of me making non-flamey useful posts.

How about another forum in which projects which are low priority, high in time cost, and a zero in the technical realm (i.e. shifter form description rewriting) are opened up to playerbase contributions. I'm sure we (collectively) could write up more well written descriptions than even the most talented of the immstaff could do alone. If someone starts a lion description thread along with their vision, and further people offer suggestions/additions/etc. the game might just end up with a finished product of great artistic value without any real time investment from the immstaff. Also, the immstaff would still have final approval etc. so they could take the best of the best and combine it into the final description.

Just an idea.... I stole.... from the open source community....


Laearrist

Forum format would be ideal because we would want feedback, and while something closed might give you ideas, you'd get less than if people were writing and receiving critiques (even flamey ones) from peers.

Hey some of us want to give something back without becoming one of the devils... give us an opportunity and see what we can do with it? After all if we can't be trusted, you've lost nothing, but if we're useful, you've gained a new resource for future projects.

Edit: The Contests forums is already there, make use of it, but open it up and you'll get more useful info, even if it is buried under some flaming garbage.

Edit: This crap is going in Gameplay because it doesn't really fit anywhere else.

This is a good idea, but it might or might not be a practical idea. Some issues:

1) Player contributors aren't pre-screened for ability. If we ask for a contribution, and the person responding does a poor job (despite good effort), they're likely to be offended if we discard their gift. Conversely, we don't want to put sub-par things into the game just to avoid insulting an individual.

2) The kinds of jobs that are easiest to farm out are often boring and repetitive. (As an example, I think most experienced players could coach newbies towards writing better descriptions. This is vaguely educational and can be fun for a while, but the longer someone has been on staff, the less they like doing it. That said, productive forum discussions about writing descriptions are welcome on New Player.) Imms do them largely because we can balance out their workload with more exciting things like immteraction, quests, new features, etc. Players don't always have that incentive to do our more menial work.

3) If a "hot" job comes around, it's usually easy for us to find manpower to do it, especially because we're pretty knowledgeable about each staff member's likes and dislikes. (Do I need descriptions for herbs to put in a shop? Find Amaranthe, get spiffy ones in my inbox way ahead of schedule.) The stuff that doesn't get done is often the stuff that falls under #2.

#1 is the real problem. If #2 and #3 creep up, the worst case is that no one signs up and undone work remains undone work. Discussion welcome.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

I hate the open source community.

I don't think the imms are having trouble getting stuff done. There's a ton of them. Its stuff that we can't contribute to that takes a long time, like coding and testing.