Does anyone have any experience hiring developers? How quickly could the average developer with generic skills in the required areas get up to speed enough to fix various things that often seem to get less attention like pet battles, achievements, holiday events, etc?
There are all kinds of sites where you can hire developers these days and I just wonder, would it potentially bring in more developers to the project, potentially create other problems, or ultimately be too expensive to accomplish anything meaningful?
I used to have a lot more free time to play WoW, used to play on retail and emulator projects at the same time. I now tend to play much less and on some private servers where I can just spend money to more quickly get in game stuff with less effort. But private servers often suck of casual play when pet battles are badly broken in many areas, holiday events often don’t work, achievements often don’t work, etc.
Private servers go from expansion to expansion with almost no improvement to things other than dungeons, raids, and current expansion quests. They milk the community of money, hoard fixes for themselves, and probably provide few if any fixes back to the open source projects that they benefit from. At least that’s how it seems from a casual players perspective. I can donate large sums of money to these servers, fill out bug reports, and literally never see a single bug fixed because it’s not relevant to the most popular content.
I’d like to see the actual open source projects get much better instead of competing private servers racing to fix things separately while profiting from players.