Quote:
Originally Posted by azxten
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That isn't what I'm claiming. I am saying the desire is probably there but the time and processes are not. It is a repeating theme on P99 that the staff and players say the staff has no time, that if people would help things might get fixed faster, they're doing this for free, etc. None of that explains why we can't improve processes around community contribution. None of it explains why Nilbog should be writing quest changes instead of responding to people on the bug forum.
Nilbog instead of spending his time on one fix could be working on 1,000 fixes by leveraging the 1,000 people who care about those fixes. Maybe he just doesn't want to, who knows, but none of it is explained by the typical answer about the staff has limited time or they're doling this for free. It's clear misallocation of resources and ignoring a huge body of resources here that mostly sits idle and becomes disgruntled with the process of contributing while the project manager fixes quests himself. Either things are being done wrong from a process perspective, Nilbog doesn't care that much to include contributors, or Nilbog does care about contributors but doesn't want to actually manage their work. Managing the work of a bunch of contributors along a timeline is quite literally the description of a project manager.
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With all due respect, I think this answer shows you do not understand software as well as you think. The P99 server code is closed source. You can't leverage 1000 free workers without giving them some of the closed source to work with. If the developers start handing out code, people will eventually backwards engineer P99, and thus the project collapses due to tons of knock-off servers.
The P99 client side is black boxed, and will never be backwards engineered to a point where we can fix most of the client side bugs.
It really is that simple. I understand your frustration and your feeling you could make this more efficient, but honestly you NEVER develop software like this in the first place (taking someone else's black boxed client and re-engineering the server from packet sniffing). It is an unsustainable model to begin with, so you need to give a bit more credit where credit is due.
To me it sounds like you just need to put your energy into something that isn't an unsustainable model. You will never get P99 to operate like an open source project. It cannot operate that way without destroying itself.