3. We can try to offer the BBs our help, either by asking if they need another programmer, or continue to support them by buying supporter and encouraging others to buy it. If more people buy supporter, they will have more funds for equipment and better servers and more programmers.
I agree. I'm paying for myself and two of my friends. I don't have time or knowledge to offer programmer service, but since I have a steady job it's not that big of a problem to miss those 90 EUR/year. I know a lot of people here are going to school and don't have a lot of money, so maybe it's a bit harder for them to pay supporter year after year. However, paying only for one year or even 6 months for BBs to get an initial boost - I think almost anyone can afford that and if the game appeals to you greatly, why not support it? Afterall, we are already paying for almost anything we like/use/eat/drink...
Paying supporter is actually a big part of this, but I've got a couple websites running for quite a while and these really have a huge cost if you need top notch performance, especially if you think that they get only 4 bucks per user per month at most and also have to pay a couple programmers. BB has grown more than they expected, that seems like a fact to me, but still, even though the major problem here
could be the money, it could also be coding. I mean, the game coding hasn't evolved as quickly as the community, so this could be expected.
I can code and/or examine code performance quite well as a CS major and I'd be willing to contribute with that, but I don't know if they'd be open to having players looking at the code directly, even just at small parts of it.
So, jumping to my conclusions:
1) We'd need lots of people paying for supporter to solve these issues, and that simply isn't the best solution(still necessary if we want the game to grow into our(players) expectations)
2) Everybody must realize that BB isn't a backyard project anymore, so just whining about delays, small errors and stuff like that doesn't make any sense. If you don't want to contribute in any way, don't even bother complaining.
3) If help is what's necessary, our community has got plenty of people willing to help, all that's needed is asking and be willing to hear us :)