Moving forward

OTLand is an open-source community, and there is nothing wrong with the people who run servers and make money from that, running a server is not essentially free and takes a lot of effort. The problem is when people use free resources such as The Forgotten Server and don't give anything back to the community -- or even worse, try to sell the resources they create.

We need to start working together to move forward. I've been working on The Forgotten Server for free for over 6 years and I've never asked anyone to pay me for a copy. When I see people fork my project, add something to it and sell their additions it demotivates me from continuing to share my improvements to the engine for free.

I'm not going to be nice and expect people to understand what an open-source community is anymore, as of today, I'm closing down the Marketplace board and making it illegal to sell OpenTibia resources on OTLand. If you're in an open-source community to make money, you're at the wrong place. It is still OK to charge for hosting services, and advertising such services should be done in the Jobs forum. Advertising websites where you can buy or sell OpenTibia resources will not be tolerated.

The best way to move forward is by doing it together, and therefore it is important that we help all the newcomers with their questions in hope that they will learn and contribute to the community. The support team has done a good job with that, but there will always be room for improvement. If you cannot contribute with codes or scripts, at least contribute by helping out the newbies in the community!

To encourage developers and end-users of the OpenTibia software to contribute more, I've also closed down the private subversion in favor of an open GitHub repository. While this may result in less donations to OTLand because many were paying for a premium subscription with the intention to get private subversion access rather than supporting OTLand, I will do my best to keep OTLand ad free.

Watch and fork The Forgotten Server at GitHub! If you have made any changes that you feel should be in the official repository, create a pull request.

 

[Itutorial]

if you can write code of any sufficient quality that it would be a hit if you released it for free.
then you are good enough of a programmer to be employed irl and make enough money to move on from whatever this scene is/was.

you want someone making 120,000USD/y to spent 48 hours writing some sick mechanics/function for you for free and then call them the problem when they won't

views aren't currency, this isn't 2002 myspace anymore
we aren't 15 year old kids anymore, your status doesn't mean shit

the leeches who want free shit have always skirted around this sort of stuff
you dont wanna pay? find the dude who is leaking paid resources, pirate it, its an ecosystem, welcome to reality

everything i have released is now out-dated and broken
i have zero incentive to make it work with the latest commit of TFS, the ROI is zero
if it was selling for a couple dollars, theres an incentive to put in the incremental work every few months to keep it working
sure the ROI is still neglible, but its an undeniable incentive

building 1 thing that sells for $1 isn't a very good incentive
building 100 things that sells for $1
now thats a reason to spend time writing code instead of writing paragraphs of meaningless opinion

I guess it depends how much TFS helped you in becoming a S/E. Some people probably owe a lot to this little community and will never pay it back.

 

[Kuzyn]

Nah guys, the perspective on people not helping enough exists only because tibia is old enough to remember times when everything was free and had a lot of active people. Right now times changed forever and community isn't large enough to have multiple people coding complex shit for fun for free.

Worst of all i hate when someone forces it upon you and thinks you're the problem meanwhile they just share some random paint sprites thinking they help. Most of people doing stuff for money also shared the most for the community.
Look at Oen: custom upgrade system, teleports, cursed chests, minor otc changes, mostly helping if you ask nicely on discord, and definitely helping on otland.

Im relatively new to coding but still with oskar we literally made zone system, i uploaded radio module, he uploaded his store module for free and various learning materials if you looked closely on discord.

We can afford sharing some code because we are constantly coding and not everything is meant to be monetized. Also we who sell the code also help on otland with random questions.

Times changed, code is still shared, community is smaller thats why it seems like everyone only sells stuff, but thats not true we are all here building this community.

Seems like people cant get over the fact that community shrinked a lot. And wild assumption, I guess that more than 80% of users are not teenagers living with their parents anymore.

I never understood that Otland's decision to keep everything here only open source and get rid of any paid elements. We're talking about a game that turns 30 in 2 years. You can't rely on good will for so many years, especially that there are multiple other "modding" communities for other multiplayer games which often have paid mods if they are high quality. What would be the motivation for skilled programmers/artists to provide a lot of free content for 28 years old game?

Ofc it doesnt mean that if Otland would allow some kind of marketplace, then it would be over for open source resources. Like you've said, it's quite often that if someone makes money on their hobby, then they are capable of providing some extra things for free for fun basically or just as a results of some testing other fields etc.