4. What is the most important thing you feel you have learned from the successes or failures of other MMORPGs?

I don’t think there is one single important thing. There are several important lessons we have learned from other MMORPGs such as how necessary it is to listen to your players. In order for the player feedback to be helpful you need to keep your players in the loop, let them know what you are doing, and why. Patch as often as needed, and do it fast. Don’t take away if you can add, and try to not overcompensate when balancing.
We don’t want to relive the mistakes made by others, and of course our players don’t want to see us using those things that didn’t quite work in the last game they were playing. If there’s a feature in another game that we do like, we shouldn’t be afraid to use it if it can help make Darkfall a better game.

There are so many lessons to be learned by our predecessors, positive and negative. There’s an evolution going on and it’s important to be able to identify what needs to be preserved in new games, what has to go, and what needs to be improved upon and how all this can fit in with our own unique proposition.