Development Bounty System

[Boas]

A project like Homecoming would challenge just about any professional dev team. Ours are volunteers. The argument that their time is limited seems to come up a lot on these forums, so I'd like to explore and anticipate the pros and cons of a bounty system for development tasks.

 

I'm talking about something like a "bug bounty" system, used by software companies to detect and correct vulnerabilities in their product. The Homecoming team could use these bounties to investigate the feasibility of certain additions or modifications to the game, or to fast-track jobs that require a lot of work.

 

Unfortunately, Homecoming is not a multi-billion dollar software company. I imagine the available funds are limited. That's the first hurdle: does Homecoming take in enough donations for a system like this to be feasible?

 

If not, oh well, close the thread. I think they might, otherwise I wouldn't have posted this.

 

I should clarify that I don't necessarily think this is a great idea. The reality, though, is that certain things just can't get done in timely fashion without someone getting paid to do it. Think of it like an old castle restoration. You enjoy the work of keeping it up and even making improvements, so your friends can come over and LARP in the courtyard or whatever. Sometimes they give you some money for your trouble. But when the toilets back up, and you want to hire a plumber, some of the LARPers get mad. These LARPers, they don't want working toilets. If the toilets need fixing, they say you should do it yourself, so you can keep spending their money on Natty Light, which they pour into plastic horns and pretend it's mead. So, you know... It's kind of like that.

 

Pros:

• Get stuff done faster
• Volunteer organization avoids having to hire regular employees (also a con, in a way...)
• Frees up volunteer devs to work on what they want
• Could players contribute donation monies directly to bounties they want to support?

    
Cons:

• The paperwork
• The expectations
• Exploitative? Someone could spend a lot of time on a problem without ever satisfying the conditions of the bounty, and wouldn't get paid. One might say that comes with the territory, but I don't like it.
• Transparency required, to the point that it might compromise the dev process, to head off accusations that bounties (read: "my donation monies") are being awarded unfairly.

 

Does anyone have experience with a similar system? If you do, it might be obvious that I don't.

[Ghost]

Could be wrong, but I don’t believe they are allowed to take donations for more than the costs of the server upkeep.

[Starhammer]

if it's something that could be done via CoH Modder, I suppose there's nothing keeping anyone from "rewarding" skilled modders for creating a desired mod...

I'd buy a coffee for someone if they could make a mod to give Star Wars blaster sounds to Assault Rifle and Soldier of Arachnos guns (the gunshot sounds anyway, the grenades and flamethrower are fine as is). Or turn the electric support bubble into something less seizureific 😛

[GM_GooglyMoogly]

6 hours ago, Boas said:

If the toilets need fixing, they say you should do it yourself, so you can keep spending their money on Natty Light, which they pour into plastic horns and pretend it's mead. So, you know... It's kind of like that.

 

That was really unexpected and funny.

 

Honestly, the best ways to help HC have already been laid out: 1) volunteer if you have the time and skills; 2) contribute if you have spare funds to keep the servers running; 3) continue to be awesome and excellent to each other on the forums, Discord, and game; 4)  Test new stuff when it comes out for beta testing.

 

Seriously, #3 is what makes communities.  Having contests, games, hosting parties in your base, forming super-groups, leading raid teams, etc. is something everyone can do and keeps people coming back for more.

 

 

Edited July 24 by GM_GooglyMoogly
forgot #4!

[Troo]

 

https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Bug_Hunter_Badge

 

Maybe this or something similar that shouldn't be so hard to get..

 

Edited July 25 by Troo

[Boas]

58 minutes ago, Troo said:

Maybe so, but that's not really what I'm talking about. Some examples might have been helpful...

 

Say, for instance, the team decides they want to implement account-wide currency, accolades, or whatever. Digging in and untangling the systems involved in a project like that is a job. If someone wants it done, they might only get it done by offering a financial incentive. That's more what I was trying to say.

[tidge]

I'm impressed that no one has flown in a demand/suggestion that the HC team make their codebase available for free... for purely charitable reasons of course.

[lemming]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

I'm impressed that no one has flown in a demand/suggestion that the HC team make their codebase available for free... for purely charitable reasons of course.

I suspect that along with financial incentives are part of the verbotten bits from ncsoft.  

[tidge]

1 minute ago, lemming said:

I suspect that along with financial incentives are part of the verbotten bits from ncsoft.  

 

Me too... but folks will ask for things "for free", and the Dunning-Kruger effect is observable, which is why I've been impressed.

[Seed22]

6 hours ago, tidge said:

 

Me too... but folks will ask for things "for free", and the Dunning-Kruger effect is observable, which is why I've been impressed.

Its ironic you mention dunning kruger effect. I feel like Megan from drake n josh sipping her soda and going “interesting” with this comment. 
 

Not for this particular reason. Just really funny to hear another person on this forum mention it. 

Edited July 25 by Seed22

[tidge]

7 hours ago, Seed22 said:

Its ironic you mention dunning kruger effect. I feel like Megan from drake n josh sipping her soda and going “interesting” with this comment. 
 

Not for this particular reason. Just really funny to hear another person on this forum mention it. 

 

I certainly hope I am not misrepresenting anything like 'programming skills' on my part... it's probably been a decade since I had to install anything like a development environment for anything more complicated that quickly navigating a code base and assisting with instrumenting code for low-level testing. For about two decades my own programming has been pretty limited to scripted/configured development, or visual programming systems and their like. I can tinker of course, and trying to get VBA from old office applications to work on LibreOffice, or Android, or whatever is its own form of hell for a tinkerer.

 

I do have the proverbial 10K hours (several times over) logged in everything else relevant for software development, from requirements and architecture through all levels of testing, plus lots of project management. I'm impressed we got the Homecoming code working so well, and my truth is that I'm ok with the pace of releases, and that 'bugs' are typically pretty minor... except of course for some things that work as-intended, but maybe didn't have the best considered intentions.

[DrRocket]

For one, I am grateful there "is" a Homecoming, also grateful it "is" free, and lastly even more grateful that new content "is" being made.

 

I understand that the software folks working in this game are volunteers, which makes sense since the game owner will not allow additional funding besides what it takes to operate the game and perform maintenance, I am amazed the original owner allows Homecoming to make new content, but not complaining here.

 

So lets get back to the software developers, have you asked yourself why they volunteer?

 

Having been a software development manager in my past, I can tell you positions for very experienced and capable software developers is very well compensated and highly appreciated (if the business is smart)

 

So there is the rub, software companies are always looking for software developers, but they must experienced and capable!

 

So my guess is that software developers at Homecoming, are doing this work mostly to build the credentials of being experienced and capable and thus palatable to large software companies.

 

So what does the individual software developer tackles in CoH, I would think, would be in the area they are trying to develop skills and capability.

 

So returning to the OP's posting, software debugging is frankly a pain on the rear, it is very hard since I have the feeling the software code is poorly documented and the code itself is a study of patches, band-aids, work-arounds and considering when the initial code was made it did not have the benefit of the software tools to aid with configuration management and thus I bet we got a veritable "Spaghetti code" which only makes debugging a titanic task. That we see any debugging on-going in Homecoming should fall in the category of miraculous.

 

Sadly, showing a resume of being a good debugger, is not as spectacular of having proof of developing an innovative data parser, graphics applications, etc.

 

As I said, I am grateful for what I have and are receiving

 

Devs - My hat off to you all

 

Regards