When running a large scale community, the mayor question is; who gets the work done? As you can read in the current blogs and the blogs to come, running a community requires an immense amount of work. There are tons of jobs to be done such as management, maintenance, improving, implementing etc etc. On smaller scale community’s you can pretty much manage these things by yourself or with help of a couple of persons. At a community from our scale, this is out of the question. There are so many tasks to do that we try and divide the workload as much as possible. To give you a little insight in who does what, check out this list; Saint K: Overall management, finances, server management, techteam leader Bucky: Overall management, recruitment management, event planning (get together etc) Demm: Tech team member, responsible mostly for coding Sourcemod plugins (SpA points, SpA bans etc) and PHP scripting, overall maintenance, manager SpA war team #1 Lacop: Tech team member, responsible mostly for code on the website (SpA shop, main website technical part, banlist, SpA points server scripts, database integration/hookups), overall maintenance Victor: Techteam member, responsible for code in the SpA points plugin, feature request plugins, overall maintenance Spike: Techteam member, Website management, overall management Blackhawk: Techteam member, responsible for all technical aspects on the SpA Cup’s, website management Futari: SpA Cup management And the list continues with many more members doing all kinds of tasks in the community. Besides the most important thing, people with skills and enthusiasm to work for the community, you need automation. The reason you need this is simple. If we don’t automate the technical systems in our community, you would need to recruit someone for a certain task each time, and keep this person dedicated on that task to ensure it will be done properly and regularly. This would mean that same person could not be used on other projects regardless of their skills. This situation you want to avoid because you want to keep your community in constant development, hence our slogan ‘improving 24/7’. You want your skilled members to be able to work on new developments continuously rather than needing to recruit new technical people for each project. A good example to use here is the current 1-on-1 Soldier Cup. What is required for a cup to run? Of course to start off with, you need good idea’s. Once you got a good idea, you’ll have to take a look at the systems. The first requirement would be a webpage which can contain the contesters in a cup, the played matches, score boards, ladder structures etc. Blackhawk found a good base system for this, and started to modify it for our use and liking. So far so good. Now you actually need to start the cup. Assuming all people have signed up properly, it’s time to plan the matches. There is 2 way’s to do this. 1) manually 2) automatic. Let’s have a look at both options: 1) You make a list of people who need to pay against each other. You’ll need to personally inform everyone. Then you’ll need to plan the matches, inform the users, check if their available on the by you selected time and date. Often this is not the case, so you’ll have to re-plan and re-plan until each of the 8 matches in the first round are planned. Then when the actual match is going to take place, you’ll require to give the users the server password, change the map and settings on the server at the selected time, watch the match, record scores, manually submit them, and that each time a match is played. As you can see, this could easily be a task for 3 or 4 people from SpA to manage. On a small scale cup with 16 people, manually is still a possibility, but imagine when the cups grow to 32, 64, 128 etc players. You’ll need an extreme amount of people to manage this all. It would take up a hell of a lot of time and resources. A lot of chance were people will miss plan something, or won’t show up, or simply get bored with managing it after a while. Now let’s take a look at the second option: 2) Automation. It takes more work to prepare all the technical aspects, but in the end it *should* be as simple as creating a new cup, advertising it, starting it, and sit back to enjoy the event! To make it automatic, we’ve been working on customizing the system. Users will be able to sign up themselves on the website, plan their own matches with their opponents, book the server on a time is good for both. A backend script will then ensure both users will receive a unique server password 15 minutes prior to the match. The script will clean out the server for any people who remained in there, change the map to the map which is played that round, and apply the correct settings. (Not implemented yet, but working on): automatic demo recording by the SourceTV server, automatic score submission to the score board, automatic screenshot submission and more. As you can see, when you make things automatic, in the end you’ll just require 2 or so admins to be available in case of trouble, and to judge demo’s in case of doubt. Other than that, everything ells will be fully automatic. This will allow us to easily set up a lot of different types of cups, were everything will be fully automatic. Now our (tech)team members are available again to work on their next project, rather then continuously to be busy with this single project. In the next blog entry about this topic I’ll shed some more light on the current backend systems to show you how much we already have automated so far.