Quoted from pinballslave:
That's interesting... you have an idea, I support it, and then you state financial reasons why my support doesn't hold water... Not sure why it would be several $1000s if it's just an afternoon to implement though... are Ferret/Rosh really paid so much? Anyone know where I can take a course in pinball programming?
First of all pinballslave I want to apologize if I have offended you. After reading my comment I can definitely see that you feel "backstabbed" but that was not my intention. I wanted just to point out that in my own experience offering money for a feature in software is typically futile because the actual cost of a feature is multiples higher than what people are typically willing to pay or think it costs to realize.
The reason why, I clearly didn't describe sufficiently enough. Exactly for the reason that most people think "how much can a few developer hours cost": No, I doubt that rosh or Ferret make 1000$ / hour (if you do, let me know, I'm gonna apply for a job at API today!).
The majority of cost is incurred after coding has finished. For every hour / feature coded you have to assume multiples of that for QA testing. You add documentation to that. And now, by far the larges cost is actually incurred by the support department for it and maintenance, as you have to keep maintaining this feature along with everything else as newer versions for the software go out. Paying the developer for the initial development is honestly the smallest part of that and that by a fair margin. People don't realize that, and how could they - they are not in that business - so, from the outside it certainly doesn't look that way.
EDIT ---
I didn't even mention planning of the feature yet, that takes also time. Typically done by Business Analysts or somebody wearing that hat in a smaller company is the planning of what and how the feature should work from a functional standpoint. After that a developer will take those specs and turn them into technical tasks - agile development anyone? -, while potentially going forth and back with the BA. There will be many hours spent before actually one line of code is written.
EDIT END ---
Now if you add in limited resources - nobody has an unlimited supply of developers, QA, and support people - you have to weigh every features benefits against other things you could be doing instead.
My intention with that post earlier was to point out that offering money is likely to be not fruitful in light of how software development works, and before we create the proverbial s***storm of "They got even offered money and are not willing to do it".
The longer I thought about my request the more I realized that it probably is not going to be done for reasons mentioned. And I apologize to API, because this discussion was certainly not my intention. Especially after Ferret gave a little bit deeper analysis above it becomes clear that the feature is non-trivial to implement and the associated dangers and cost seem to outweigh benefits for now. Maybe they will add something like this in one of their next games, but backporting this feature for Oktoberfest seems not really feasible.
I regret asking for it now, because I should have made that connection before I wrote this, especially being in that profession myself.