It Takes a Great Team
Many of today's popular games are about a co-operative experience. Shooters (both third-person and first-person) require at least a moderate amount of teamwork from their players, if those players expect to be successful. Squad-based shooters and tactical shooters require even more coordination and planning from players. Success in these games isn't the work of one person, it is the work of many moving parts reacting to situations as they unfold. Each person brings their own skillset, and each person is required to react dynamically as new needs arise.
MMOs such as World of Warcraft have expended this idea as well. The whole idea of a "raid group" is to design a much larger cooperative team, from a much larger pool of possible players and characters. The nature of an MMO means that your players are more variable in nature, and the characters (with all of the choices for race, class, skills, spells, armor, weapons, items, etc.) are infinitely more variable. But, even with the greater variances, many of these groups run like clockwork as they run through the end-game content over and over.
It may go without saying (and it often does), but it needs to be said - running a successful gaming website requires the same kind of teamwork. And I am lucky to have a great team. Our volunteer staff of Editors/Mods do a great job in the day-to-day running of the site, but I want to take a moment to really thank the Admin Team that works behind the scenes.
These last couple of years have brought dramatic shifts to the WSGF. A few years ago our landscape covered MediaWiki, phpBB, and numerous static php pages. It was difficult to manage and our content was becoming stagnant and disjointed. It was often difficult to find even simple bits of info on the site. We decided to migrate everything under one platform - Drupal. This would give us a place for "data" (game info), blogs, news, reviews and the forum - all under one roof. It was a long struggle to build the site, and migrate it; but we got it done.
CrackerJackMack has always been the "server guy". For a long time, he actually hosted the WSGF for free. This generous offering was a great benefit to me personally (as I pay the bills), but also to the site as a whole (as we had someone truly knowledgeable running the server). He also helped us to migrate hosting from box to box, and provider to provider, with relative trouble-free execution. He was also the person who first suggested Drupal (but we're not holding that against him).
Delphium jumped in about the time we were deciding to do the migration (this was almost two years ago), and volunteered to help with the Drupal architecture. Delphium dove in head first and learned huge amounts about Drupal and how it works. He was responsible for creating the templates (e.g. how a game page in the MGL looks), the views (the list of games in the MGL index), and the forms for inputting all that data. It seems easy enough, but the back-end work required to make all this happen is enormous. Oh, and he also themed the whole site!
AussieTimmeh is beyond many things a great motivator. The sheer amount of grunt work he puts in, the collecting of ideas and team actions, and the positive reinforcement for the work we are doing is nothing short of amazing. AussieTimmeh managed to migrated HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of games from the old wiki pages into the new Drupal system. I did a couple hundred myself, and it's finger-breaking, eye numbing work, and it takes forever. He also took our byzantine grading system, and turned it into a flow chart that we could simplify and solidify. He then turned that into a Drupal rules flow that allows the site to automatically grade games for widescreen and multi-monitor support as you enter them. And he follows all of that work up with testing, testing and more testing of the site. Oh, and did you see that he added a hundred new Detailed Reports to our games database this year! Holy cow!!! And, the name is pronounced Aussie-Tim-E (a la TImmy in South Park), not Aussie-Tim-a (a la a bad Australian accent), or as some of us like to call him, AwesomeTimmeh!
What do I do? Not enough, let me tell you. I started the whole thing, so that bit's my fault. I try to provide vision and direction, and help where I can. But, I never feel like I'm pulling the most weight. There are other Editors/Mods on the site who do a great job as well, and I will be pointing them out in the future. But, I wanted to share with everyone the amazing team we have that has worked tirelessly over the last two years to consolidate and migrate the site onto Drupal, squash bugs, work performance issues, admit defeat, go back to phpBB3 and integrate that back into the Drupal.
I think we're finally where we wished we had been a year or so ago. I appreciate all of you, my visitors and members, but I would love it if you help me express our collective appreciation to these guys. If it wasn't for them, the WSGF would simply have died away, or be close to doing so. It's been a rouge couple of years, but I feel we're now on a trajectory to be more and do more - and it's all because of having a great team!