Hi everyone,
I need to post this here as I broke our front-facing website (more on that later).
We've been a bit quiet if you've not been around our Discord lately I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about why that is and what's been going on over the last year or so. There's a TL;DR at the end for those of you whom lack the time to read all the details.
What's the hold up?
The last 12 months or so have been quite a stressful time in the personal lives of the team, I won't speak of the others because that's not for me to discuss but I moved between jobs and had quite a steep learning curve that burned me out from anything outside of just doing that job, I didn't have the time or the motivation to organise events for TSG because I was flat from work. We had spent time trying to put systems in place so some aspects of the community could run themselves or at least have minimal input from us and at least keep things ticking along in case something like this happened but we just missed the mark on getting it in place.
So We Back?
There are some developments taking place, not all behind the scenes if you've been keeping track of things on Discord with a loose plan to return to organised online activities in late July/early August. So we not back yet* but it's coming real soon.
CANZStats and RocketSTATS
Part of the plans when it comes to keeping things formulated to be able to somewhat run themselves has been the establishment of an event/competition management platform. Stats has been a pet project of mine for some time now but we're fast approaching a point where I can start to think about how we can use it to manage our more competitive side of things. Starting, of course, with our racing and Rocket League arms but eventually looking at other games as well. Read on for a brief outline of how each Stats platform will aid us in organising things.
CANZStats
As far as organising series goes, the bulk of the work was in structuring everything and doing the results for rounds. When it came to updating championship standings back when we were Regional Gamers League Online Racing Community, that meant manually updating web pages and tables on forums. Hacking together pages with calendars and dates for events, who to contact with queries and the locations for each event. CANZStats automates the generating of a lot of this content. Admins create championships, add rounds at certain locations on specific dates to those championships, and then enters the results after each round. Championship tables are updated automatically and even factor in reports should points deductions be applied. Individual user profiles also track the users stats as part of their overall career so everyone gets a nice overview of their history with CANZ/RGL and eventually we hope to welcome other series onto the platform for them to be able to track their stats too. We're still in early testing for many features but hope to have an early public test build soon.
(For more info and a history of development check out the #statstalk channel on our Discord)
RocketSTATS
This one is a little more open-ended as thought has only started going into it in the last couple of weeks. As far as automating much of this goes we're taking a slightly different approach. Players register on the platform and start as free agents, they can create a team or apply to join a team. There are two formats of competition, ladder and knockout. When a knockout series is organised the teams apply in a first-in-format, the organiser sets the number of teams and the system will generate a knockout bracket based on the Team Rating's (TR's). A TR is determined by the Win/Loss ratio of the team as well as other factors such as Goals For/Against and average winning margin (how this is calculated is to be determined). A ladder format is the standard format for the platform, over a set period of time (determined at the time of creation) the teams will compete in a ladder tournament attempting to reach the top of the ladder by the end of the "season", similar formats to this limit the number of positions you can challenge above you on the ladder and that will be determined by the organiser. There's a bunch more planning to do here but this is the overview. Players will also earn a Player Rating (PR) for their overall career based on their overall stats as well as Match Ratings (MR) for their performances in individual games. We'll have more to talk about with this as we get closer to launch of the RocketSTATS platform.
CANZ Racing
As many might be aware, initially the name was "CANZ Racing Community" where CANZ stood for "Confederation of Australian and New Zealand Racing". We've changed it up slightly and it's now just "Community of Australian and New Zealand Racing". Not a huge change but for us its a perception that we're targeting a more social racing community with a hint of competitiveness (the Sporting Regulations aren't going anywhere) but nothing over the top serious, at least not to start out with. Once we build the community back up we can explore how we organise things.
Socials
Social nights have always formed a big part of the community aspect of TSG, now that a few of us have streaming capable connections (cheers NBN) socials are going to form an integral part of the rebuild phase of TSG's community, so keep an eye out for announcements of upcoming social nights here, Discord, and our social media!
Minecraft
The realm has been reborn! Jump on our Discord or contact me for an invite!
TL;DR:
Life got in the way, motivation was down but we almost back. There's some Rocket League, Racing, Socials and STATS galore coming! Minecraft is here now though!
I need to post this here as I broke our front-facing website (more on that later).
We've been a bit quiet if you've not been around our Discord lately I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about why that is and what's been going on over the last year or so. There's a TL;DR at the end for those of you whom lack the time to read all the details.
What's the hold up?
The last 12 months or so have been quite a stressful time in the personal lives of the team, I won't speak of the others because that's not for me to discuss but I moved between jobs and had quite a steep learning curve that burned me out from anything outside of just doing that job, I didn't have the time or the motivation to organise events for TSG because I was flat from work. We had spent time trying to put systems in place so some aspects of the community could run themselves or at least have minimal input from us and at least keep things ticking along in case something like this happened but we just missed the mark on getting it in place.
So We Back?
There are some developments taking place, not all behind the scenes if you've been keeping track of things on Discord with a loose plan to return to organised online activities in late July/early August. So we not back yet* but it's coming real soon.
CANZStats and RocketSTATS
Part of the plans when it comes to keeping things formulated to be able to somewhat run themselves has been the establishment of an event/competition management platform. Stats has been a pet project of mine for some time now but we're fast approaching a point where I can start to think about how we can use it to manage our more competitive side of things. Starting, of course, with our racing and Rocket League arms but eventually looking at other games as well. Read on for a brief outline of how each Stats platform will aid us in organising things.
CANZStats
As far as organising series goes, the bulk of the work was in structuring everything and doing the results for rounds. When it came to updating championship standings back when we were Regional Gamers League Online Racing Community, that meant manually updating web pages and tables on forums. Hacking together pages with calendars and dates for events, who to contact with queries and the locations for each event. CANZStats automates the generating of a lot of this content. Admins create championships, add rounds at certain locations on specific dates to those championships, and then enters the results after each round. Championship tables are updated automatically and even factor in reports should points deductions be applied. Individual user profiles also track the users stats as part of their overall career so everyone gets a nice overview of their history with CANZ/RGL and eventually we hope to welcome other series onto the platform for them to be able to track their stats too. We're still in early testing for many features but hope to have an early public test build soon.
(For more info and a history of development check out the #statstalk channel on our Discord)
RocketSTATS
This one is a little more open-ended as thought has only started going into it in the last couple of weeks. As far as automating much of this goes we're taking a slightly different approach. Players register on the platform and start as free agents, they can create a team or apply to join a team. There are two formats of competition, ladder and knockout. When a knockout series is organised the teams apply in a first-in-format, the organiser sets the number of teams and the system will generate a knockout bracket based on the Team Rating's (TR's). A TR is determined by the Win/Loss ratio of the team as well as other factors such as Goals For/Against and average winning margin (how this is calculated is to be determined). A ladder format is the standard format for the platform, over a set period of time (determined at the time of creation) the teams will compete in a ladder tournament attempting to reach the top of the ladder by the end of the "season", similar formats to this limit the number of positions you can challenge above you on the ladder and that will be determined by the organiser. There's a bunch more planning to do here but this is the overview. Players will also earn a Player Rating (PR) for their overall career based on their overall stats as well as Match Ratings (MR) for their performances in individual games. We'll have more to talk about with this as we get closer to launch of the RocketSTATS platform.
CANZ Racing
As many might be aware, initially the name was "CANZ Racing Community" where CANZ stood for "Confederation of Australian and New Zealand Racing". We've changed it up slightly and it's now just "Community of Australian and New Zealand Racing". Not a huge change but for us its a perception that we're targeting a more social racing community with a hint of competitiveness (the Sporting Regulations aren't going anywhere) but nothing over the top serious, at least not to start out with. Once we build the community back up we can explore how we organise things.
Socials
Social nights have always formed a big part of the community aspect of TSG, now that a few of us have streaming capable connections (cheers NBN) socials are going to form an integral part of the rebuild phase of TSG's community, so keep an eye out for announcements of upcoming social nights here, Discord, and our social media!
Minecraft
The realm has been reborn! Jump on our Discord or contact me for an invite!
TL;DR:
Life got in the way, motivation was down but we almost back. There's some Rocket League, Racing, Socials and STATS galore coming! Minecraft is here now though!
![[Image: signature_S5.png]](http://scottbattye.com/uploads/signature_S5.png)
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