Volunteer Labor?

[evdk]

Well, thinking about it a bit more I have found that I could help them write some mad scribbles of a brain damaged asylum inmate.

[nikolokolus]

Maybe that's what Obsidian should do, send out 75K madlibs that users can fill in and send back?

[Shevek]

This would lead to uneven quality and tone.

[Kaldurenik]

The gifted people or whatever you want to call them would if they are serious contact Obsidian the correct way. Other then that... Serious people will mod the game if its good. I see no point in asking on the forum even if they would be ok with people helping all you would get is lots of people that think they know but dont.

[Monte Carlo]

^ The man is correct.

 

Modders FTW. The rest of us should watch and learn.

 

And in the unlikely event that Obsidian need help from the community, I'm sure they'll ask.

[Dawn_]

@Montercarlo

 

Too bad, i am sure you could write us a terrible romance XD

[Monte Carlo]

I can write Bio romance!

 

<CHARNAME> (a modded elf with pink hair, big translucent eyes and sticky out, horizontal cosplay ears) "Hi, my name is Ez'lyh'lss The Abundant. How are you?"

 

NPC (an uber-stacked pirate with a huge red mouth, wearing a diaper) "Yo-ho-ho! I'm Rosie the pirate! I really like you! Fancy a bunk-up in my tent?"

 

<CHARNAME> Sure, we can talk about lurve and children later. Have you seen my house and phantasy phurniture?

 

:: Cutscene of eye-watering excruciating pixellated sex ::

[Pipyui]

I can write Bio romance!

 

<CHARNAME> (a modded elf with pink hair, big translucent eyes and sticky out, horizontal cosplay ears) "Hi, my name is Ez'lyh'lss The Abundant. How are you?"

 

NPC (an uber-stacked pirate with a huge red mouth, wearing a diaper) "Yo-ho-ho! I'm Rosie the pirate! I really like you! Fancy a bunk-up in my tent?"

 

<CHARNAME> Sure, we can talk about lurve and children later. Have you seen my house and phantasy phurniture?

 

:: Cutscene of eye-watering excruciating pixellated sex ::

 

The blood won't stop flowing from my eyes! It's flowing other places too, but let's not talk about that.

[JohanKris]

DEAR GAWD NO! Keep the general public the hell AWAY from this game as much as possible. Obsidian know what they are doing, AND this is one of the smallest budget game they have worked on (if you look at the dev costs of say NWN2 or KotORII). There is nothing at all to be worried about. And "fans" helping would be a terrible terrible idea.

 

I don't know Jeasun. I think they could benefit from free cleaning, massage and commuting.

[YourVoiceisAmbrosia]

We don't really know a whole lot about the major lore and themes of Project Eternity, aside from some snippets. If this were to happen, a considerable amount of time and resources would need to be dedicated to editing in order for it to fit. And I don't know about you, but I've witnessed the horrible depths that fan fiction can stoop to.

[Jaesun]

DEAR GAWD NO! Keep the general public the hell AWAY from this game as much as possible. Obsidian know what they are doing, AND this is one of the smallest budget game they have worked on (if you look at the dev costs of say NWN2 or KotORII). There is nothing at all to be worried about. And "fans" helping would be a terrible terrible idea.

 

I don't know Jeasun. I think they could benefit from free cleaning, massage and commuting.

 

[Osvir]

Hahah I remember them stating that they don't use other people's ideas, that sometimes people are on the same page as them or something someone says 'inspires' certain things etc

 

grain of salt of course.

 

It's all simple really, let's say you have a great idea and you present some of the information to me (or it is all information that you got, you just pretend that its some of it), I agree with you "That's really cool! What about this, and this and this?". By giving feedback I set in motion more chains of thoughts for you, your all like "Yes yes yes! I can use this with what I intended originally!" and you create something more awesome out of it, something you wouldn't have thought of as fast as you did thanks to my feedback. 2 heads work faster than 1 (if both have open minds for effective labor, that is). Similarly you can look at it, and feel "Nah, not the direction I want to take".

 

I think that, the above example, is what the relationship between these Forums and Obsidian are.

 

1 word can set 1'000 words in motion if Obsidian would require assistance from the fans I am fairly sure that they would ask for it, but I don't think that they need it.

 

How would you (the community) feel about threads started here named "Item Descriptions" with the intent of creating resources and material for Obsidian that they could use and bend to their own will (Like a Cheap Lore-Mart Supermarket)? What does Obsidian feel about that?

Edited October 28, 2012 by Osvir

[diablo169]

We've funded the game, let Obsidian do their job now.

[Hassat Hunter]

Yup, forum discussion does help. From big things to small things like Sawyer saying "Hello World" instead of "Hello America" xD

 

As much as I hate to admit it, Team Gizka was right here. Training people to help probably takes more time than it is worth to have their help with. In this case, OE's writers can use the time to check the "volunteers" work to, I don't know, write their own descriptions. With their bigger understanding of the lore (and writing skill) they are bound to produce better results too.

 

Of course, then TG got superceded by us while they kept saying that... The help that took so long to train made a mod faster than they could. So surely there are people in the community who can help. But how to find them? Often with closed QA sessions over the web some that are 'so going to help' end up providing no feedback at all once the QA starts. I've had it. We had about 5 or 6 people to check for bugs. However 80% of the conversations was still me to the programmer and the actual QA person. The rest wasn't nearly as motivated (or didn't find as much issues). 2 of them never even submitted anything after the first 2 days, even with more builds released :/

 

Having said that... willing to help. All I have as resume is TSLRCM though...

Yay for stupid school being a pain in the arse and that then ruining much of your chances for a future :/

[Osvir]

@Hassat, where is your profile picture from I find myself recognizing it but I can't put my finger on it

 

Further, like Josh said in Update 29: Things we discuss here on the forums give insight to Obsidian (@diablo167, which can be a very big big help), things they might not have thought off or solutions they haven't managed to solve within their discussions which 100 people on the Forums discuss for 5 minutes and within it Obsidian can just pluck the good out from whatever spawns within it and works well with P:E's scope. It can be dangerous too, to be too "Fan Aware" (kind of like being "Map Aware" on League of Legends), because if you focus your eyes on that "Mini-Map" too much, you might forget where "You" are standing.

 

So many times have I been ganked/fell out of position (League of Legends metaphor/reference) because I was paying more attention to where everyone else was standing on the mini-map but I didn't pay attention to where I was. But I don't think I really need to say that

 

I've been thinking about organizing the board, saving information from what people have said and create some sort of summary of what people have written on the board and present some sort of "P:E, the Forum Version" thread just to see what kind of game we have created in our discussions and imaginations thus far.

[SophosTheWise]

I do not see how random people could write good texts for books, items and such, when I cringed EVERYTIME reading a page from a Skyrim book that was probably written by a professional game designer. Man, that was so bad I could've died out of pain while reading that stuff.

[HeedlessHorseman]

I agree that the game should use unpaid volunteer labor. Unfortunately, many people would decry what I consider to be unpaid volunteer labor as slavery.

[Hassat Hunter]

@Hassat, where is your profile picture from I find myself recognizing it but I can't put my finger on it

:Not sure if serious:

BG2, IceWind Dale. Don't recall if they appear in other IE games too.

I've been thinking about organizing the board, saving information from what people have said and create some sort of summary of what people have written on the board and present some sort of "P:E, the Forum Version" thread just to see what kind of game we have created in our discussions and imaginations thus far.

I seriously doubt you can succeed at that without creating a 500 page manuscript. Heck, some discussions like on the XP and armor already have about 30 pages of long responses and suggestions alone...

[PsychoBlonde]

 

As much as I hate to admit it, Team Gizka was right here. Training people to help probably takes more time than it is worth to have their help with. In this case, OE's writers can use the time to check the "volunteers" work to, I don't know, write their own descriptions. With their bigger understanding of the lore (and writing skill) they are bound to produce better results too.

 

Or, they could organize the effort like intelligent people do (and volunteer work groups everywhere do), and make it their first step to audition and appoint a qualified volunteer editor/manager who vets all submissions for quality before passing any worthy examples on to the actual pros for final acceptance. Granted, these efforts sometimes implode because the bag-holder gets tired and fed up, but it's not like you lose anything significant if the source of free stuff dries up. The times I've seen it done well, it was planned in advance from the perspective of "if anything valuable results, yay, if not, oh well".

 

The extra work for the editor/manager pays off for them indirectly (provided they have the free time and the drive to manage such an undertaking) because they can put in their CV when applying for paying work. I've seen people put managing MMO guilds on their CV and have it count in their favor. I know one person who got a managerial position solely on the strength of his management experience in an MMO guild.

 

It's pretty clear that none of you guys have ever had to seriously organize or manage volunteers before.

[PsychoBlonde]

I seriously doubt you can succeed at that without creating a 500 page manuscript. Heck, some discussions like on the XP and armor already have about 30 pages of long responses and suggestions alone...

 

Why would 500 pages be a disaster? I can read a 300 page book in under 3 hours. Besides, weed out the people with terrible spelling, grammar, and incoherent thoughts and you'll be down to 50 pages in no time. If it's longer than that, it means you have an unusually coherent, focused, and erudite base. So you win either way.

[jezz555]

No offense, but I'm not sure I quite trust this community to write well written blurbs/books ect. Obsidian claims to read these forums, so if they saw something they like, I'm sure they'd use it, but it seems like a bad idea to just get any old person to write text for the game, I imagine you'd just end up with a lot of ancient magical scrolls with cryptic phrases written in them like "Lolboobs" and "I'ma chargin ma lazor"

[Aedelric]

The legal complications involved probably mean they would not want to make the effort, but if they did I would like it.

 

So long as Obsidian properly evaluates the work and the work itself is only superficial, notes, books, drawings in said books, small props. Nothing major and the sole reward is a mention in the credits.

 

This all said, Eternity will be moddable and there is nothing stopping the community putting together such a project after release to flesh out the game world.

[SophosTheWise]

I seriously doubt you can succeed at that without creating a 500 page manuscript. Heck, some discussions like on the XP and armor already have about 30 pages of long responses and suggestions alone...

 

Why would 500 pages be a disaster? I can read a 300 page book in under 3 hours. Besides, weed out the people with terrible spelling, grammar, and incoherent thoughts and you'll be down to 50 pages in no time. If it's longer than that, it means you have an unusually coherent, focused, and erudite base. So you win either way.

 

I highly doubt that, because proofreading is something COMPLETELY different thing than just reading through some pages in a normal book. Also the texts must not contradict other lore-specific things. As a journalistics student, I even cringe when I have to proofread others works and those are ****ing linguistics students and not some wannabe-authors. As much fun as creating lore is, most people should just keep those things to themselves or use it in their P&P campaign. To write coherent lore, even if it's just blurbs, requires a LOT of work and knowledge about storytelling.

 

Also: proofreading would also mean a constant transfer of knowledge between volunteers and devs and I think that creates more work than it would if they simply hired professional writers for such tasks. Because this is exactly what freelance writers are there for. Why does everyone seem to think that everybody can write a good book or good text? I just cannot comprehend that.

Edited November 5, 2012 by SophosTheWise

[rjshae]

No offense, but I'm not sure I quite trust this community to write well written blurbs/books ect. Obsidian claims to read these forums, so if they saw something they like, I'm sure they'd use it, but it seems like a bad idea to just get any old person to write text for the game, I imagine you'd just end up with a lot of ancient magical scrolls with cryptic phrases written in them like "Lolboobs" and "I'ma chargin ma lazor"

"Lolboobs" was, of course, a reference to her royal highness, the good Queen Lolboobs, who insisted that her +5 chainmail bikini armor of eye searing be forever preserved for posterity. Sadly, the much prized armor has since become lost. But work continues on a suitable simulator to render said suit with proper jiggle physics. I feel certain her highness would be proud.

 

Feeling particularly silly today for some reason... must be from sniffing the political sewage.

[Monte Carlo]

It's pretty clear that none of you guys have ever had to seriously organize or manage volunteers before.

 

If you threaten them with machineguns you can get volunteers to do anything: walk through minefields, for example. Or even, if you are feeling especially brutal, play DA2.