Greetings all. Does the Genesis team offer coding opportunities / competitions so that the community can contribute to the development of Genesis in limited ways? Reason I asked is that one of the wizards pointed out that they need volunteers to help develop the game. As such I was wondering if a TopCoder or Freelancer model might help.

Specifically, say you wanted something like a module implemented. Maybe you could throw it out there (here) with clear guidelines and see if people will contribute code to that module. We would not have to be wizards to do this but if it is successful it could seriously improve the volume of work covered by the wizards.

PS: you could even throw it out to the web in general. Just include careful guidelines so that you get what you ask for (nothing more and nothing less).

Well, yes and no. Sometimes we ask players to help out with descriptions and things like that in the game, and sometimes for small rewards. For example we had a competition to write the quest orbs in the game, and one for website content, and stuff like that, and the players who contributed got in-game rewards.

I do not think we've done that so for actual programming though, as it's a hard thing to "outsource" since the programmer really need to understand how Genesis works and how the very niche LPC programming language works as well.

We always welcome players to apply to become wizards though, and you can still remain a player in the game if you want as well.

Noted. Thanks for the info.