And to those that just say to throw more programmers at the game I ask that you read the first couple of paragraphs on page 3 of this article;
Neverwinter Nights Client/Server Postmortem (page 3);
"
Neverwinter Nights was by far the largest project that BioWare has ever attempted. By the time in was completed almost everyone in the company had made contributions to it. At its peak, there were 25 programmers working on the project. This was a radical departure from Baldur's Gate, our largest project previously attempted, which only had 7 programmers."
"Another interesting "truth" that we learned was the fact that if you have a senior programmer managing and providing technical design for more junior programmers, once the number of junior programmers exceeds 4, then the senior programmer is unable to do any actual programming of their own."
A lot of lessons to be learned in the article concerning coding an online game.