Measuring Influence: Contribution Points
The Influence immortal statistic can be recovered by use of objects the immortal has authored, but we currently only have a loose idea of how to measure a given person's contribution to any given object.
The theory is that contributing time to making the game world better should be rewarded by additional power in the game, so here's a list of the activities which should be rewarded:
- Design of game world systems
- Implementation of those systems
- Maintenance/bugfixes on those systems
- Authoring documentation, both developer docs for the code and documentation for players
- Creating in-game content such as textures, quests, areas, organized events, etc.
- System administration tasks, setting up databases, web servers, and administering the game server itself.
- Project-manager-eey stuff (if we don't end up frustrating ours to death)
Some ideas for measuring one or more of these things:
- Hook into subversion, and doing some kind of per-line reward. This would obviously have to be not a pure one line = one point kind of thing, as we want to reward code reduction, maintenance that strips out old cruft, and keeping your code small to begin with. It's also difficult to capture pairs of contributors this way without specially-formatted commit logs or something.
- Have a database of contributors to the points that they've earned.
- Parse the wiki pages for author tags.
- Track activity in #faeriemud irc room (via Bogswiddle)
- Manually attribute points to important but hard to computationally derive contributions (Aidan kicking our arses into gear, for instance).
