Development Rewards

[Edned]

Hi Edned!

As I stated in the thread there was indeed an open discourse. As soon as Soul stated he would be open to the idea in a discussion thread I contacted him and then I contacted the Development team and as the opening paragraph suggests, the majority of the team wished for physical money to be spent on tools the Developers used - Which Soul has been supplying (as you may have noticed we've gone under a lot of maintenance recently, this is due to us updating our systems which were at the Developers request).

They then stated that they'd be happy with in game rewards, to which I believed was fair too. They came to me and stated that 50k would be enough and from that I built upon that as the standard rate and that it could go higher depending on the size of the update.

On the topic of why don't staff get payed. At the end of the day, if I am speaking openly - a lot of people want to be staff and with that they get a lot of rewards. Before I became SA, devs did not have an ability to extend their proplimits, etc. and so we've aimed to make the admin and developer ranks equal in all ways. However, where FL is perhaps falling behind on in comparison to other similar gamemodes is the rate of Development. Our current Development team is extremely enthusiastic, as can be seen with their wish to make a public road map, etc. and so to attempt to make it even more of an incentive to bring out updates, we've brought out in game rewards. Developers can't be as easily replaced as Administrators and also it would be extremely hard to deem what would be acceptable to reward staff members in terms of @calls, etc.

Hi Divey,

Thanks for your reply, I appreciate your views on this.

As previously mentioned, it's definitely a step in the right direction and a lot of recent decisions recently have also, in my opinion, contributed well to the community. I'm very pleased to see the player counts also increasing again.

In your point about making the ranks equal, this is exactly what I was talking about. I meant what I said about the @ calls sarcastically, as it would be very difficult to determine how those rewards are handed out, as you said. There's also a few factors that might need to be considered. A bug that requires one line of code changing could be set as a very much needed update and rewarded the maximum. However, a new system that one of the devs came up with might not be deemed as "important" but could be a really good asset to the game to enhance RP, etc. How would that be assessed, if you don't mind me asking? I think estimated time of work should definitely be factored into that.

Developers are such an asset to this community and its growth, and they can't be replaced easily, as you said. As a developer myself, I know how time consuming it can be, or not, depending on the task in hand. It does work as an incentive to get updates out, you're right. I agree they should definitely be rewarded for the work, in some form or another. I think that in-game money is the wrong way about it though, as it is used for RP Purposes and could be devalued. I've only ever seen currency given through donations other than earning in-game. It's an odd concept to reward this way.

I think everything added should be properly credited to the authors, like an auto-generated developer CV kinda layout. On top of this, some custom in-game kit (that is obviously for show purposes only) and more. Devs get distanced from roleplay as they focus a lot of time to developing and I think something like the ability to host events given the tools to enhance RP would be a great addition and reward. Maybe also scheduling who works on certain updates, so some people are given more time off, etc.

Again, just ideas.

TL;DR - Devs are an important asset to the community and should be rewarded well, but in-game cash might be the wrong way to go about it.