Gauging Interest for a Volunteer Auxiliary Dev Team

We often hear from both devs and players that resources and staff are tight at Daybreak Games. This has the unfortunate side effect of many bugs that go unfixed and many items on the devs to-do-list get continually put on the back burner. Given the workload of the devs, this leaves little time for the consideration and implementation of feature requests from the players.

Since the recent pandemic, many gaming studios are now fine with developers working remotely. This new paradigm opens up the talent pool to many developers who do not live in the greater San Diego area or do not wish to move there with their families for various reasons.

I'm proposing that Darkpaw seriously consider the implementation of a volunteer auxiliary dev team to handle many of the tasks that the current dev team is unable to do due to time and resource restrictions.

In the years that I have played EQ, I've had the pleasure to meet developers from various studios in-game. I know there are still quite a few active and inactive retired developers from other studios that play still play EQ. There are also talented and dedicated devs from EQ emulators that play EQ as well.

EverQuest occupies a special place in the hearts of many developers in the industry. I wager some of them would not mind spending a few hours a week volunteering their time to help out the devs with whatever tasks would be assigned to them. Working on EQ would be a a labor of love and dream come true for them. I think it might be nice for them to play a small part the ongoing legacy of this beloved franchise.

There would be no cost to this outside of a producer spending some scheduling time working with the auxiliary devs to track tasks, legal to set up the volunteer/intern contracts and a vetting process for potential candidates. If anyone is interested, please PM me. If enough are interested I can put together a formal proposal to send off to Darkpaw. Thanks for listening.

I can be in charge of tank belt itemization. I have a pretty good track record with belts in general, tank/caster belts specifically...

It sounds great and I would be all for it except for:

The Council that went nowhere. Twice.

The Player studio that helped out with art work and earned them money and was cancelled.

I don't think they want our help. And some of us have delusions of greatness that might not be helpful.

Open source EQ is a fun pipe dream. They would need to hire additional staff, make significant IP concessions and rethink huge parts of their process for what would be a risky gamble for probably modest results.

Restarting the player studio and leaning into the CRC would be a good way to explore that avenue without much risk.

This will always never happen in any company. There is so much QA that need to be done when you put some random joe on making code in a database. I would never do that in the company I work for. And you would really never know what they actually did do, if they did "work" on items they were not supposed to do.

Let me start by saying I am a software engineer with 30+ years experience coding.

When you get a "new hire" it generally takes anywhere from 3-6 months of hands on mentoring with an experienced developer before they are really allowed to touch "the code". Its often 1-2 years before they are experienced enough to be really be able to start contributing more work than they take supervising.

An "auxiliary dev team" would be a nightmare to manage.

Is it a nice dream, sure.

Maybe try to collaborate with some of the EQ e mulator like P99 or the guy that's rebuilding EQ in unreal.

This exactly. I am a software developer as well and thinking of some brand new person stepping onto the field touching code that goes into production gives me nightmares.

Someone I know works in marketing and the pictures folder in the advertising agency cloud just poofed. IT said it was deleted from the conference room. I don't think it was actually deleted, I think someone just broke the shortcut on the cloud. It was surely a mistake and was easily restored, but, what windance said.

Sounds like you are not setting up your team for success if it takes that long in order for a new team member to be productive. Sure they can't do everything but there should be plenty of work that can still be easily done by a new team member. Not that I think the idea of outsourcing work like this is a good idea.

if you want to be an adjunct dev - hop on to beta and test drive the new xpac and help out with what needs to be fixed. I'm sure they would appreciate knowing what still needs to be fixed before hitting live.

I have always understood by business consultants that the average adult learner takes 3 month to just scratch the surface of a job. Could be why the police depts and other companies have 3 and 6 month periods where the participants are referred to as "recruits" or on "probation" and then they graduate to real officers or employees.

I understand that it takes time to get a developer up to full speed but there is no reason that they can't be working on the code in the first 3-6 months and having that code go to production. Sure the work they do will need to be reviewed by more senior developers but that doesn't mean it should take 3-6 months let alone 1-2 years before they are working on code that is getting pushed to production.

Well, I know my burgers are better done by an experienced employee than one just hired who "bar bee q"s" them at home all the time and don't need no help making these little things

Just trying to lighten things up. Forums are so intense recently.

I understand but people don't get better at doing something unless they are actually doing it.

We hire a lot of collage students or recent grads because they are cheap. If the new hire has several years experience, then that time easily gets cut in half or a quarter.

Doing something like artwork, or using tools to build models, would be something that a new hire should be able to spin up a little faster.

Doing QA is another option. Having well trained people who can not only find bugs, but can document how to recreate the problems is invaluable.


On the other hand, actually coding on a large convoluted project like EQ that has 20 years of tech debt, will take longer.

And I disagree, I have worked in places that hire college graduates and they still have work that can be done from them from the start. It might not be major work but it is still them making code changes and that work getting pushed to production.

Since most of the coding is so broken that even OG devs cannot figure it out then I doubt volunteers would be much help.

We have a lot of players who support other players right now with solving tech issues that the paid employees have no idea of how to solve right here and now. They are like volunteers and a great help

What kind of application and development tools were you using ?

Coding and tech support are entirely different and unrelated skill sets. Knowing the code base does not at all help you solve technical problems the compiled binaries from that code produces. Even spotting a bug in part of a program you personally worked on is merely a start of diagnosing what caused the bug, let alone actually approaching developing a solution for it.

That first point that "even OG devs cannot figure it out" is just a stupid statement. Sounds like a statement made from a point of ignorance. There are times when as a programmer I have had to sit and reverse engineer someone else's code, to completely map out what it's doing, why it's doing that, and what that means for the code I was tasked with working on. Every time that occurs it's just a matter of spending enough time with some debugging software and a hell of a lot of patience.

There are also California laws concerning unpaid workers doing things that they should be paid for. This even applies to internships.