[crossfire] Organizing efforts, was Re: Project: New Intro

[Alex Schultz]

Mark Wedel wrote:
> Having project leaders before the project is worked on/voted on makes sense. 
> And as I think about it more, it would generally be good to have the detailed 
> project plan before voting, so people actually know what they are voting on. 
> OTOH, writing up project plans for all the potential things to do is a daunting 
> task.  The flip side is that if someone is willing to rite up the plan, there 
> is probably at least one person willing to work on the problem.
>   
Well, I would say perhaps not the full detailed plan, but at least some
sort of outline of what would need to be done. I wouldn't want this
requirement to make the process too much effort really.

> I'd expect in most cases the vote to be pretty clear cut.  I think each vote 
> would have to be limited to the top 5 (or so) most important projects, which is 
> probably decided by the person running the vote (but once again, I think the 
> seasoned developers would have a pretty good idea).  Certainly anything that has 
> a dependency on it should almost always be on that list.  And certainly opinions 
> could be solicited for what should be on the voting list.
>
> As stated in my original message:  The reason that only the developers vote on 
> the next project to work on is because it is the developers doing the work.  The 
> testers are important, but for the most part, they are not going to help get the 
> project get done.  Likewise for the players.  A big concern I have is that if it 
> is opened up to non developers, we'll get a vote that basically none of the 
> developers (or too few to for meaningful team) agree with.  So the players say 
> 'foo should be done first', and developers say 'I could care less about foo'. 
> End result, foo is never done, and this system fails completely - if the vote 
> has no meaning, why do a vote?
>   
Well, so far as I can see, two valid concerns have come up on both sides
of this:
1) Only developers vote and the interests of what makes the game fun and
what players want is lost
2) Both developers and players vote and that tips the scale to a project
that developers are highly disinterested in and thus little gets done
about the 'chosen' project

Because of these issues, I don't believe we can simply have just
developers, or just developers and players as the voting pools. The way
I believe this could be solved to satisfy both concerns would be by
making this "Top 5" list to vote on, heavily influenced by polling
players about what interests them of the larger list of projects. This
way, what players are interested in will be remembered and will
influence the process, but the selected project will not end up being
one that will disenchant developers.

>   And last point:  For quite some time, the mode of operation has been long and 
> varied discussion about all sorts of points, with developers going off working 
> on what they want to work on.  The end result of that is very few of the 
> 'important' projects on the TODO list get done.  so I would hardly say the 
> current method is working especially well.
Agreed. :)


Alex Schultz