Miscellaneous: An Appeal to Improve Contributed Research & Development: A User Story

[azxten]

But it could be useful and it could be a place to engage with contributors and leverage their efforts if the crap could be filtered out, the meat made more obvious to the staff, and the contributors who are providing the meat given more direct interaction regarding their efforts and how they can provide more help on a given issue or help in other needed ways.

Also I want to mention this point. I went from being someone who is creating crap, to someone who is trying to not create crap, to someone who is trying to create meat, to someone who actually maybe created a piece of meat. I did that in the context of wanting to write THIS bug report about why 10 years ago I never contributed anything in spite of knowing I could and having a desire to do so. I did it to expose why it's difficult to be a contributor.

It's difficult to create a piece of crap when everyone shits on you for it even though there is no process for asking if something is a piece of crap or not. You just have to clutter up the bug process with your turd and carry on because often you don't know if it's a turd or not until afterwards. You might think you could ask if something is a bug on the server forum instead but that will result in about 10x more getting shit on, being told you shouldn't be complaining, redirected to the bug forum, etc.

It's difficult to try to create a piece of meat or not create a piece of crap when you get forum trolls, people trying to defend mechanics because they like playing cheesy semi-classic EQ, told by others that "yeah that's probably fucked up but no one cares, I made a post on it 5 years ago, here's a link to 10 different bug report threads discussing that issue, good luck", and you're trying to build up a body of evidence while having randos posting, "Stop posting! That isn't good enough evidence! It's not enough!" no matter how good the evidence is and with not even the slightest guidance as to what is good enough evidence in any given context. There must be some context like I mentioned before, does a moss snake kick? I mean no one is going to lose their shit over the outcome of that bug and maybe finding 10 in era archived player posts with the same answer is enough. Did Charm break more often in live? Now suddenly we're going to need Brad McQuaid himself providing an autographed archived post stating that P99's charm is garbage and here is the C++ code for how it actually worked in live. Yet none of this is spelled out, the staff merely offers, "HEY RETARD, STOP MAKING SHITTY POSTS, YOU NEED GOOD EVIDENCE!" So you push on through that.

it's difficult actually creating the piece of meat. Apparently no one, none of the devs, no one has bothered to provide you with an easy way to compile EQemulator source and test your change. Good luck! You know it's fucking hard as shit to compile and if you don't already know that then lol you are totally fucked! Thanks for your contribution though! LOL No one is going to tell you to use Ubuntu 18, not 20, not 16, just 18. You didn't know Perl changed in Ubuntu 20? Retard. You didn't know cmake doesn't reach version 3.7 in Ubuntu 16? Why are you even trying to help P99? Go away. Oh you don't know how the retarded mostly undocumented EQEmulator logging system works so that you can actually see the output of all those Log() function calls in the source code that are in the function you're working on? Too bad, I guess you're just not good enough. How to make yourself a GM? How to fly? How to run speed buff yourself? All the other common bullshit you need to know to not waste your time when trying to test your code? Well sucks for you, I guess you're just not good enough to be a P99 contributor.

It's difficult to provide the piece of meat. Oh you actually went through all of that? You're still here? What? You actually have a well researched bug report with the code changes clearly outlined to fix the bug? This isn't supposed to be possible, how did you get here? The staff will get back to you next year, just keep bumping.

I mean this is the reality of the process. Meanwhile, after you've gone through this gauntlet, you see a new patch come out. They added wine berries to Neriak! You see posts on Rants and Flames talking about the absurdity of adding wine berries when there are "so many other problems." Will anyone respond to my post about channeling which is full of evidence? Probably not but they did get those wine berries in to the great excitement of the server population.

Nilbog and other staff, I love you, I love what you've done on P99, but man this process is FUCKED UP from the contributor perspective in terms of how you are treated by the community and the staff as you progress along that path from hopeful contributor to providing a solid bug and being ignored.