Say players who know about coding and that. If they report a bug Cryptic gives them the appropriate script and says 'here take a look at it and tells us what's wrong'. Of course this would mean trusting the individual is an accomplished coder and would mean employing some method of checking and testing the code, but this would mean 100's of people would be able to fix bugs at once instead of just the devs.

My rates start at $85 an hour for custom non-client work.

And I'm cheap compared to many.

edit: Would probably double their workload as well due to go back and double check just the coding let alone test it like they do with their inhouse coders.

I was just meaning as voluntary as I would be happy to do that as coding happens to be a hobby of mine. I spend as much time creating scripts and mods for games as I do playing them and I enjoy doing it - so do a lot of people. Google mod the siims 3 or GTA San Andreas just see how large the modding community is.

There is a reason only the most outstanding (usually total conversion) modding projects actually come to any attention with companies.
Modding for a lot of games is rather easy, bugfixing is not. Especially if you need to take double precautions (QA).

Just because you scripted here or there, doesn't necessarily mean you're good at bugfixing or coding (already).
But if you like that stuff, maybe you consider studies in that field. After 5+ years at work, you might reconsider your statement from today
Coding is not that much fun as it sounds, once you have 40h+/week working schedule and "final dates".

Coding is more of a passion than a hobby of mine, I do it for a lot of different games and am a member of lots of different forums. Some bugs could be just due to bad syntax in a line of code. Everyone makes mistakes - even university graduate developers who are doing a job there paid to do. But at least with the STO community reviewing and building code it would mean that mistakes are less likely to happen. Well that's just my point of view.

And what you could do could be based on your skill level, from fixing typos in dialogue boxes to fixing major issues. Also a kind of points system could be implemented - the more points a user has the more reliable/better programmer/coder they are.

On a personal note I know coding can be quite boring but the joy comes at seeing the end results I have been coding and modding for many years.

Why do developers realeasing a game on PC always release it 'half-finished' anyway? You never get a game on PS3, Xbox or an console that requires a ridiculous amount of fixes and updates.

Simply put:
Much less QA to do for consoles
Fixed hardware and "OS"

BTW I also started programming as a hobby, wrote my first "game" on a C64 when I was eight.
25 years later lot of the passion is lost, sounds bad, but I still like doing it. It's just not the fun from the past anymore (maybe I grow old )

They will not let you do for free that they pay people to do its a legal issue with California labor laws.

I'm sure the Open Source community would disagree with you on that point. For example Wordpress is based out of California. I don;t know enough about all that so I'll leave it there.

But yes, I would be hard pressed to justify doing free work for a commercial operation such as this. Especially with their *cough* 34% Net Profit last quarter.

Sounds reasonable. It works well with linux users writing device drivers.

Oh wait. No, that doesnt work well at all.

Bad idea is bad.

Funny Mod the Sims which allows people to contribute mods is based on a Californian server

Is there no red cross or other charity workers in California then?

I did consider that point before I started this thread as well, and they could reward people who fix bugs in some way, such as free zen or membership.