Community Engagement

You will probably categorize this under 'Staff Recruitment' and dismiss it as such, but Nelth has been my home for years and I hate to see it in such a state, so I felt compelled to at least make this suggestion in the hopes you will give it some consideration, as I sincerely believe that it has merit...

My personal recommendation would be to open and encourage community volunteers (no monetary pay, maybe a coin or 2 or some vote points here and there for good work?) to augment the Warmane staff efforts. Maintaining an entire expansion with 1-2 dedicated staffers is not sustainable long-term, but that is effectively what we seem to have with LK getting the primary development efforts and MOP being the next in line. My suggestions (and could be applied to LK and MOP as well):

1. Community maintenance of the Bugtracker - We have a LOT of open bugs, an many have been there in a 'stale' state for a very long time. It would be a great aid to development if this could be better maintained (closing/linking duplicate reports, closing invalid reports, posting updates, setting priorities, updating bug statuses, validating newly-submitted bugs, etc.). This doesn't take a lot of development knowledge to do in most situations, and should help developers better focus on their work of actually producing fixes.

2. Community-supplemented QA - We still have a decent playerbase. Leverage that to help validate bug fixes and new content rather than continually piling those changes into the queue of an already-overloaded on-staff QA team. Again, this shouldn't require a great deal of technical expertise (just solid analytical skills, attention to detail, and ideally solid troubleshooting skills as well).

3. Community-supplemented Development - I know this is going to be the most sensitive topic because it would require members of the community to actually see the codebase, but I'm sure the dedicated on-staff developers would be glad for all the help they can get, and I'm sure there are a few people in the community with viable SQL/C/C++ talents that would be willing to contribute to improving the quality of the realm we all call home. For added protection, there are several ways Warmane can help protect and ensure the integrity of thier codebase (restricted access to only trusted/vetted volunteers, no code commits incorporated into the codebase without staff review and approval, etc.).

4. Community-supplemented GMs - There are many people who could help supplement the online GM presence on Nelth and help the in-game community, especially in Warmane off-hours (the Americas and APAC global regions specifically, EMEA to a lesser degree). Their role would be to help players with in-game issues, help monitor public chats to enforce community public chat guidelines (e.g. no hate speech, spamming, harassment, etc.), respond to in-game tickets with helpful feedback, and even host weekly community events at different times (1 for each region).

To help alleviate staff concerns, some of the following measures can be taken. Each will add some administrative overhead, but will help mitigate risk (likely similar to what Warmane would do before hiring a new staff member):

A. (Applies to all 4 above) Staff can screen volunteers before enabling them to make active contributions (similar to apply/hire). This can add some administrative overhead to the staff, but can help ensure people aren't being blindly allowed into positions of trust.

B. (Applies to all 4 above) Staff can regularly monitor activity of community volunteers, and take corrective action(s) when deemed appropriate. Additionally, Warmane can assign a staff 'supervisor' to help guide, direct, and review the community volunteers.

C. (Applies to #2 & #3 above) Warmane can require all community volunteers to sign a Non-Disclosure and private-server Non-Compete agreement prior to granting rights to community volunteers to fulfill any role, protecting Warmane from having their internal code/processes release outside their control, and reducing the risk of 'volunteers' jumping to another private server for employment.

D. (Applies to #2 & #3 above) Warmane can require staff review and sign-off to volunteer contributions before incorporating their work into the primary code-base (be it staff code review of fixes/enhancements from a volunteer developer push request, or staff review of volunteer QA testing method and results before clearing a bug/enhancement for release).

For what it's worth, I'm not suggesting that you change how you recruit, screen, evaluate, vet, or manage the Warmane staff and potential applicants, just that you consider opening applications for community members that would be willing to contribute on a no-pay/volunteer basis (again, potential compensation in coins/points based on performance/contributions, but at your sole discretion). The flip side is that they wouldn't be explicitly tied to a '40-hour work week or else' type schedule, but instead contribute as their time permits.

The bottom line is not to overlook or dismiss the talents that exist in our community - use them to make us better! Many of us would be glad to help in any way we can (without needing a monthly check from Warmane) - myself included!

Thanks,
Sam

We've done the first two points in your post and from experience, they're not always the greatest things. We did end up with a few full time staff members from it though but the general gist of it was that the volunteers either did not have the time to dedicate themselves or simply were not all that correct.

It's something that we can consider for the future for sure as the reporters option, albeit not that good, wasn't a failure and we did get some good stuff out of it.

As for the third and fourth note in your post, it's simply something that we can't do. Our GMs are people that have been here for years and have earned a certain level of trust. We don't give commands or tools to people that we don't trust. That is why you won't hear any stories of abuse around here or any GM tampering.

The development is a whole another ordeal and in today's world even with such NDAs and contracts we are just not that willing to give our code to volunteers. We had offers before that seemed great but we had to refuse them due to the chance of being hurt in the process. As you might recall we had something similar in the past and when you get burned badly once, you blow air on an ice-cream cone.

So in total, the only thing that's a possibility is community supplemented QA and reporting process to a certain extent and in the following months this is something we'll look into and see if it's feasible.

Either way, we thank you for the interest in improvements. There's always room for those and we can see the kindness that went into this post, we appreciate it.