Based on the information about development of MMORPGs of this
article from Wikipedia, I present you the way of boosting the speed of development of Planeshift exponentially and for people who wish to make their own free(either on the sense of GPL or on the sense of freeware) MMORPGs quickly. It is a quite intuitive guide based on simple instructions:
1) Have around 20 millions dollars ready to invest(In other words: you must be a billionaire)
2) With this available funds, besides the volunteer devs, hire lots of people, writers, 2d and 3d artists, programmers, Sound Effects designers, Musicians, Networking specialists among many other fields of expertise. Just remember to not hire more people than necessary, and that from a certain point it becomes inneficient to hire more people.
3) Buy some powered server computers(perhaps even a mainframe if you really want to get rid of server-side lag), a heavy load of bandwith and hire a maintenance staff to take care of the occasional server crashes and problems. Don't forget to buy more infra-structure as the number of players grow.
4) Find a way to make lots of money from the game that does not involve monthly fees(if it's possible to find such way), as you will have to keep the maintenance staff even after the game development is "finished"(something that will never really happen for a MMORPG) and probably keep the hired developers as well.
If none of these is possible, there is the alternative way of making a completely volunteer-based project, where things always will
unfortunately come sooner
tm than in the case of commercial projects. Of course other variables in this case can make it go slightly faster or slower in comparison to commercial projects.
P.S.: Why not ask Steven Jobs for a donation? Few games run on Macs nowadays(Forget about Bill, he would want this project to run exclusively on Windows)
P.S.2: If you have any ideas on HowTo: Improve this HowTo
, you could post them here too.
