Community's Efforts

As I have witnessed, there are a lot of talented coders that are playing this game as well as in the forums as a person managed to custom make me an addon (which while not the most complicated thing in the world) still requires some knowledge over the game's basic coding). As that happened, an idea came to my mind of how warmane could profit from the community's skills.

Invest in community efforts in order to encourage them. What I mean by this? The source codes of all expansions the server maintains as well as the server source codes are easily accessible online for everybody to explore. I found that out when I was trying to find a way to balance battlegrounds (which I did but that idea got shunned away). Regardless, since everybody can have access to these codes, you may as well benefit from them in a way by allowing these people to send you solutions to Bugtracker reports which they had come up with by themselves, easing the work of the staff significantly. For an example, there is the bug report that one cannot skin beats in heroic dungeons which I am beyond certain can be fixed by changing just a few 0's to 1's or false's to true's in a couple of places.

Have the community write the changes themselves, send you an email for you to approve and reward them in one way or another to encourage their assistance. I am not saying 10,000 coins per bug resolved but 10 points? Why not? You benefit as the product you offer becomes better; they benefit; EVERYBODY BENEFITS! You can just make a new email address [email protected] and havef people send ready codes there. Neat, right? Certainly saves mods a lot of time, at least.

Where did you find the source code? We're running a customized version of the Trinity core; I assume that Warmane keeps their code secret, since that's standard practice for private servers.

I personally would be happy to submit bug fixes for review by devs if that were a possibility. It wouldn't have to be an email address, we could just have a Github account for Warmane and let people submit pull requests. However I'm also worried that letting just anyone submit code (even if it's reviewed by a dev before being adopted) could lead to even more bugs being introduced -- especially if there's a reward involved, as that might incentivize people who are not the best coders / not that familiar with the code base to shoot for the reward with half-assed code. This isn't an insurmountable issue, but it's something to consider.

If a reward system is implemented, I would suggest basing the reward on the priority of the bug, with a certain minimum for bugs with 0 priority.

Suggested before, denied before. As above, our core is customized, so any changes made on what is actually available would very possibly just not be compatible, and we're not going to make our work public. It would also not make our work that easier, as the more complex the fix, the more attention, scrutinizing and testing it would take, with added work for stuff that in said fixes that could need fixing themselves.