When Rhialto made wizards responsible for handling promotions, he made a point to say that we were allowed to promote artists/programmers without requiring them to make an area. He also made reference to this in the quest an area guidelines as you can see below:
Quote:
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(Note: if you're a good programmer or artist, you can become a Wizard without making an area. Instead, Rhialto will give you a project to complete.)
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http://web.archive.org/web/201011201...idelines#great
Granted, there are still places on the website that say programmers have to make an area first (like in the wizard FAQ) and while we did promote artists without requiring them to make an area we never were able to do so for a programmer. However, the game was intended to be able to mostly address your concern in its current form (I say mostly because they wouldn't have very much access to fix game bugs, but they could free up time for those that would by doing other work and they could be given buggy content to redo from time to time). The problem is that when Rhialto stopped actively working on the game, Teshuvah and I were the ones who primarily stuck around to deal with things and we were not coders. So, although I have always very much wanted to be able to promote people based on their specific skill sets as I too have seen the pitfalls of trying to make programmers create maps first, we were not qualified to judge people based on the code they submitted to us. What we needed was a high ranking programmer willing and able to give people a yay or nay based on coding examples and assigned work that people submitted. That person then needed to be willing and able to keep on top of them and guide them in the work they did as wizards.
Of course, we have had high ranking programmers in Rhialto's absence; specially Legolas, Raeden, and Contrare. However, Legolas ended up retiring a little bit later, Raeden didn't stick around long after Legolas left, and Contrare was unwilling to judge people based on their code as he didn't feel like he could properly gauge where they were at. However, Contrare is an extremely talented programmer who was able to do a lot of the work that Rhialto normally would have done, including fixing the a ton of long standing bugs (some of which had previously proved vexing for Rhialto). So the game was able to make a tremendous push forward before being taken down and could have continued to progress greatly had Rhialto worked out the server issues that not only made it difficult for us to handle very many people playing consecutively, but also led to our current situation.