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Originally Posted by Kal
Another reason for the NDA is so that all the code belongs to jolt
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I think this is the crux of the issue, and where the open source issue sort of falls dead, assuming by open source Phil M means actual open source, released under GPL 2 or something.
You're asking Jolt to support, as a company, something that allows people to walk along, say "hey, neat game", set up a server, load on the open source code and start what's basically Planetarion. I know Awake mentioned this, but really .... I know there are clones, and some have gone their own way, but it's still a bit of an issue..
If you don't mean open source, but more that people can contribute code to the game, then Jolt are asking you to sign an NDA so you can't say "hey, you've done something that's made me cross, I don't want you using my code any more". It's a legal thing.
Also, you still need to decide the features going into the game - there's no use 3 people coding their own versions of the research tree and then aruging about which one is better.
And who's in charge of bug fixing it all?
Finally, too much change is arguably as bad as none at all. Planetarion, despite the changes since say Round 4, doesn't change a large amount round on round. We usually have something every round or two that's a bit different, and lots of minor changes (and all the arguments about alliance rules, buddy packs, etc), but we don't recode the whole system each round and change everything. That just confuses people and makes them less likely to play. Whilst say the top players can cope, many don't want to have to spend 5 hours talking to people and reading the forums and another 10 in the beta to understand the game before they start playing. If they know that they can go off and come back after a couple of rounds off working or on holiday and still have roughly the same game, they're more likely to play than if they have to re-learn the whole game from scratch.