Introducing Wicked Designs (Hi ALL)
I would like to say first of all that being a small team (5) of professional designers (We work for Epic Games and cannot release our names) this is probably one of the best, most extensive, and fully operational mmo engines we have seen, not to mention nicely commented. We have been looking for and engine such as this for quite sometime and were about to give up and begin coding our own. To Spodi...you need to stay focused more on the engine and less on too many request for for what is referred to in the industry as "Polish". To everyone on here asking for this and asking for that (we have been reading everything in the forum for days), I will tell you this, when there is a middle-ware engine such as this and its free, you have to understand that the makers of this engine are assuming you know basic to expert programming and can make your own GUI and game options, and that most of your requests for "I need it to do this and i need it to do that" just slows down the progress of the engine itself if the designer actually sets aside what he's doing to fulfill these requests. We are adopting this engine as our base for now, we did an extensive server load (2500 connections) and toyed with a bit...very stable, nice sever and client programming, comparable to most high dollar apps out there such as BigWorld Technology's server and client. For as much work as has gone into this engine and the quality and stability that it has, I can say for myself and the rest of our team its a shame that it doesn't come with a price tag, and that the developers aren't spending more time writing materials and references for it rather than fulfilling small requests of people wanting them to pretty much make an entire game for them. Now that that is out....lol, if ok with the owners of this engine, we will be documenting and making tutorials of all of our work and posting it here in the months to come. It is a pleasure after searching for weeks and playing with so many engines to have found one that works this well ( we tried alot of them) and I'm sure it will be a pleasure working with you guys.
TRiPP, (lol-tripp@hotmail.com)
Lead Project Designer & Level Editor
Wicked Designs
New Site Coming Soon.
I was meaning things that could easily be coded by the person asking if they just put the effort in, and we know people donate to this engine...we know everything about this engine and its communitiy we have reading the forums and studying the engine for days, An believe me all of us would like to support it. A huge supporter of the indy community which was a Multi Million dollar engine just went down the drain and out of business (Torque 3D) would hate to see a lot smaller less sponsored, but equally valued engine do the same. Which I guess is a good thing there is 2 what i consider pro C programmers on our team, like my good buddy prot here just said friends lists, chat channels are all relatively easy and when we start putting things together we could throw up tuts on that as well. Anyways nice to meet yall and we were just pretty much over introducing ourselves and letting you know you have 5 guys from a AAA game development company joining your community.
You'll forgive me if I'm a little bit skeptical of you being a group of people from Epic Games, but welcome to the community anyway!
I don't think you have to worry about this engine going anywhere. If there's anything that Spodi has shown here, it's that he can keep working regardless of the activity in the community.
Welcome! I'm glad you like the engine. 
To address a few things you mentioned: for one, I do spend a bit of time working on "trivial and/or unnecessary features", but a lot of times it is because it is something I'd like to use myself for my own game. So if I'm going to make it anyways, I might as well just plop it into the engine in the first place. While there is always work to be done, I do still prioritize tasks a lot. Bugs and performance issues always have highest priority. I also only implement them if I think they are important aspects to online games, or if they are very easy to ignore if you don't want them.
Also, I do put quite a lot of time and effort into stuff that isn't really "needed", but does make it look better and a little easier to use. While it may not seem like a very useful use of time, its all about attracting new users and trying to not overwhelm them. With more users comes more testing, resulting in greater stability. It also means more developers which leads to a greater chance of people helping out with documentation and development of NetGore.
Ultimately, the biggest thing holding NetGore back right now is its lack of popularity. People will often make up their mind about software they don't know about relatively quickly. If they can't figure out how to get it working right away and/or aren't too impressed by the pictures of it, they'll likely just ignore it and move on quite quickly. But if they have heard about it, and see a lot of others are using it, they'll be far more patient with it.
Ain't that the truth. 
NetGore is building a fanbase and Rome wasn't built in a day. To be frank, I think the lack of tutorials and documentation on the engine is partially responsible for it's lack of popularity. When a person asks a question we can usually say "RTFM", but in this case TFM is lacking.
@Everyone:
I've submitted two tutorials to the Wiki, it's time for everyone to start contributing to the tutorial / manual department.
@Spodi:
Great work man. The engine rocks.
Well, if I was expecting professionals to use an engine, they would probably want the basics done like networking, graphics, and persistence to name a few. Making these cores agile would be preferred. Also, having things done in some generally structured fashion would be good. Basically, I would want something that isn't a thick ball of mud and has basic cores done, ready to be used and extended.
Things I would like to see would be Dependency Injection, Aggregative Component design structure for game entities, and other neat approaches. Then I would want a demo that would piece these together for others to see how the pieces fit together and interact and for more "newby" developers to toy with.
I have still not looked at NetGore, so I can't really say if it does any of these things or if it's "good".
Engines are meant to make games, not to necessarily promote the best practices. Overall, "Getter done" seems somewhat appropriate. I've never made a mmorpg, so maybe these soft paths would save more money in the long run, but NetGore wasn't really meant for AAA titles...
Anyway, welcome to the community and I think you guys come off slightly pompus, hopefully deserved hubris. Don't feel too obligated to donate, just feel enough of an obligation to donate...
I suggest if you really are going to use the NetGore engine and you're a game studio you should donate a decent amount.
We are not a game studio, we just work at one. We rent a 1 bedroom apartment as our office lol. So in case you think we make millions your wrong, THE COMPANY maybe, but um, i make $14.50 an hour as a level designer so... i usually bring home about $480 or so a week, far cry from a multi-million dollar game studio.
You are forgiven. What can we make just for you personally with UDK to prove to you we are who we say we are?
The main thing that attracted us was the clean, simple but effectivley coded client & server, one thing you should know is it would be easy for us to make a mmo using udk if their was not connection limits, and altho udk is free to the public the source code to the server & client is not. With a max connection of 64....thats not really mmo. Even in-house there is only a very small few who have source code to the client & server, the only other engine besides this one that was worth a damn was Kaneva but not the style we're looking for.
Anyway, welcome to the community and I think you guys come off slightly pompus, hopefully deserved hubris. Don't feel too obligated to donate, just feel enough of an obligation to donate...
And for that all we have to say is let the games begin!
you made any games so far? Just out of interest (i'm assuming you have as they can afford to pay)
There are 10 types of people in this world - Those who understand Binary and those who don't.
This is the first MMORPG we have ever decided to work on, and the reason behind it is they are big profit right now. As far as our own 3d games, we are working on a 3D RC game in UDK that includes every RC out there, cars, boats, planes. We hve been working on it heavily for the past 4 months and its looking and feeling great.
Good luck on finishing that. Hopefully you guys will add to the community.
You're seeing it from a wrong perspective.
vbGORE and NetGore live because of its community and "indy" developers. No offense for Spodi but I'm sure commercial games would use an engine built by several industry seniors. I know silly things like a GUI are too much to ask but I'm pretty sure stuff like chat channels, friend lists, a couple of basic AIs, ... are essential for any kind of mmorpg engine.
Also Spodi coded this to put on his resume, (some day) make his own game and for the experience gained by doing so, not for profit.
True, it's a shame there are only a handful of people around at the moment but then again, do we want a thousand 12 year olds posting the same things over and over?
Besides, the price tag? People who've actually been using the engine do donate 20 to 100 dollars which, I guess, you could see as the payment for NetGore, but mainly it's because we appreciate Spodi for spending hours developing this engine as well as the insanely fast bugfixes.
I suggest if you really are going to use the NetGore engine and you're a game studio you should donate a decent amount.
Click here for my Netgore Content Editor Tutorial video