However, as I understood it, you were also suggesting hiring external help for specific ingame tasks as well? This part I struggle to see how it would work, if that was what you are suggesting? I have a hard time coming up with anything that you could hire an outsider with no knowledge of the game or its code to work on. And without it causing friction within the wiz community, and potentially undermining the chance of getting new volunteers who work for free. But maybe I did misunderstand, and you didn’t mean that external programmers should work actual ingame stuff?
Regarding code assistants, I have no idea what that is. My own programming knowledge is fairly limited, and I have never worked professionally with programming in any way. Apart from LPC in Genesis I’ve dabbled a bit with various scripts for websites and some C# in Unity. That’s it. So, when it comes to suggestions on how to best improve the Genesis coding environment, I am not really the person to talk to. Tapakah, the Arch of Code, would be the best person to reach out to regarding that. So, I can’t even comment on your suggestions about creating some sort of code assistant thing, since I don’t know what it is
Anyway, let’s say we disregard all of my concerns regarding external programming help, and we decide that we can hire people for basically any task, I still think the money is better spent on ads. To begin with, a few hundred dollars a month won’t get you far when it comes to hiring programmers, so we’d have to save up for quite some time in order to hire any decent programmer for anything, and that means spending less, or nothing at all, on ads, which would be sad now that we are seeing promising results.
Secondly, I don’t think the game has an immediate need of anything in particular. If we stopped developing Genesis today, I think it’s good enough as it is, and that a lot of new and old players will have a lot of fun with it for many years to come. I think what the game needs most of all is players, and I think the game is more than good enough to keep a small percentage of the new players as well. And we know this for a fact, because many of the “Chrome generation” of young players have become prominent members of our community by now, so we do know that we can attract new players that will stick around. We don’t need massive changes to the game in order to get people to stay, so I think it’s much better to use our money on attracting more players than on any sort of development.
I mean, for the first time in a long time, we have a positive trend when it comes to player numbers. I know some think that none of these new players will last, but like I mentioned above, we already know some new players do stay for many years. All we need to do now is to continue running ads and the playerbase will slowly increase. The only reason I can see to use money for something else would be if we knew it would bring in, or make us keep, more players than the ads currently do.