2 hours ago, doughphunghus said:I would love it if they incorporated the original authors name/handle into the POI name.
An optional "Author" element in the POI's XML would be my choice. The game could, show that in small print in the Danger Meter or maybe instead when the POI's name is briefly displayed in larger letters. I wouldn't normally desire that, but for POI makers a little recognition is typically the only reward possible.
Related to the original topic, POI files are all open and freely traded between people in terms of the technologies involved. Assuming we could put a price on them, piracy would reign and I'd have to reconsider donating them to efforts such as the CompoPack.
2 hours ago, doughphunghus said:And it might also fill the need for "just more content" or maybe they could specify: "we are needing 25 more tier 4 POis, 15 tier 5" and let the community craft for a month and who knows, maybe some are good/fun/creative enough for the base game.
Perhaps. I don't want to derail the conversation from the original subject. To TFP's process, community work might be more work than doing it themselves. What I mean is I'm pretty sure TFP has an internal review system where their efforts standup to intra-team critique. They make each other better with their ideas. They also have design goals and approaches that sometimes leak out, such as the A21 developer streams where they talked about room design.
The result from a community effort would be they might get some contributed POIs that were maybe 50% of what they want, have no way to do the intra-team critique, and would have had to write and distribute their design goals, which probably involve a healthy amount of verbal discussion from team meetings and weren't otherwise captured. Then there's all the time they'd have to spend sifting through the contributions just to find the few they might use.
To me, the only viable thing they could probably do is pick a dozen community designers who each have a number of POIs available and pick one POI from each. Have a conversation between a member of the TFP team and the designers to capture what the community designer hoped to accomplish, and then have the TFP person bring it up to snuff. While this would be a neat gesture to the community, it doesn't solve your goal of getting more Tier 4 and 5 POIs.