Stress and pressure of running a game

Hello Everyone,

Today I want to address the stresses and pressures of actually running a game. I want to prefix this by saying I run CrimeBloc and it's fairly big within the PBBG community.

We run a pretty small crew, there is me as the sole developer and 2 administrators who handle the day to day issues of the game, cheaters, helpdesk, in game issues etc.

Unfortunately even with the two administrators I have there is a lot of stress that comes directly from players via inbox, helpdesk and the forums. I've received my fair share of hate mail on how I should just give up, how the games broken and various other topics. Generally this spouts from when a feature isn't exactly to their liking, and this mainly comes down to gambling. Of all the features to complain about, the casinos are the number one worst thing to deal with. See if you side with the gamblers, then the casino owners will always lose money, in which case makes the casino worthless. If you side with the casino owners, then the gamblers will think they are broken and they have no chance of winning. It's so damn tough to actually get right. At the end of the day the casinos are gambling, and as in real life, the casino has the edge, it's mostly 55/45 or 60/40 depending on which casino you gamble on.

The forums are notorious for complaints, it's hard to control as you can't hide the complaints as then people go to your inbox and directly complain. At the moment I personally mute people if I notice a pattern in which all they do is come to the forums and rant, they don't rank, they don't play the game, they are just pure toxic. Which I have no time for. If you play the game and have actual complaints then I will always listen - for the record I have 2,424 messages since I launched the game back in April.

It really is demotivating to have to deal with hate, most players don't understand the work that goes into building and maintaining a game, and many times I've had a passing thought to just shut it down. It's apart of my depression really, it's the stress of needing to do so many things and when working with a legacy code base.

If you are a player, please try and respect the work that goes into creating and maintaining a game. There is a lot behind the scenes that isn't always apparent.