I have not yet finished a complete board yet, but I have played around with the designer quite a bit. One thing I realized pretty quickly was the immense time it can take to finish up a board that has a lot of borders. (Kudos to all the great board designers out there!)

The first thought that came to my mind is why not to crowd-source specific tasks like border-drawing? I could even imagine whole maps being created in a collaboration between players.

Me personally, if one of the board designers asked me to help them out drawing a few borders for them, I would gladly help them (Given I am interested in the board, of course). After all we are looking at at least a few hours for the board designer compared to merely a few minutes in-between games for a handful of players. I think that is a small price to pay for being able to play on that board from then on.

Currently WarGear has no payment for boards. I always liked warfish's concept of rewarding board designers for their work. Until this is implemented (if planned), social board creation could be a great way to fill in the blank.

There are a two more advantages beyond the aforementioned that I can think of: (a) Mistakes (or rather oversights) in the board's design are found in the designing stage already, limiting the number of test games. (b) players who have assisted in the board's creation already have a relationship with the board.

Is anybody else interested in this idea?

My guess is most map makers already have a few ideas they want to work on that they are trying to find time for, so they don't want to work on other shared boards.

Occasionally you do see boards released from a team effort, but I think it has always been 2 people at most.  I think you would have better luck finding a partner to team up with.  Normally this is something I would be interested in doing, but I just don't think I have the time now to commit to anything.  Maybe in a few months I would be interested if you still want to at that time.

The next best thing to having a partner is to have some dedicated testers.  Depending on the board and your experience you may need many test games to get the sort of play out of the board you are looking for.   Finding 1,2 or 3 people that are willing to play several dev games and give you feedback is invaluable.

Also, depending on the board sometimes I can help with tedious tasks.  If you need to add 100s of something, and they are well defined, I can maybe write a python script to do it.  I don't mind spending 30m of my time to save you a few hours of tedium if we get a good board out of it.

On occasion, I get periods of time where I'm really bored, and a nice tedious border creating party fills the time well.  I think if you posted a really specific task, or a list of tasks that might need to be done, someone would bite sooner or later... maybe.  And your board would likely get done... eventually. 

Mostly however I gotta +1 ozy on this one.

Actually, I wasn't so much speaking in my own interest here. This post was not about me looking for help with the busy work. I'll sit down and do the work or write a script when it comes to that. 

I was just wondering if someone else felt the need for such a feature. Granted, the crowd sourcing of border creation is maybe a bit too far fetched. But I could imagine the ability to share ownership of a board with a select partner or partners - just like co-authoring a document in Google Docs - may be greatly appreciated. 

Another, less drastic variant would be to allow other players to create scenarios for a given board. Warfish had that feature, but if WarGear allows it I am unaware of it. I was in this situation recently where I had a few ideas for an alternative scenario to Snoochie Boochie's wonderful Metroid Board. Snoochie was so kind to implement my suggestions in an alternative scenario, but I had preferred not having to bother him with the extra work. 

poq wrote:

I'll sit down and do the work or write a script when it comes to that. 

If you are serious about scripting some stuff, PM me.  I have a lot of python functions written that can make this go much quicker.

Another, less drastic variant would be to allow other players to create scenarios for a given board. Warfish had that feature, but if WarGear allows it I am unaware of it. I was in this situation recently where I had a few ideas for an alternative scenario to Snoochie Boochie's wonderful Metroid Board. Snoochie was so kind to implement my suggestions in an alternative scenario, but I had preferred not having to bother him with the extra work. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this.  I like having control over my boards.  if someone wants to implement a scenario & I think it's a good idea, I'd be happy to do it or work with them to get it done.   You can always email the XML and image files to let someone else do a scenario on your board.  It's not quite as simple, but it should only take about 5 minutes on the part of the map maker, and it leaves the control in their hands.

Maybe a compromise would be to allow anyone to download the XML & images from a live board. Then someone else could setup their own 'scenario' if they wanted (although I assume it would have to stay private), or if the original mapmaker agrees they could email it to the creator and have it added as an official scenario.

I really like the idea of other people being able to create scenarios for maps.  I know that Cram used to do that on ToS a lot and we had a ton of fun with it.  I made a few for other people too, but the thing that Cram and I always did was ask for permission from the originator before we did.
I would love to see this as a feature here, but I would really like Designer Permission first and not just a bold "allow scenario from other designers" thing, but allow individual access.  There are some maps on this site that I really respect the design but hate the gameplay because it's boring or could be better and I'd like to make a "Risky Scenario" for them.

if they're any of mine, feel free to make a DEV board with the update, when it's done i'll add it as a scenario.

I'm assuming you can get to another player's designer page to download the graphics and the .xml to import into your own version?

EDIT: hmmm i thought there was a blue arrow linking to the designer page from the boards about section. did that get removed? and looking at the designer itself, there's no spot for exporting .xml from the designer (seems you have to do it from the right-click option on your boards page...). that could also be remedied (i'd think).

in conclusion and recommendation:
put a link to board's design page from the about page &
add the .xml import/export to the designer page (prolly below the graphics up/download).

A quick off-topic because I have been wondering: I've seen people refer to 'ToS' a couple of times now on this forum. Am I right in assuming that it's an affectionate Star Trek-themed pet name for warfish? Or is it a reference to the original board game?

Back to the original conversation: I am envisioning a rights-based system (again, a la Google Docs) where the board creator can choose who is allowed to co-author the board, and who is allowed to create a scenario. 

For example board author A chooses to work on boards a and b on his own, while cooperating on board c with another board author B. He wants full control over board a, but choose to allow three other members he knows to be allowed to create scenarios for board b. On board c, however, Authors A and B decide they want to see what the community comes up with, so they allow everyone to create scenarios.

This rights management framework would also lay the groundwork for a board payment system if it ever were desired.

poq wrote:

A quick off-topic because I have been wondering: I've seen people refer to 'ToS' a couple of times now on this forum. Am I right in assuming that it's an affectionate Star Trek-themed pet name for warfish? Or is it a reference to the original board game?