Use voluenteer developers.

[Cratertina]

So here is my suggestion: use voluenteers to increase AO workforce and improvement rate.

Personaly before comming to AO in my spare time I worked on balance of a MMO. More specieficaly every patch I would go through all weapons and ships and engines and missiles to rebuild them to more balanced specifications.

I believe much of old content equipment needs complete rebalancing, my speciality was making weapons keep their character yet balanced amongst all factions and levels. Right now 95% of weapons and armors are completeley ignored for the sole reason they are worthless in stats. I would voluenteer to fix that.

Further I believe there are many more skilled members of the community that are willing to contribute their free time to further improve this game. Imagine how many things we could fix and what a timesaver we would be for the paid devs.

Hows that a suggestion?

[Wyoming]

Just employ Lazy already.

[drainbamage]

They'd have to be pretty damn picky.

[Litestrider]

They've already been doing this for icons, I'd love to see them unleash us on animations, models, particle effects and other things like that, I know I'd take a crack at it.

As for proper bugfixes, mob placement, landscape layout and other things that desperately need fixing but apparently can't be given the attention they need, those are much more touchy subjects, as it would essentially entail the game going opensource, and otherwise revealing potentially sensitive information to the public. Even if they hand choose their volunteers, it's almost certain everything will get leaked sooner or later, and then people will go about finding exploits of all sorts and blowing the game wide open.

I think it's a fantastic idea and I'd love to see an MMO go "community co-developed", but I don't know if AO and Funcom are ready for it, it may need to wait for an MMO developer to embrace it from the ground up.

There's a lot to gain, as all of us know AO is lacking a lot of polish, but there's also potentially a lot to lose. Funcom would have to think long and hard about such a move, and make it very carefully. At best it could usher in a new golden age where all the "thousand cuts" of the small bugs and issues get ironed out in record time. At worst, dozens of shabby emulators and new exploits could crop up overnight and kneecap the game if not kill it outright.

[Cratertina]

Well, where I come from microsoft game has been edited from multiplayer game to an MMO, we developed it for years after MS stoped support for it, without them ever releasing a sourcecode. Mostly through scripting, kind of how ao database works.
That wouldnt release any funcom secrets, atleast the patch i purpose - remake of old weapons and equipment.

Database rips exist, infact we get several after each update. Auno and now xyphos are dedicated to it. Finding a voluenteer to polish old content is easy. Assigning a real dev to the task is expensive.

Result in my experience was. 7 years after Microsoft officialy ended all support we have a MMO that has a community more active than AO, server that runs for 60% of the day on maximum capacity and gameplay that is polished beyond anythink Microsoft was ever able to come up with. We voluenteer devs got several Moddb sim of the year awards.

Becouse gameplay issues get solved regulary population is stable serverside limited, for last 6 or so years.

Imagine what it would do to AO if an army of voluenteers would fix up midlevel content? If a community gets toggether and rebalances stuff, from the players for the players?

At same time theres a thread about audio remake also very worthwhile.

Imagine a npc remake? Rather than us crying for changes for years we could make them. Let funcom deal with engine,running servers, fixing bugs, providing a stable platform for community to grow on and have fun. After all funcom is about having fun, future is in system based content. What about community based content?

[badorde]

I would join