the intranet site

Recently, in the last two events of 2009; the SOGC used intranet websites developed by yours truly to provide information to the attendees of that particular event – with somewhat reasonably good success. Both sites that were released were different, each featuring different aspects of the evolution and design of our intranet site; something we’d like to be a really significant part of the SOGC experience at our events.

The first release at LANoWEEN 2 – involved a more technological side of implementation; users were able to register feedback, and sign up to competitions through the intranet site. Making the system actually pretty efficient; this wasn’t a feature complete site, but it took us in the direction we wanted to head, and feedback overall was pretty good based on several testers for the event.

The second release at ForceLAN – was a design based release. Which you can actually click that link to see. Here, the design of the site was pretty much finalized, and all that was left was to marry off the tech to the design and voila, we’d have a great site to use! Unfortunately that’s not the case, I’ve started advancing some of the work on the site and what could almost be called feature creep has started to occur.

I’m going to jot down a few of the features we’re looking at:

• live server status pages
• feedback forms with graphical summaries
• competitions control and results management

These three are the biggest features we’ve got at present, and are being very slowly worked on as we speak. The code is entirely raw and hand-written with none of the proper educated conventions of a real PHP developer (I’m a self taught PHP coder, so it’s not exactly pretty) – the one forgiving thing is that being a LAN based site, rather than a WWW based site means that optimizations are not as consequential. Client and User connection speeds are significantly greater than what is available online.

It’s not really noticeable to the crowd themselves, but I’ve started moving back from the frontlines as it were, and started managing the team and working on the servers to help boost the guest experience as much as possible. Leaving people with far better public rapport like Russell (Nokturnal) – and his superior sense of humour to the commentary is something I’m more than happy to do.

Our team’s structured in such a way that we have an enforcement group, a competitions group, and a support group. The three main areas of the LAN really. But that’s another post for another time

I’m still alive!

So, it’s now post-ForceLAN, and we’re going into hibernation for the 2010 year of events in terms of the public eye.

I know I’ve been extremely absent from the blog recently; I do apologise – in that time I accrued something in the order of nearly a dozen post drafts on a variety of matters. But really, things have been happening so fast, and so chaotically I never got a chance to finish any of them beyond a paragraph.

That said, I now think I’ll just wipe the table clean (get rid of all the drafts) and here I am ranting on something more current and related to the SOGC rather than bitching about DJ Hero and Modern Warfare 2; I’m going to stick to my guns and try to keep this blog more LAN organiser related, as well as semi–techgeek-gamer related. There’s three things I’m going to talk about in this post – more relevant to organisers than our gamer patrons; but for those of you who do stick around and read this, I hope it’ll still be handy or interesting info for you.

1. Live Mesh for our team files
2. Our ForceLAN Feedback form
3. Our new server: KANAKO

Those are all pretty geeky and ambiguous titles… allow me to explain.

Xbox Live gaming, and gamer rankings

warning: I swear a bit in this post – I usually swear like a sailor normally so for most people who know me, it’s business as usual. However, if you’d been reading recently you’ll find that my swearing kind of petered off as I tried to moderate myself a bit there.

I have to admit, I’m supposed to be quite the gamer; yet recently, it seems I haven’t done any gaming apart from polishing off Uncharted 2, and randomly lurking around in Aion. So yesterday, I was doing the usual soul crushing chore of my credit card balances and noticed that I have an active subscription to Xbox Live, Gold. I decided I would take a moment to see what all the hullabulloo was about and actually get some gaming done on a console, which is practically unheard of for me. I grew up playing the PC, sure, I had the Nintendos and Segas everyone else had, but for me, gaming was on the PC as soon as I touched Doom back in … ‘94? Since then, I had never taken console gaming seriously or given it any real credit.

So, I decided that “today will be the day” (actually, last night) to try out Xbox Live – and see just how well it works. I also chose to use one of the more popular games, Gears of War 2 in horde mode. This plays out just like Invasion in UT2004, or the ending scenes in L4D where it’s you guys against the masses.

There was a secondary ulterior motive to my little venture into the realm of console gaming (specifically XBOX gaming) — the SOGC is looking into implementing gamer medals and conjunctively, research into a way to rank our members in terms of gaming skill and competitions is also becoming of interest. (The team will probably murder me for disclosing that feature prematurely. So if I disappear… D: )

It is with confidence I can say, Xbox Live works – it’s quite a good system, and easy to use. It’s multiplayer for the brainless, bottom-of-the-barrel fucking idiots who can’t figure out PC multiplayer for crap. More importantly, it’s fun. The matchmaking system works somewhat well – considering I was unranked in all games, and had never been online in Gears of War 2 prior to this (mind you there was a fucktonne of patches to download) – and I was quite intrigued by it.

Microsoft uses a Bayesian applications to their ranking system to determine matchmaking – it’s a good system, well grounded in maths and social theory – called TrueSkill. It’s an alternate form of social engineering – a field of study I find myself greatly interested in – by all regular standards, sports nowadays and any other form of competition generally use something called the Elo rating system. I won’t burn all your time by digressing into the rating systems, I’ve linked both the whitepaper and the wikipedia article on the systems respectively – they’re interesting if you’re into all that background stuff.

These algorithms unfortunately only work for match-making systems; unfortunately with the SOGC – we’re grounded entirely in a Tournament format of competition. One day however, I’d like to implement a ‘Challenger’ system into our competitions; but for now – I think this may be just a pipedream. So last night’s foray into competition, tournament and gamer ranking formats was unfortunately, while educational, still unsuccessful.

I did learn however, that Xbox Live is pretty fun – it takes all the thought and effort out of having to game; just like how fast food takes the effort out of cooking food for yourself and instead gives you the convenience of slowly killing yourself. Xbox Live does that to the technical skills of the gamer population. I’m wondering if it’s a bad thing.

Site upgrades

Recently, we had a little bit of an upgrade to various features on our website. Most of these won’t be immediately obvious to our visitors at the SOGC website; but they’re a big step forward. Initially there was a bit of a stumbling stone, where a lot of the team were questioning what was going on with the site. As of tonight, that’s mostly settled, with ucosty taking over development of the site entirely, while I fill the site up with content.

So far, it’s been pretty fantastic; we’ve now got sponsor bio pages (down the bottom) and more excitingly, a new photos link at the main menu at the top of the site. This is great as that was one of the missing things from our site since this new version went online. For us at present; the next big thing is working on a corresponding theme for the forums. I’m branding our current design theme ‘charcoal’.

It’ll be a fairly straightforward port of the current SOGC site (I hope) – so stay tuned for some interesting developments on that front.

SOGC badges – where are they now?

Well, the badge system, is something that I introduced some LANs ago, I believe it was when we were still in the beta stage.

The way these work, is that badges would be akin to something of a ‘Real Life’ achievement system for members of our LAN. These would attribute to their ‘LANFreak score’ which would essentially determine how freakishly awesome a LANner they were in our community.

Unfortunately, the system proved a little beyond the manpower capacities we had at the time; and as a consequence stagnated and is virtually left in the dust on all SOGC platforms and systems. But they are not forgotten…!

Originally, the SOGC released this ‘Badge’ system as a way to encourage attendance, badges would be won, credo and egos would be fed, and eventually, prizes, benefits and what-not could be attributed to these badges. On a technical scale, this system is a pain in the arse. It’s absolutely requires a real-world input and cannot be automated. It’s not dynamically administered as crew need to manually determine the requirements for each badge; and they all need manual updating. Sucks, right? …

Our badge system is coming back

This time, under the guise of being a medal system. XBOX Live has Achievements, Playstation Network has Trophies, the Scouts have buttons, and the SOGC has medals. The development of this system is still ongoing, and it’s coming – bear in mind the SOGC is first and foremost, a business. While we don’t want to do any evil, or rip anyone off – much like Google – we unfortunately therefore limit ourselves to whatever slow progress and meagre funds we get/make from our events to push development of anything involved in our community.

The new badge system will be fully integrated into the user profiles located on the SOGC forums – this will enable us to manage them more directly from the forums. We’re looking at doing a few other things too – so expect downtime for the forums in the near future

Jaiku, vBulletin, and WAVE

So, after pulling off that madman’s rant last post – I’m continuing it (in another post, not this one!). But for now, I thought I’d talk about the recent surge of importance general team management and project management appear to have taken up in the life of the SOGC thus far. It’s an important topic, and one that most people will find interesting if they’re even remotely curious about behind the scenes stuff for a LAN event.

I’ve consulted a number of LAN events – with how their plans and implementations go ahead; Quakecon, has a very intricate management system – and they gave me a fairly accurate number of 43% of successfully deployed plans. SGL say roughly 70% of things go ahead smoothly, and nvLAN in Malaysia (the nVidia event) say that they recently worked really hard to push through a near 50% successful rate of deployment.

When I look at this, all these events being anywhere from double, to nearly 50 times the size (assuming the SOGC is at a size of 60 attendees); these deployment rates all indicate one thing — everything becomes more and more unravelled, the larger you get. There’s a whole plethora of extraneous factors that need to be taken into consideration, but otherwise – it does highlight the need to somehow optimise the crew and operational workings of your event’s infrastructure.

I’m a firm believer of communicating with our community – that’s why this blog is here, and why I talk so openly about a lot of the stuff the SOGC does. It’s why we’re planning a keynote speech by me even.

Recently I took a look at twitter, that micro-blogging platform – we do currently have an existing account – that’s sort of been in disrepair since our DriveLAN event – which was way back in (23rd of) May, 2009. Compounded with login credentials issues, I decided to look for alternatives… We came across Jaiku.

Just in: while writing this blog post – we’ve returned back to twitter, but not under the /sogc name – we’re using an #sogc discussion group that people can search and participate in.

The idea is that we can use the accessibility of twitter and the install base of it amongst members of our community (just about everyone) – and we can provide them with live updates on what we’re working on, and have realtime discussions with them. It’s an extra personal touch.

Blogging is just one of the many ways to communicate with the crew, and the members of our community. I digress though, the main focus of this post this time is the management methods and systems in use by the SOGC team. I’ve put this into another cut-away section for people who are more interested; the rest of you, I’ll see you next blog post

Activision and my recent spate of venom.

Recently, I caught wind of some news about the CEO of Activision, Robert Kotick, in his latest little description of disdain for the gamer population. I have fairly close ties to Deutsche Bank, and happened to be following the latest from the Technology Expo they were holding in San Francisco. He went on to describe his initial plans to have every game in their stable being multi-platformed and accessible (he neglected to mention the Wii, or the PC) to a potential 350 million users — this is the approx number from the current subscriber base reports from the respective PS3 and XBOX360 console’s parents companies.

Fair enough, it is wise, the two more powerful consoles on the market both had it within their ability to offer a fairly nice, even playing field in terms of open market. Appealing to both consoles with games would make good business sense.

He also went on to explain the money-making capabilities of Guitar Hero, providing a little historical insight as well as giving up his margins:

“In the last cycle of videogames you spent $50 on a game, played it and took it back to the shop for credit.

“Today, we’ll sell you for $100 a guitar. You might add a microphone or drums, you might buy two or three expansions packs, different types of music. Over the life of your ownership you’ll probably buy around 25 additional song packs in digital downloads. So, what used to be a $50 sale is a $500 sale today.”

But what does Activision Blizzard look to make form this? Lots, that’s what.

“And the best of all margins – the 25% operating margin business – has the potential as we can see with World of Warcraft to be a 50% operating margin business. What used to be a low 20s return on invested capital business is now growing to a plus 40% return on invested capital business.”

That’s an incredibly high return on investment. Unfortunately his artificial inflation of the market is unnoticed by most mums, dads, and their screaming kids at your local EB.

I’m not lashing out in particular at Guitar Hero; everyone knows I am not a fan of the game. But I am of two minds about what Kotick has managed to pull off with the games market. While everyone’s eyes were on the evil that was EA as a publisher, no one noticed Activision Blizzard doing some pretty serious business whiz. Effectively they have a potential of earning 10 times more than what was initially available, without wasting extra money on development for additional titles, and manufacturing equipment from cheap factories in various countries that gets gobbled up almost guaranteed. A brilliant business move. A horrible move to take advantage of the public.

Best trick the devil ever pulled was to make everyone believe he didn’t exist.

- I don’t own shares in Activision Blizzard

We’re still stuck supporting them for their Guitar Hero competition at LANoWEEN 2 – it’ll be a good gauge of the game’s popularity and future viability as a platform for additional competitions in events coming.

Maximise the fun!

So, the SOGC is having its first paintball meet – I’ll probably run a meet every few months or so (I used to be a regular baller for a while in Uni). I’ve noticed recently there’s a few games/things that are now occupying my time:

• Street Fighter 4
• Aion
• Game servers
• SOGC stuff

And my life is slowly moulding itself around spending as much time as possible on those things. Currently, things are fairly crazy hectic with the SOGC – with a ridiculous number of tasks and planning steps required for LANoWEEN 2, and the very quickly followed ForceLAN.

Over the December/January break we’ll probably plan various social events – non LAN related, but hopefully trying to build up the community even more.

I’ve got a few ideas floating in my head for things for the community to do while there aren’t any SOGC LANs being held – but for now I’ll keep those under wraps.

It’s been pretty interesting in the work we’re going to be doing for the Mosman Club for LANoWEEN 2- this is our old stomping grounds, so everyone on the crew is very familiar with setup (with the exception of Izrid, our newest admin). This leaves us in a better position to make sure all the servers are fully functioning and up and running without a problem.

We’ve got cable coverings now which we’ll be using at the venue, brand new Arlec power block units for the tables – these are the best of about 5 different brands of power blocks we’ve used; never overheating or blowing a circuit.

We have a number of competitions, that I’ll be firing out via e-mail to all our potential guests.

I can’t wait till LANoWEEN 2 because I’m 100% certain it’ll be extremely kick-ass, a lot more fun than AnniversaryLAN, better planned, and better executed. As far as AnniversaryLAN goes, it was a great, successful event, but it wasn’t the best we could have gotten. While we tried our best (making lemonade when you have lemons) – we reached maybe a 85 to 90% execution completion rate, commonly for SOGC events, we hit 90 to 95%, and we aim always for 110% (to exceed our original plans).

Anyway, some *massively* exciting stuff incoming for LANoWEEN 2. I really hope we get some awesome numbers for the event; and really push the envelope. Make some jaws drop

I’ve been looking at some other more geeky stuff – which I’ve put in a cut-away section in case you guys aren’t interested. It looks a socio-psychological behavior amongst the crowds at SOGC events, and is a sounding board for ideas on how to improve the SOGC in a fairly obtuse way.

Animu, MMOs and the flu

So recently I’ve been turning into an Otaku. I squarely blame Navillus for it – who stayed for the week, I suddenly ended up playing lots of games, watching movies and anime, and doing random things.

I’ve recently gotten back into the groove of watching some of the anime shows I’ve got – thanks to the mighty Appleseed series (domo arigato shirow-san!) and I’ve also started playing Aion – damn addictive game that one. It’s an entirely different creature from WoW, it seems more like a real meeting point for East meets West in terms of online gaming. With heaps of stuff to do and all that — I’m currently playing as Ashiya – an Elyosian Chanter – kind of like a paladin from Diablo. She can heal, and chuck out auras that really boost a party.

Anyway, I’ve also started watching one of the most bizarre, yet high-energy series I’ve ever seen in anime, Bakemono Gatari or more simply, Monster Story. It’s fairly fascinating and has one of the most bizarre female leads – it’s reminiscent of a more light hearted Gainax series from their Evangelion era (and that sure was a mindfuck, jeez). Still there are some bizarre funny moments in the eps, but I’m only up to episode 3.

Recently with the SOGC, we’ve been earnestly trying to adapt ourselves to some sort of management system. ANY sort of management system. It’s become prudent to try and mould ourselves to a strict, rigorous project frame work to ensure everything gets done in a timely manner, and that there is some sort of record of our exploits. It’s been fairly difficult, with me trialling everything from famous corporate level solutions, to Google Apps services (which works pretty damn well if it ever decides to properly start working) to a small online App I’ve started using to store notes and progress on projects (events). It seems to work well and suit our needs.

In the end, I may decide to go with Google Apps however – for the sake of reliability, and consolidation. It would mean shifting all our protocols from our other app to this though. Which could well be a pain in the ass.

Blargh it’s late. I’m out.

Site monkeys and Paintballers

So, the SOGC site is bouncing around in migration purgatory. We’re moving over to the incredible new website – although our forums will remain the same. It’s now an entirely proprietary website – with our forums as a separate system (phpBB). We’re written up in Ruby on Rails for the main site; which is fantastic – and the site is really schmick.

I can’t wait till everyone gets to see the new site. Genuinely quite thrilled.