| deadowl |
07-12-2016 03:47 AM |
There is a significant pool of people that have gained experience by working on Graal that are now professional software developers. The major problem I continue to see with Graal is that there aren't very many professional developers hired to work on it. Without the presence of professionals, the authority situation is unreliable. I will refer to Antagos' posts in that regard.
When I worked on Graal Classic as the lead developer, I didn't get paid. I got a lot of stuff done. I got a lot of stuff done fairly well. I was still a ****ty dev admin, and only had something like two years of amateur programming experience and zero management experience. I got a lot of complaints about what I couldn't get done that I wanted to get done. I didn't have anyone to advise me on how to manage that kind of situation, what my expectations should be of myself, what my expectations should be of others, or anything else. There was a significant communication disconnect between the ownership of Graal and the community that created it, and I suspect that's still the case. That said, I got a lot more done than what I would personally expect of anyone else that situation; notably the server was reduced to less than a hundred levels from thousands, maybe tens of thousands of levels.
Antago was a kid who wanted to create a bunch of cool things, found an outlet, felt underappreciated, and quit. I can relate to him in that regard. Myself, if I was to be put in the same situation again, I would have quit my role much earlier. The kind of **** some people will put you through when you're not being paid or even receiving mentorship is not worth it. A zero dollar paycheck--would that be worth it to you?
I tried to create a new overworld that drew from both old and new concepts. That eventually became the basis of the overworld for iClassic. I think it's awesome that the overworld my team created was used as the basis of iClassic. I think it sucks that the quests we created were nixed, and I would think that they should be reincorporated if not for the fact that they exist and can provide value to the community. Whatever may be in the future won't stop me from having pride in what I helped to create and wanting to experience what I created again. However, it's not my decision.
I wonder if the goals of development have become more clear since my time. I'd imagine with a lot of concepts being more closely tied directly to revenue that it has, and that the maintenance of existing revenue streams outpace the importance of potential new revenue streams. I struggle even more today to find a connection between Graal ownership and the Graal player community. With graphics development and player customization, however, there seems to have been a particularly significant realignment that aligns Graal's revenues with the demand of the player base.
That said, when you're frustrated about bugs and feature requests not being resolved, the typically unpaid staff are probably more frustrated than you. The motivation for them isn't money. Sometimes it's experience, and sometimes it's pride. This is especially the case with bugs. Either something they made is broken, or fixing something someone else made is going to delay what they would rather be working on. They're not being paid. Give them a break.
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