I originally posted this in the suggestions board http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/10111 but I was disappointed at the lack of responses, so I am going to post it here one last time. My hope is that people read this board more than the suggestions board and it isn't just the idea that floundered.

I believe the greatest advantages that this game has over other games are its ability to evolve and the community that it has around it willing to contribute to the evolution process.

I have seen so many efforts and ideas that have amazed me in their creativity, skill, and hard work. It sometimes make me feel like I am just a lurker who's been around too long without really bringing anything of substance to the mix.

When I saw the news about Waylon leaving, all I could think about was 'how can I help?' The answer I kept coming up with is I really can't. I am not a programmer or an artist or a webdesigner. I am a poli-sci major and apparently that doesn't help pilot a ship very well.

But what I am good at is blinding idealism and the ability to spot a good idea when I see one. I'd like to think that I can come up with ideas as well. Therefore I have one lofty and complicated idea that I am throwing out there for you guys to tear apart.

Guild Software is made up of now just three very dedicated individuals who can only do so much. There also is a larger group that as far as I can tell donate their own time and resources to more periphery activities such as the original wiki, creating trailers and advertising ideas, and flooding the suggestion board with ideas. This flood of ideas must be deafening to Guild and the few forum moderators that police the boards. The constant repetition of ideas can drown out a gem of an idea in the blink of an eye. In my opinion, the Suggestions Board isn't enough to be as helpful as it could be with a little more organization. There are several game trailers out there and all of them have very good qualities but think how powerful and effective one collaborative and polished trailer could be to attract new players. Gathering that talent together would require time and effort that I don't know Guild has to offer. What I also know is that it may not be time and effort that you as individuals have either. I know a lot of us are in school or have jobs or have families or have girlfriends or a combination of some or all those things we so casually call RL. But I also know that some of us want to help in anyway possible. I am sure that many of you have approached the devs personally asking the same question I ask myself, "how can I help?" Answering and coordinating all of those requests is a task in itself.

What I am offering is my ability to help organize some sort of committee to facilitate this process. I want to volunteer by helping organize the volunteer effort, to take some of that burden off of the company, so they can do what they do best, innovate.

I want to form some sort of group of veteran and dedicated players, who know all of the ideas and suggestions, who know all of the history of the game and its successes and failures. I want the people who have the skills and knowledge I lack to talk to each other and come up with a better trailer, a better banner, a better concept. I want to use this community to help Guild build a better game, a successful game. I want to use our collective desire to help in the most helful way possible, by organizing it.

Or am I just dreaming again?

I'm here and I would love to help.

I have:
Good people skills.
I'm sexy. (what you thought I would leave that one out? ;p )
I know some computer graphics but it has been alone time.
I know some web design but not vary good at all.
I know people that I could ask for advice so I'd make a good go to guy.
And I can fly a ship sorta good.
Best of all I'm crazy.

Oh and if you need I can do funny voice overs. I can speak in many accents. some of them are Indian, Russian, Irish, Mexican, and a few others. Though I can't really see us needing that talent. ;p

Let me know.

I think my skills can contribute something too.

I'm a IT security consultant and I work with security vendor leaders like Check Point, Trend Micro, ISS, etc...

I'm also beta tester for some open source projects like Fedora Core and Mozilla so I have some experience in tracking bugs and help developers focus and coding.

So i can help perhaps with the backstage of vendetta.

Lets see if devs can coment on this.

Also I will post here a suggestion.
In order to help track down bugs and repair them more quickly, quicly determinine duplicate posts of bugs, etc... I guess Guild should put a server up with bugzilla (the best developer tool around to fix things, receive suggestions, assign ppl to trouble tickets, etc.)

I really think devs should look into bugzilla.
http://www.bugzilla.org/

Moriel
IDF

Yes, you're just dreaming again.

This is a great idea, nuthou5e, and I tend to agree with your premise. I often find myself wondering how many good ideas have been lost in these forums because the devs never got the chance to see them.

However, I am not so sure about your solution. I'm definitely interested and I want to know more, but here are a few potential problems I see.

1) If said committee was formed, how can you be sure that you would have the dev's ear? For a while Sarah (who is married to one of the devs) was our "demi-dev" who spent a lot of time in the forums, and she definitely had the dev's attention.

2) What would we as players have to gain from submitting our ideas to a committee to either be accepted or rejected? I see patient types who are more likely to come up with good suggestions doing this, but I don't see one-sentence posters doing this. Why not simply advance our ideas in open forum?

I like the idea of forming a group to come up with group projects... but that is kind of the idea behind the "community projects" forum, I think. You have a good idea, but one that would be pretty hard to fairly implement imo.

At any rate, let me know how I can help out. I minored in Film as an undergrad, so I know a decent amount about different kinds of shots, pacing, composition, and visual storytelling.

I would also like to think I'm a fairly decent writer, but I've never tried taking a crack at Vendetta, and I know there are some on these boards who are better *cough*Celebrim*cough*.

Who are you organizing? The devs don't want publicity because their game isn't done, and they've stated that they are going to hire one or two new members. That basically covers everything the community could possibly do.

What Guild needs from us is to be as newb friendly as possible, so that the trickle of people finding the game stay in the game until the unspecified point in the future when it's done enough to start really advertising.

I second Tosheeba's Bugzilla idea. Bugzilla would be a nice place to organize the bug and feature requests that are posted on the forum. It would be nice if a few people would look through the suggestions and bugs and summarize the good/important ones that the majority of players agree upon onto the Bugzilla site. The devs would have an easy place to check for things, and update progress on rather than look for some thread in the forum.

While I agree that this can streamline a process that's more or less already in place in the forum, the core fact remains that there are only 3 people working on code and content, and it's not going to make a really significant impact on things like patch turnaround time or content completion. The only real way to get more done in less time is more developers, and there are only 2 solutions: Hire people, or go open source. The latter would open up a whole new can of worms and is probably completely out of the question.

What the community CAN do is help offload other mundane tasks from the devs. We already do a good job at suggestions and bugs. It could be extended to: Web Design, Wiki Maintainence, Trailers, Music, Concept Art, and more. Conversely, I can appreciate the devs keeping everything in house, as having that control factor is nice.

My idea was to organize all of the creativity and skill. Right now all of the projects are very individualized. Closer collaboration between people with similar skills that are listed below. This would involve different areas that tkjode touched on:

-Trailers (http://vendetta.crawl-forever.com/ is a good posting site for this)
-Music
-Wiki (this is already an active collaborative project that needs to be supported by the community better)
-Graphic Art
-Game Content
-Web Design and Content
-Board Monitoring (to help consolidate the repetition, find new ideas, and have knowledge of the board history)
-Code Assistance (when requested)

I want to make this clear, nothing would be done to supercede Guild Software, this just would be a method for us to talk to each other and use something besides this forum to communicate with each other about areas where there is willingness to cooperate with each other.

The bugzilla idea as I understand it, would be completely up to the Devs. They have a bug reporter that I assume works well enough for them and any code outsourcing would be entirely up to them. I am unfamilar with this sort of thing.

This isn't about influence and power. It is about turning quantity into quality which requires a lot of time and effort. It is about combining talents. I think there are people here that are willing to help.

I very much appreciate the idea, and I do have plans for areas of the game to which the users will be able to contribute. Some people on IRC have heard about our Universal Information Database plans (an in-game database of relevant data), and I've hoped that that could be populated by users in a Wiki fashion (moderated, and edited to make sure the information remained in an in-character in-game context).

I've also talked to a few people about generating in-game events and role-playing and such, which is something I really want to encourage.

So, I welcome this kind of organization, but it may be a little while before I have some applicable tasks that you guys can work on. I have a whole lot of ideas of things you could contribute and ways to go about it.. but it all requires development time to construct administrative frameworks and blah blah. And, at the moment, I really need to get our design for the next year nailed down. So, let me just say "cool!" and get back to you on this in a few weeks.

Thanks Incarnate,

Believe me that taking into advantage our will to contribute really means a lot to us.

And the idea of one day players can contribute to at least part of the role play backstory of the game is just awsome.

Keep up the good work and not not hesitate to ask for help.
Moriel

Let us know inc I know I for one would love to help in any way.

/me starts to think maybe he should not have said any way..... 8-0

I just started playing the game today and am pleasantly surprised at how mature the community is (for the most part).

I'll list my skills, which perhaps can be of some help.

I am a Web Developer (not designer, you nut!).

I work mostly with PHP/mySQL, with about 3 years of fairly strong knowledge of the language itself. mySQL is something I know just enough about to be dangerous.

In the meantime, let's have a ship design contest, for the fun of it. I'll post a separate message proposing some ground rules.