

I would also look into creating an SVN type hub to facilitate adding/modifying content and make clients able to immediately test changes if they so choose.

En tout cas chapeau, c'est un bel effort ;)

Answer 3

This is basically impossible, you can't make an MMORPG as a spare time project. I wouldn't know how you would get people to contribute anywhere near enough, but even if you could manage that you wouldn't be able to make them contribute the right stuff. Contributing content is one thing, making everything fit together another, and that is a lot of hard work requiring great skill, which no-one will do for free.

Don't expect to be able to do anything a lot bigger than what you can do on your own.