Gauging Interest for a Volunteer Auxiliary Dev Team

Its not my statement but its a fact that Devs have admitted many times in these forums or in interviews that they were stumped or could not figure something out.

This is a general discussion where anyone can voice an opinion, life experience or fact on the subject, which is thoughts on a volunteer dev team.

There is never a reason to call someone "stupid" or that they are making a "statement out of ignorance". This is against forum rules. Keep your personal feelings towards other posters out of it and stick to the subject.

Ignoring the glaring faults with this that others have pointed out... Judging from the forums, I wouldn't want 99% here to have any meaningful input. There's like... less than 10 people that I would trust not to just destroy the game (which intentional or not).

This is partially due to the economics of developing code in a for-profit company. It doesn't make sense to devote endless dev resources to every task. At some point, it's not profitable to keep trying to figure out how something works since that takes dev time away from other tasks. It's probably more accurate to say that "Devs could not figure it out in the time they had allocated to try to figure it out." Given enough time they could have figured it out, but many other tasks would have been ignored during that time.

This is something that people tend to forget and it isn't only California laws that would apply but the laws of the location where the work is being done. Once you have to account for international labor laws a suggestion like this gets really messy.

Correct. I don't think for-profit companies can use unpaid workers.

https://hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2018/01/04/can-accept-volunteer-labor/

SOE ran into hot water with the Guide Program in its early days regarding required hours to maintain status in the program. I doubt DPG wants to go back down that road again.

Imagine volunteering to provide free labor for a for profit company.

The one that started the post is not volunteering, he want others to do it so he can play the game while others make it for free

When I interned for my first job in the video game industry, within one day of arriving, I was tasked with designing the levels for a blockbuster IP for an AAA video game. I worked my off and put in 16 hours a day and pumped out the levels for the game. Within 8 months, I went from intern to lead designer at the company.

Regarding new hire onboarding, every studio is different, every new hire is unique with their own skill sets and work ethic. Obviously you want to hire qualified people who have a track record of experience which is why I mentioned candiates for this proposal would have experience, not just people hired off the street from a temp agency.

If DarkPaw were to hire 10 new developers tomorrow, it would still take time to onboard them, just like the volunteer/intern hires working remotely. So this point is moot. Yes, remote workers would take more time to get onboarded.

I was also a Senior Guide for EverQuest. I was in charge of 20 guides below me and I meticulously ensured that all of the guides followed SOE policy to the letter. It was hard work but it was not a nightmare at all.

The benefits of free labor for Darkpaw vastly outweigh any potential drawbacks.

Yep. Lots of video game studios in California use interns. Daybreak legal counsel would have to look into this to examine the legal issues. The issue of using out of state interns is also something to consider.

In the real world, every developer I have worked with never had delusions of greatness. On the contrary, they were hard-working, passionate and committed to making the very best video games. If wanting to provide players with the very best experience possible is delusional then both of us are living in different universes.

The very best studios have a studio culture of excellence and hire people that aspire to do great things. Nobody starts a video game studio and says "Hey, let's make mediocre video games!". You hire the very best people because you want to make great games that players love.

As I mentioned in the original post, all applicants would be fully vetted.

Of course any volunteer or intern auxiliary developer would not be given free reign to do as they pleased. All volunteers would be under the strict supervision of the full-time dev team.

As it's been pointed out, it would be illegal to take volunteers to do work for EverQuest.

It would seem they already have, and the idea was rejected for legal reasons and possibly for other reasons as well.

P.S. Are the interns you cite paid, or unpaid? If they're unpaid I have friends in the legal profession who might start salivating.

Just because they are interns doesn't mean that they are unpaid workers, plenty of places pay interns just like they pay every other employee that works for them. In fact it is becoming more and more common for laws to require interns to be paid just like every other employee.

I think those circles are placed too close together.

This is exactly correct. Companies above a certain size won't even consider this approach. In fact, I don't know of a single case where this has been done successfully (not that I'm an expert).

It depends on the domain (industry), the programming language being used, the size of the code base, the complexity (or crappiness) of the code, government contractor vs. private, etc., etc. I'm a dev manager for a company in the gaming (gambling) industry. We don't take that long to ramp folks up (usually 3 months) but I can understand why some companies do.

I’m in support of the idea, but I’m not doing any of the work.