[tak]

Originally Posted by niclam

It's an interesting point what you just said tak.
We have thought a couple of times about having a volunteers programme, that would allow people from outside NGD to participate into the game's development.

The main problems were also what you mentioned: legal issues and copyrights. If we are going to do this, there is no way we can pay the people back, so the licensing would be restrictive as it usually is on this kind of matters.

Yes, it is too bad that legal issues make it hard to implement such exciting possibilities. I hope you will find the money to have a lawyer set up a legal waiver that makes it clear that by participating in development you agree to waive your owner rights, agree to not use content that belongs to other people etc etc. The payment is rather unproblematic IMO, for example for me it would be enough to see "my" monster or to be able to say " i designed this" (maybe a bit of Ximerin would be nice of course ) others might naturally agree or disagree.

Originally Posted by niclam

And last but not least, we need to have somebody on the team as the lead volunteer manager, that can organize and communicate with everyone to check for progress. There are a lot of procedures involved into the content pipeline that makes it difficult to add new stuff without having to worry about things like consistency, testing & QA, balance, etc.

Yes, the additional strain of sifting through (hopefully) lots of user generated content, most of it unusable, and commiting it to the regular process without having someone close by to ask about the details would have an impact on workload. I think it would be worth it overall, though.

Originally Posted by niclam

Anyway, Im sure there are plenty of people willing to participate and we will surely have them on the credits so they can show off that on their CV's.
So, maybe after launch where we can hire more personnel, we could approach this.

It would really really be great to be able to do that. Having the perspective to be able to do that, at least after launch is something that makes me happy.
I hope you find the man-time, money and consensus of your team to do it, the sooner the better of course. I put my money where my mouth is and tell you that you only need to contact me, i would be excited to have the possibility to participate in your project. I know others who are qualified who feel the same way.