Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmas
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The unfortunate thing about those posts is that they compare P99 to a business, which it is not. They actually use the words "business" and "customer support" as well as make comparisons to exisitng businesses. People acknowledge that this server is produced by people with other real world obligations, but they don't really.
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It is a project that relies heavily upon a community being interested in the project and the same rules apply to this that apply to a business. The whole "real world obligations" thing falls flat when you remember that you have hundreds of volunteers for a community with thousands of members that has a current staff size of 4. It's purely a lack of focusing on allowing those volunteers to contribute instead.
There could easily be a 10 person development team, 20 guides, multiple server technicians to resolve login server down, etc. I'm so sick of hearing about "they have real world obligations so they're too busy to take advantage of all the volunteers offering to reduce that load."
You then go on to claim IP exemptions don't matter, it's the lack of expansion, etc. Well, how much farther would that be along if Rogean/Nilbog/Amelinda never had to do an IP exemption? Lack of focus on the small things, the details, will always kill projects.
There is a reason why this server never grows beyond 1,000 players. It's because there is only so many players a team of 4, with really 2 of them having any power, can support.
Every time the population surges guild disputes explode over raid content, developers stop producing content and start policing the server, the petition queue explodes. Everything reaches critical mass until enough people get sick of it and quit and then finally the population shrinks back to a manageable size for the size of management.
You can use the whole "not a business line" all you want but this is still a project, with users, that requires management and that management refuses to grow with the user base and so the user base will never grow.