[Zengez]

Well, here's another problem however,

In order to have access to the code we need to meet these 'quality controls' and make sure we're not retarded... ok fair enough, but here's the thing... many of us don't want to go through the long process of 'proving' ourselves and for many of us we do this kinda thing in our spare time with our busy scheduals, so we just don't bother trying to get in the group even though we might be useful...

Still, you can't just let anyone who thinks they're useful mangle the database, so what do you do?

I'd say release a mangled database with everything you have right now in it. Not just the 'fixed' code and the 'perfect spawns' and the 'complete expansions' just release everything. Let the spawns be wrong, in the wrong spots, patrolling wrong, have the wrong stats/no loot/no faction or whatever. Then, people will get it and we'll each gravitate to the zones we hunted in the most, and note the problems. Those of us that know something will fix them and (hopefully) post a thing in the forums about it. That was the PEQ team can skim the forums time to time and pull out the actual intelligent fixes that other people did in their spare time, and ignore the post about inserting cazic thule into ecommons because 'it'd be fun!'. And that way everything gets done much much much faster and PEQ team still controls what goes into the 'official' database and re-releases that periodically with 'fixed' content zone by zone, and the rest of us can play the fixed content + mangled extra zones with the knowledge that said extra zones aren't going to be correct, just rough approximations. I know I'd be fine with that, and it'd give me something to work with instead of wishing i had tools to spawn zones and then finding out that they are already spawned when i'm half way through.

This isn't a rant, it's just frustrating because it's the exact same thing i've been saying since i joined the project some 2+ years ago, you want to control the official database from the newbins, fine, but give us something to work with so we can do exactly that, work with it. if you give us nothing then say prove yourself by finding minute flaws in the zones we've never even been in and/or code in the emu itself, you lose alot of people that might be good at database work that just simply didn't play those certain zones in eq.

Moreover this would still be the same singular database, just make every new release include the fixed zones and the unfixed zones and slowly but surely the unfixed zones will become fixed and we'll have everything up to par.

Also, I'm a tad confused by the afore mentioned 'we have everything we need' to 'we'll update the tools to read the logs when we have enough logs' to 'even our tools don't work' .... do you have everything litterally poped and you just drop those zones for the releases? or do you only have the logs to pop things and you're not making the converter for.... some unknown reason?

Anyways, thats that, for whatever it will accomplish, I'm losing interest in doing database work as I can't seem to get any support to do anything I'm capable of, perhaps I'll just leach like everyone else and play off other people's hard work and let them do everything rather than helping out :(

EDIT::

Having a pretty craptacular day so i think that came off a little more pissy than i meant it, sorry, but I stand by what I said in the terms of theory and practice and what I think would help the situation.