Well I wrote a serverside modification for TRIBES, which was about 52,000 lines of code, had about 40 servers, ran for about 2 years in Tournament play with about 30 teams.
Then I bugged the devs for PlanetSide enough that I got about 40 of my ideas into the game, including the exact structure of about 40 warpgates. I then took their 7GB FTP file installer, and built a 1mb installer off of it by taking the bare minimum from the launcher to replicate itself, and put a bunch of registry fixes in there. Then that installer was used in a community marketing campaign to get about 30,000 downloads. The devs later copied the installer with a 10mb version. Got to the point I was routinely messaging back and forth with their Community Manager and Executive Producer.
I’ve guessed the near exact details of a surprising amount of features in Overwatch. Including asking for variables-only balance changes using serverside variables to bypass console recertification replying directly to Jeff Kaplan and WyomingMyst/Craig/Kaedi that this should be a feature in the game. And then it was a feature in the game 3 months later. I also did a comprehensive balance change post on the Overwatch 2 PVP beta, about a week before they announced it, just before the OWL team owners were heading in for a conference with the devs.
I’ve also personally probably spent more time on Role Queue issues than the entire community combined.
But sure, “I click heads gud” is better than all that, huh?