Crowdsourcing?

Galluccio

"the practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the internet."

How come Ultima Online hasn't done this at all?  I get that the Event Moderators is little like that.  Years ago someone criticized the Trinsic Rose which gives the +5 strength petals.  Some talented artist came up with all this art which could have been used yet none of it was ever adopted.  We could have had a much better Rose of Trinsic for example,

Lets take the new player experience.  I can think of a bunch of things which would help a new player.  Even just text hint boxes which would come up to give guidance.  Kinda like a tutorial as you moved through the game.  I tried paying a guy to start up a new account a little while ago.  He was so confused and frustrated by the game that he stopped accepting money to play the game.  I have email proof.  I'm not just pulling something out of hat.

I don't want to get hung up on just that one idea which would need some fine tuning.  

The development team is so small now that they could use any help that they can get. 

dvvid

I think the game could really benefit from this. Of course I’d like to see crowdsourcing for vendor search and bug fixes, but quality of life stuff is always good too. 

Sable

They tried this before with Seers and Companions but a lawsuit came of it so from that point on, they've gone away from volunteer type programs.

Acid_Rain

Could b totally wrong but heard lawsuits came from volunteers for being unpaid... after volunteering for an unpaid job... *doh* 

Also heard something abt volunteers wanting to ‘unionize’. All water under the bridge but for whatever reason, this is why we can’t have nice things lol

Cookie

It's a nice idea.

It's a shame that they've had such a bad experience with it before, human nature, and the American Way by the sounds of it

loop

Crowd sourcing the ability to develop new features or fix bugs isn't going to happen. It would entail the game becoming open source (or close to it), which would present numerous financial and legal challenges for a business that is set up to distribute a closed source client and monetize access to a closed source server. There is already a vibrant emulation community with projects that straddle the spectrum of closed/open source.

There are already mechanisms that leverage the community to improve the game, some official and some emergent. Event Moderators, as you mentioned, are one thing. The Test Center, to some extent, is sort of an outsourcing of QA. Players can give feedback through a variety of channels, but it's up to the developers to take that feedback into consideration.

Where one opportunity could exist to crowd source content would be the creation of new art or the improving of existing art, the writing of books, possibly others... provided the tools to conduct that work can be made public and the work can be moderated. However, if the items that result from the work are just going to be dumped on the UO store or doled out as freebie gifts, then I would argue that the contributions wouldn't amount to anything substantial.

I'm not saying that some alternative model couldn't be successful. After all, we see a great deal of innovation among the free shard community, where many individuals who aren't part of a paid development team do some really interesting things -- in their free time, no less.

Edit: I forgot to mention UI mods for the Enhanced Client, which is another area that encourages community involvement. Of course, by "community" it's mostly just Pinco, and the lack of such involvement has more to do with the failure of the Enhanced Client in general, but perhaps its another avenue that can be improved.

Arnold7

Not sure what this post is all about, but think a number of players that respond to these forums would help new players out or provide suggestions on how to solve problems players have, or even provide some guidance on how to build a character.  See that done all the time here and sometimes in the game.  I don’t think asking for help would be a bad thing - might be good. Asking for detailed solutions and player guides, or a specific time commitment that’s a little different.  That’s not the players’ responsibility.  But given the varied backgrounds and expertise of the players, finding a way to ask for suggestions for resolving the various issues this game has might go a long way to point the developers in the right direction.

Also, as an aside, might help if UO responded once in awhile to questions that are asked over and over again.  For example, see lots of questions about problems with vendor search but don’t recall ever seeing a response from UO either acknowledging the problem or providing a clue to what the real problem is. Know they can do these things.  They explained why we no longer have snow in the winter.  Appreciated them answering that question.  Know now why we don’t have snow and can accept that.