A Land Far Away

This conversation is meant for NWN2 building teams. I would ask that others please refrain from comment because this is potentially a touchy subject and I'd rather the main interests tie their own rope, so to speak. We'll have the discussion moved to private fora if necessary.

Right now we have servers in development that have essentially been promised live slots. How long do we wait for a server team to get done enough to be live? A team holding on to a slot and being in perma-beta is simply not acceptable. It is in the interests of the community as a whole that if a team cannot or will not get their server out in a timely fashion, then another that can take their place.

So the main question is what teams would consider a fair and reasonable way to decide when to pull the plug on a team and make way for someone else. I want to have some policy in hand now so expectations are clear and it doesn't look like any one team is being singled out. Thank you for your input.

Each team should have a regularly scheduled build status meeting. I would recommend at the very least once a month, but ideally biweekly. Chat logs should be kept.

Summaries of the build status (a brief 2 - 3 line report) should be placed somewhere for Admins to view on a monthly basis. These should be reviewed by the Admin regularly.

If 6 months have passed without a build status meeting, I would say it is time to give up the slot. I would make that a hard and fast rule, IMHO.

Off the top of my head... Dec. 31, 2007 seems like a good timeline for the initial batch of servers. That is if we do a timeline, personally I think we should look at each situation individually, for each server team. Perhaps make the timeline for reaching Beta3 status, which is feature complete and bug testing. I'm hesitant to pull the plug on any team that is working on a proposal and think we should use this as a last resort if a team completely falls apart.

The absolute cutoff? 1 month beyond ALFA's targetted live date, assuming another server is in a position to replace it.

Perhaps by gauging progress at the "half way" point, you can also make pre-emptive adjustments to teams or slots. It should be plainly obvious which servers are in a position to get to live and which ones are not if you have something to physically review. You can tell how much has been done and how much yet remains. If the work that remains is considerably more than the work that's been achieved at the midpoint, it would be reasonable to forecast that that server won't be ready in time.

Obviously, you'd have to review all servers and it would need to be handled on a case by case basis.

How about a base mod, Fluff? Then we can truly get to work or are we supposed to just wing it for now? Nothing concrete has been said. We get the tools to do our job and Im sure we can be Live within 6-8 months. Probably less.

That factors into the timeline and ultimately the LIVE date. The question as I understand it is how long beyond the LIVE date (basemod +3? +6?) should server teams be given to get their server up.

I really hate to slam the door on people though, especially with how long it takes to toolset things. Instead of removing a server or whatever, what about simply switching places for a slowly built server with an expansion server. Hope I worded that properly, not sure if it makes sense. There should probably be some sort of hard cap, but I'd rather swap in a quickly built expansion server than to completely deny any approved mod within the first year of NWN2 gold. Like I posted earlier though, I really think it will come down to individual decisions per server team, as opposed to some blanket rule.

I agree Heegz. It should be a swap Live <-> Expansion, unless the team itself has dissolved or withdrawn voluntarily. It remains to be see if this will even manifest as a problem but it'd certainly be fairest to set the ground rules for such a decision well in advance.

I think we will be lucky to have a full set of servers that are ready to go live within a couple of months of each other. I'm guessing we'd probably do well to get 3-4 out initially, and then just add the rest one at a time as they test out of Beta3. Once we see the player density or whatever start to drop we can hold off on more servers as needed. Optionally, we currently have campaign servers. If the Live servers are full, we could even put the expansion servers up as campaign servers if they are ready before they actually get approved. Anyways, starting to ramble here.

As somebody who has built, populated, scripted, blah, blah, blah, a server from the ground up, it takes time. A lot of time. It took me a year. The first 6 months I was on my own. Then I took a break of about a month or so. Then Barendd stepped in and helped me with the 3000+ named NPCs, the city of Teziir and some dungeons and cave stuff. We went live in August of '04, I think. I started building in May-June of '03, two or so months after live. The Westgate server was a big server though.

The toolset is now much harder to use, but much more powerful. The level of detail one can achieve far surpasses NWN. But, it appears most teams will have more than one builder, not all but most. I'd give teams no less than 6 months after the base mod is ready to have their core area live. Remember, we don't have to build an entire server to be live. A core area with decent enough static content and DM attention should do just nicely.

So, 6 months after the base mod is released/ready.

As an expansion server proposal my words should obviously be taken as someone who wants to make live

I see the need to define a strict date, I'd be apt to give builders the benefit of the doubt and say more like 8 months from base mod, if 6 months is what everyoen agrees to then I'd be fine with that also.

Now posing a question simply, because my Myth drannor team is shaping up very well. What if an expansion server gets finished or ready for live before a 1st round server. I take it we just wait and put the polish on our server even more? I'm fine with that as that's the role we will be playing, I'm just curious what peoples opinions are on when an expansion server should be allowed to go live, even if a '1st round' server or two have stagnated but are not completely dead.

I'd like to have something small (the city + a few adventure locals) live at about Base Mod+6 months.

On the matter of pulling the plug on other servers that aren't delivering what they promise, well I'm with HEEGZ. Give them 12 months, and move them from live to expansion. Or do it earlier if they request such themselves.

Base mod + 6-8 months seems reasonable, at which point a live/expansion slot can be swapped out.
Like Inaub said...a server takes a heck of a lot of time to create, though we are lucky in that this time around we have a base mod to start with.

Don

I'm going to violate your rules now fluff, lol authority

But just to say that, there's no reason why you guys need to wait for a base mod. You can just export all your areas and import them into it when it's done. Just physically build now, don't add scripts or items or whatnot, save that for when you have the base mod. That way you don't waste time waiting for it, and the final product is exactly the same.

Danubus wrote:How about a base mod, Fluff? Then we can truly get to work or are we supposed to just wing it for now? Nothing concrete has been said. We get the tools to do our job and Im sure we can be Live within 6-8 months. Probably less.

There won't be a base "mod". The Alfa Base Resources (ABR) are currently contained in a campaign, as listed in the Base Mod (I need to change the name, I know) content forum. This may change if OE adds proper hak support in the future, but it may not.

The ABR will expand and be added to as people contribute to it. If anyone needs something which is holding up their server, they should let me know, and I'll try to get it out ASAP. Since Rusty and Spider went offline there are only a few of people helping, so we cannot be everywhere at once. Thats why I posted directions for build teams to contribute resources themselves. The idea is that if a team needs something, they make it, and contribute this resources to the rest of ALFA so no one else has to duplicate their work. Have people actually been doing nothing waiting for a base mod? I had no idea No one said anything to me about it.