With the dawn of the new week, a progress report for the Phoenix Initiative.
So far there have three pledges, amounting around 50% of the requested total (depending on the current XMR rate).
I pledge a 1000$.
Crichton pledges 5000 M3
I pledge 1000 S-PT (10% of Phoenix Trust).
I've sold these 1000 S-PT OTC, so change my pledge to 20 XMR for the Phoenix Iniative.
Pledge 10 xmr to the phoenix initiative.
So the pledges are:
iluvbitcoins - $1000 Paypal funds
Crichton - 5000M3 ingame
Karl Hungus - 20 XMR
boomboom - 10 XMR
I will now begin the first step of the process: looking for qualified individuals to take on the lead dev role and help establish a definite roadmap for the challenges that will be tackled, as well as a timeframe for it. Obviously not all desired solutions can be developed, so they will have to be prioritized based on importance and difficulty, to get as much done with as little effort as possible.
Among the glaring problems we have: inconsistent functionality with various bugs, dysfunctional in-game communication, inconvenient user interface (or lack thereof), stagnant economy, minimal automation and maximum tedium. Solving these would be the bulk of the development and design process, and how much can be done within the set constraints remains to be established.
Other aspects, such as marketing, documentation and monetization would be done in parallel.
Once several suitable candidates are found, I intend to recruit them for a small job to get an opinion on the current code base, and test their knowledge and ability by solving a small part of the recognized problems. For example: $150 for 3 hours of work analyzing the code and writing a brief perspective + implementing a way to automatically change the damn in-game year on Jan 1st.
Ideally, 100%+ of the sum will be pledged by the time this is required, but if things move quicker than the funding, we could start the pre-production steps with the pledgers' permission before the full sum is raised.