Why not start a developer volunteer program?

Looking at the AMA, the answer to most questions seemed to be "We don't have the dev time"

Why not start a well vetted developer volunteer program? It would give some talented people experience. It's free. Some older less important things like broken quests and classic tweaks could be accomplished.

I'm sure there's some great developers out there that would love to get involved with improving their favorite game.

Because it's not free, one of the other things that was said in the AMA is that Absor ran out of times to work on things because he was so busy training new people on the toolsets that EQ uses.

Even if the volunteers are fully trained up and don't need any training you still manager/developer time to assign/approve what they will work on, developer time to review the code/changes, qa time to test them, and likely other groups time as well.

Just because you have someone else doing the changes in code doesn't mean that it isn't going to cost the team time to finish the work. In fact it could end up being more work overall because it will take longer to do all the processes for someone who isn't a member of the team versus someone who is.

^^^^^^^This^^^^^^^

- Don't have dev resources
- Devs allocated to create new content, fix bugs, create and update all documentation, look to the future for where the game intends to go in 5-10-etc years
- Devs train new content creators
- Devs perform other duties as assigned

Adding op's idea
- Dev's are supervising
- Dev's are training on specific nuances pertaining to code, design, applications, etc.
- Devs no longer have time to create new content, fix bugs, create and update documentation
- Devs no longer have time to look to the future

- NDA's would have to be signed
- Agreements would have to be in place that all content created is the sole property of DBG
- Legal has to be involved in where the content is created and stored and ensure that the content is not on a random somewhere else storage device or cloud environment
- Equipment has to be accounted for that is used in the creation of content

While the OP's idea might work in theory, there is more to it than hand me an idea and let me hand you back a product while I learn under your wing.

Volunteers are what I affectionately refer to as 'paper employees'. Ultimately unreliable, part-time employees with little to no ownership, accountability, or stake in what's produced.

Sorry OP. Of all the ideas to relieve some pressure on the EQ dev team, volunteer devs would be the absolute worst one.

How long do you think it would take the first volunteer dev inappropriate "Easter egg" to occur?

There is a thread from awhile back that covers pretty much the same topic.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...st-for-a-volunteer-auxiliary-dev-team.286764/

Lots there, but one pertinent comment was posted by ttobey.

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

I don't think the idea will go anywhere and I don't think it's really the best solution to the problem.

Why do gamers always think people want to work for free?

nobody wants to work anymore....

For profit companies cannot have volunteer employees in the US (and many other locations as well).

"Under the [Fair Labor Standards Act] FLSA, employees may not volunteer services to for-profit private sector employers."

https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/docs/volunteers.asp

Or they could just commit to 100% reinvestment in Everquest and then just ask their customers to help support more Developers by <you know?> actually buying the product. Of course we know they won't stop killing the golden goose.

Lovely, lovely thought. Too bad EG7 holds the purse strings.

I'm sure if they openly spoke about how they wanted to invest in the game with money earned instaed of just extracting profit, that would have a huge impact. However that can only come from them

I would if I could; but only because if I got paid I wouldn't get my expensive medication for free. I'd be basically working for free either way.

I created that thread. I have also spent many hours researching and creating other threads that provided actionable suggestions on how to compensate developers for working extra hours on EverQuest.

The EQ Guide Program (which I was a part of) was run for many many years and guides were doing customer service work by answering petitions. Guides were also writing quests and events. Those guides worked selflessly for thousands of hours with no bay and greatly benefited the entire EQ community.

There are 60.7 millions volunteers in American right now. They do all kind of useful tasks to help people in all walks of life. However, there is a sense of hostility on these forums from a few naysayers who are against volunteerism.

Many EQ players like myself are veteran game developers. I'd love to lend a hand and help out the Darkpaw team because I love EQ. Many EQ players would love to do because it would help them build their resume.

Everything is doable. Volunteerism is here to say in our culture. The legal argument are bogus. All that is needed is the will do to it.

One of the only places I think they can use volunteers and not have an issue is with class balancing, specifically DPS, vetting some extremely reputable players to parse an extremely large amount of data. It would still be up to the devs to determine the use of that data. However, I believe that if they had a program in place to use a few of the communities top DPS experts, we would have seen improvements much sooner (example, wizards).

I do not believe the problem with tuning is dev interest or ability. The problem with tuning is obtaining adequate amounts of reliable data. I do believe that we have some members of the community who, during the farm cycle, would be honest about having properly setup groups with optimized aDPS. This would allow the Devs to obtain a large enough data set for tuning without the huge time commitment of obtaining that data.

All of the other places I have seen suggestions would not be beneficial to the bottom line.

Imagine volunteering for a for-profit enterprise.

As a long-term volunteer post beta tester for EQ, I can, in fact, imagine that. I even pay for two accounts to keep testing.

Yeah nothing wrong with volunteering to make a game you play better. The payment is a better game.