serious no-staff problem

[RageRitual]

Hmmm let's look at this staff list
https://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=staff

?find dock>
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find priitk
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find qan
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find beasty
Not online, last seen 6 days ago

?find wirah
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find m_m god
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find tucker
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find hookecho
Not online, last seen 3 days ago

?find lf
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find biet
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find bitsaver
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find dezmond
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find markmrw
Not online, last seen 3 days ago


willby and dwopple only ones seen in the last 24 hours of dev or upper staff.

It's time. Time to start promoting other people to dev / upper staff and ditch the dead weight. I mean I understand it's a non-paying job, but if you don't have the time to do a job find somebody else that will! 70% of the upper staff haven't logged on in ages. Clearly these people are either too busy or don't give a shit about the game anymore.

I mean we just had to cancel DT because there were no staff to take it over when tiny bailed on it.

[renzi]

What’s the point when there isn’t the player population to require it? And I thought DT was cancelled due to less than 90 sign ups

[Dwopple]

Hmmm let's look at this staff list
https://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=staff

?find dock>
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find priitk
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find qan
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find beasty
Not online, last seen 6 days ago

?find wirah
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find m_m god
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find tucker
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find hookecho
Not online, last seen 3 days ago

?find lf
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find biet
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find bitsaver
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find dezmond
Not online, last seen more than 10 days ago

?find markmrw
Not online, last seen 3 days ago


willby and dwopple only ones seen in the last 24 hours of dev or upper staff.

It's time. Time to start promoting other people to dev / upper staff and ditch the dead weight. I mean I understand it's a non-paying job, but if you don't have the time to do a job find somebody else that will! 70% of the upper staff haven't logged on in ages. Clearly these people are either too busy or don't give a shit about the game anymore.

I mean we just had to cancel DT because there were no staff to take it over when tiny bailed on it.

Is this you raising your hand to volunteer as a staffer, or just venting?

If it's the latter, I understand the frustration. Unfortunately, it's not as simple as "promoting other people to dev" given the current state of the code and lack of knowledgeable resources to train new(er) devs. This is a reality of a free-to-play 25+ year old game.

We could use help with new, motivated staffers to continue running leagues or coming up with new ideas (RE: Banks' idea) within our current dev-limitations. I can promise you it's not for a lack of current staffers "finding somebody else", it's a lack of trustworthy, willing volunteers. Myself, along with others have been begging fresh volunteers before and after every league with mixed results for years now.

Do you have any helpful ideas to compliment your very-valid complaints, or are you willing volunteer yourself to help us alleviate these issues?

If it's the former, just DM myself or WillBy

Appreciate you sharing your frustrations, RR. I feel them, too.

[RageRitual]

Is this you raising your hand to volunteer as a staffer, or just venting?

Appreciate you sharing your frustrations, RR. I feel them, too.

I know a lot of thankless work goes into this game and I am not ignorant of that fact. It sucks having to listen to bitch about everything. I realize it just sounds like I am bitching, which maybe I am but, the point of the post is because it is a problem not just to vent. I have been staff twice, first time around 2009'ish years ago before I quit the game, and for a short while after I came back. I go through periods of inactivity that makes me not a good candidate for staff. Both times I noticed there was a lack of upper staff available, this has been a problem for a long time. I could offer to come back to staff again but I'm not sure what I could really offer other maybe running MMR sometimes when we don't have a host and when my work is slow I can be reached via discord pretty easily,

What we really need is more devs. Not just one dev but a dev team so our devs don't get burnt out so easily. I mean let's start with a website. The websites we have are a mess and it's not just one website either. Why can't we just get one website that has it all and organized. Can we outsource this? Can we not just hire a bigass nerd to come get us a nice bugfree website and have it crowdfunded by the players? We should be able to click a players name and see a profile that shows everything. If I go here https://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=e...player=dwopple I can see LIFETIME staffs for players in elim. Why can't we have that for TWD/DT/TWL, etc. Any league we have stats for. This game has decades of history let's show it off!

The other thing we desperately need is an active news feed. Like holy fuck the last update on trenchwars.com was 2.5 years ago. TWD site 1.5 years ago and steam well shit I don't even know but it was probably me posting about upcoming DT. I even offered to do this when I was on staff, but upper staff would rather nobody post then let me do it. One of the huge griefs I had when I was staff was we have to rely on upper staff for everything which is probably why things rarely gets done. Sysops shouldn't be the ones doing work (unless there is a problem) , they should be managing people that do it for them.

Discord, I pulled 150+ people together for discord, Joe took that to the next level. Maybe staff with Joe and make his an official TW discord.

[Dwopple]

I know a lot of thankless work goes into this game and I am not ignorant of that fact. It sucks having to listen to bitch about everything. I realize it just sounds like I am bitching, which maybe I am but, the point of the post is because it is a problem not just to vent. I have been staff twice, first time around 2009'ish years ago before I quit the game, and for a short while after I came back. I go through periods of inactivity that makes me not a good candidate for staff. Both times I noticed there was a lack of upper staff available, this has been a problem for a long time. I could offer to come back to staff again but I'm not sure what I could really offer other maybe running MMR sometimes when we don't have a host and when my work is slow I can be reached via discord pretty easily,

What we really need is more devs. Not just one dev but a dev team so our devs don't get burnt out so easily. I mean let's start with a website. The websites we have are a mess and it's not just one website either. Why can't we just get one website that has it all and organized. Can we outsource this? Can we not just hire a bigass nerd to come get us a nice bugfree website and have it crowdfunded by the players? We should be able to click a players name and see a profile that shows everything. If I go here https://trenchwars.org/index.php?v=e...player=dwopple I can see LIFETIME staffs for players in elim. Why can't we have that for TWD/DT/TWL, etc. Any league we have stats for. This game has decades of history let's show it off!

The other thing we desperately need is an active news feed. Like holy fuck the last update on trenchwars.com was 2.5 years ago. TWD site 1.5 years ago and steam well shit I don't even know but it was probably me posting about upcoming DT. I even offered to do this when I was on staff, but upper staff would rather nobody post then let me do it. One of the huge griefs I had when I was staff was we have to rely on upper staff for everything which is probably why things rarely gets done. Sysops shouldn't be the ones doing work (unless there is a problem) , they should be managing people that do it for them.

Discord, I pulled 150+ people together for discord, Joe took that to the next level. Maybe staff with Joe and make his an official TW discord.

Could we crowdsource funding? Yes. Could we outsource (or insource) dev work? Yes. The problem, again, is the availability of those knowledgeable enough of the dev environment. If we're talking about raising funds, we'd first need to understand the the paid/unpaid willingness of existing devs to lend their time and knowledge to bring a new, paid dev on. Time consuming, but probably not impossible.

The current dependencies on upperstaff / devs exists because of the current dev environment and limitations of the game code (which isn't accessible) and server code which would need to be completely refactored to reduce dependency on upperstaff without risking abuse (re: my previous post about a lack of trustworthy, unpaid volunteers). Again, very time consuming, costly, but not impossible.

With this in mind, my estimate would put this at close to a year-long project (from planning to gradual implementation) and we'd need to rely on as much unpaid work as possible

[RageRitual]

Could we crowdsource funding? Yes. Could we outsource (or insource) dev work? Yes. The problem, again, is the availability of those knowledgeable enough of the dev environment. If we're talking about raising funds, we'd first need to understand the the paid/unpaid willingness of existing devs to lend their time and knowledge to bring a new, paid dev on. Time consuming, but probably not impossible.

With this in mind, my estimate would put this at close to a year-long project (from planning to gradual implementation) and we'd need to rely on as much unpaid work as possible

While I can see it taking a long time for someone new to learn there way around the bots and such, I can't see it taking that long to build a website for us, but I also must admit I know very little about building websites or I would have offered to make one for us already. Regardless would it be so bad to at least look into and maybe get a quote to see how much it would cost?

[Hookecho]

The issue is that to do some modern web development, we really need to update the entire stack at the same time. There are breaking changes so it would also include a refactor of any TWCore code that touches the database. It's a lot to juggle for organizations to do things like this, let alone a couple of people in their spare time. Also those organizations have sometimes up to five environments where they can test their code. We have one. The odds are not in our favor.

It's not that we haven't looked into it. Once you start taking everything into consideration, it becomes unfeasible with the limited resources we have.

[RageRitual]

So, forgive my ignorance here with the topic....I'm just a guy still learning spreadsheets.

If a new website is out of the question at this time, I know I can pull data from TW websites into a sheet, but I wonder if it would be possible to skip the websites and pull data from the TW database directly into a sheet? If that is possible to do in real time maybe we can use nerdy ass sheets for player history.

[Hookecho]

No, you can't pull data directly from the database.

[Grasps]

Just going to throw in my 2C that I think Subspace needs to collaborate with Free Infantry aka Subspace 2.0. If you've ever played it, you know its basically the same game as this just with mouse controls and way more features due to the fact the same dudes who made this game, moved on and made FI. I remember when it came out I thought it was going to be an SS killer, and for a while it sure looked that way and then Sony stepped in and fucked everything up going subscription based. Fast forward, they've done basically what we've been trying to do with SS and revived the game after Sony axed it in 2012. They have competent dev members working with upgraded SS coding. It's a match made in heaven. Contact those dudes seriouslyqan I've had a chance to mingle with one of the main devs and he's a stand up cat. Whether he'd be interested in helping this game to maybe help their own is a question mark but truly, they are like the same games and we really should try to cross advertise and who knows what can come of it.

It's just came back out on Steam like I said and if anyone enjoys SS that hasn't heard of it yet, really owe it to themselves to check it out and see the new features that maybe in another universe could of been applied to this game if devs didn't bail.. Link below.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2.../FreeInfantry/

[godisdead]

The biggest problems in chat are those that conduct their entire social life within the game eg stinger metal, comedy etc while making sure they do not break the rules their constant spam ruins any good natured gameplay.