pitfall of making mmo

we are at the middle of making a micro-scale mmo (online game?), and we have learnt why making a mmo is so hard. these are the top three hurdles of mmo development

1) no planning of editor tools development and design team. all budget, time and effort are invested into engineering, arts and marketing. we'd over looked the need of design team to create background story of npc, items' information, character balancing and so on. if due to lacking of design team, the needs of editors/tools for generating game data is much more urgent.

2) under-estimated of important of item attributes design. it is the thing should design from very beginning, because it affect combat system. and because of that we also under estimated the difficulties of combat system.

3) under-estimating of development's team orientation and documentation. these 2 topic don't sound like related at all. but because of lacking of documentation, each team member have their own interpretation of the project goal, and ended up not all team member understand the objective and scopes of the project, and causes unnecessary high expectation from team member, therefore they are easy to get demoralized. and also experience of the team in mmo field isn't enough. some team member were from web development industry, this causes them un-satisfied with the development direction.

although i'm facing the about problem right now, but i still confident that the project can still be completed on time.