Should be added to the main game if you ask me.
Wasn't it? I distinctly remember it being added to vanilla game. Which means, go to skirmish, and vote yourself as commander? Then you can practice using the spotting.
No
and so the vicious cycle continues. People don't want to help because the devs are burnt out and the devs are burnt out because people aren't willing to help.
Advisor could come handy. I just want to say 1 important thing: I personally haven't expect any heavy contribution from your (devs) side. We just want to make sure that our work won't be in vain. We want to know that you (devs) won't step back from us (community) after we have done our part of job - since we are not any proffesionals to put it all together by ourself.
Sometimes you just need to give it a go. You can't ever be 100% sure your work will be fully utilized.
Take me for example. I spent literally hundreds of hours across the last 7-8 months working on servers and getting DDOS-proof servers set up all while people were constantly telling me and others that Ren-X would die. But I did it anyways because I learned valuable skills and it's fun to have a project to work on.
I started out as a random nobody with Ren-X and stepped up and beefed up my resume as well as contributed to the game. You just have to go for it sometimes.
I can re-add them tonight.
The problem is that when the patch was built, the precompiled shaders weren't included. This forces the server (and clients) to compile shaders before the maps starts. It's a rather lengthy process for that map and therefor disconnects all the clients and puts a huge strain on the server which I typically try to avoid.
Validation can be very disk intensive. Make sure you don't have any other disk heavy things running at the same time.
Check resource monitor to see current I/O usage in Windows.