Idea to get development going again

[jjsquirrel]

I posted this in the Going Public thread. Could be worth discussing it separately without hijacking the important discussion there about who offered what for the game years ago.

 

 

What maybe could be done however is opening up the dev process some.

 

Mike probably doesn't see any business case in hiring someone for dev work on the game at this point. But what if he set up some specific improvements with a kickstarter-like funding? If people donate X amount towards feature Y he will hire an external developer to make it happen. People are already making donations, something like this would likely pull in more. Even if it doesn't end up in Mikes pocket it might still be a win-win as it would improve the game as a whole and renew interest in paying for VIP etc. maybe worth trying?

 

Disclaimer, I happen to be a developer. I even talked to Mike once about helping out with some work for the game, but nothing came out of it. This is not me looking for work, in fact I doubt I'd have time to take anything on right now, just throwing this idea out there. In a way I'm not even sure I'd want to look at all the source code and know how things work since that would take away from the fun of figuring it out which is a large part of playing this game. If I did take on any serious amount of dev work I'd probably stop playing.

 

 

DoctorOctagon:

 

This is the best idea. Not sure how realistic it is though since it would eventually require a revamp and re-org of the entire site hierarchy. It's a big job and would require Mike's assistance more than accepting avatars would

 

Also, no offense, but I'd rather Mike keep running it than Penn or a large group of the highest bidders. In my experience, any business becomes infinitely more complicated the more people that get involved

 

 

Yes it would still require Mike to be involved. He needs to make the decisions what to put up as development candidates, take part in balancing/testing etc. decide who to trust with development. But it would at least be less than doing most of that anyway while also the coding on top. And it keeps Mike in control of things.

 

About site-revamp, yes ideally the donation thing would be tied into something where you see it progress "live" on the site if that's what you are thinking about. But I was rather thinking it could just be something simple like a page Mike manually updates with the status every week or so to begin with while we see if the model works.

 

Btw, accepting avatars. I'm sure there would be someone willing to take that job and do it according to guidelines set down by Mike in exchange for say free VIP. Would be one more thing to reduce his workload.

[listerman]

I get that everyone wants to help, but from my understanding, the codebase currently does not support different permissions or anything like that. Someone who would help develop a feature would have to stop playing the game, because he would have access to 100% of the code and database.

 

Also, any development done is done on the live site, as there is no dev/staging/test environments. I get that developers keep throwing their 2 cents about how it could be better, but it's a 10+ years old game with a structure that has absolutely no best practice nor coding standards.

 

Accepting avatars, give someone the power to accept/reject other than Mike and you create more issues than you fix some.

 

I'm all for seeing this game evolve, but I also have a strong feeling that there will be no easy way to do it.