We worked for 3 years before the game came out, and after the game came out, to get the first servers live. We had to wait for the toolset, then build like mad for years. We had to adapt to changes in the ACR, and refine with rules adaptations. But the payoff was big, so it kept us going.Zelknolf wrote:
"This work I'm doing for my hobby will matter in three months" is, in practice, pretty terrible motivation. The smaller number of people who are on your server right now are an active audience who you know you can give stuff to, and you know they will use it. The larger number is vague, and in the eyes of dwindling motivation of an artist with no audience, it's easy to view it as that they just won't show up (which is a thing that will only get more severe with time; keep in mind that willpower, creativity, memory, and reasoning are the same exhaustible resource).
I'd probably point to our incomplete servers as evidence of this. If motivation was as you say-- and a few months of intense work to get a month of all of ALFA playing the stuff you made was plenty to keep people going-- we'd expect it to be really easy to get a server live. If a human could intensely focus on build and keep motivation up for three months, they'd be able to get a server to live in that time, and the burst of activity from basically all of ALFA and the sparkley-eyed wonder at the novelty of it lasts about a month. The reality, though, is that the overwhelming majority of servers die before they make it to beta, the ones that make it take much longer, and I have to assume that it's pretty rare for the reason to be that the builder(s) are physically incapable of continuing.
Now, clearly this won't describe everyone (some servers do get built, but there's two of us still here who have done that, being Teric and I) but how do we make sure we have those people and that they'll produce?
That said, we are not talking about building servers from scratch. We're talking about parking servers that are already built, and making some relatively minor changes to them to get them ready for an event. Some servers may not need much anything really built at all, just writing of the plots and the planning of how to manage them when the time comes.