Hello There!

Welcome to the 'early access' of a fully re-vamped Playtopia! I could write a 10,000 word essay here but rather than crap on where it's not needed, the short story is that after many, many, many years I've recreated the Playtopia website in a way that just might become a viable bridge to all the scattered gaming communities (specifically in Australia, but there's no reason it wouldn't scale internationally). Many or all of the features here are obviously available elsewhere but intended for a huge audience and wide focus. The idea behind recreating them here (many social features are basic clones inspired by various social platforms is to give gamers a familiar look and feel to how they interact but be able to keep everything gaming focused. I'll save the rest for real posts when things are live... let's continue with why we're here.

The Mission of Testing

Being one person with a dream makes it very hard to test the in's and outs of hundreds and hundreds of tiny features. This new site is also built completely custom from the ground up without the aid of an existing GUI framework like WordPress  and I naturally test most things using a god admin account (more on that below) and have my own vision of how things should work and look/feel. However, I certainly don't know it all and quite possibly don't even know what people do and don't want! That's where you come in, dear testers.

 

Testing is about

• Using the site generally, but frequently. See what performs and what doesn't.
• Using all of the features you can and then getting more access to use even more.
• Looking at the browser developers console and seeing if any errors pop up if you notice strange behaviour.
• Recording and reporting back with strange behaviour, broken features, console errors, anything that essentially isn't working properly or doesn't make sense to you.
• Providing feedback on the site, its features, looks, feel, whatever you think!

I want to hear every last bit of feedback; are there too many features? Are there not enough? Have I missed something or over-cooked it? Do you think anyone WANTS this sort of site and features anymore?! (probably not the forums tbh...) I'm all ears. 

Features List (Frontend)

This thing is a bit of a monolith and there's a lot to it, so I'll try and keep the blurbs brief because as testing continues more and more discussions will open up, you don't need me writing every tiny detail straight off the bat. If you can't see a feature, that's cool - you're a basic user to start with. Those willing to go beyond basic testing, I can open up a role at a time for them to continue testing the backend (e.g. Admin, not the tech stack) of the site as well.

• News - Backed by a relatively basic editor and workflow system for people to write and submit articles of any type and have an admin team review and publish the articles.
• Forums - Fairly basic, includes a reddit style up/down vote.
• Tournaments - Designed to be a tournament manager and bracket visualizer for any game, all major formats, prize pools and match history / stats. Games and 'positions' or player roles per game all customizable in the admin backend.
• Ladders - Designed to bring back the glory days of constant ladder competitions like the CyberGamer days. Allowing any game and teams or individuals to challenge above their rank and fight for the top spot, creating constant competition and need to defend positions to avoid de-ranking.
• Teams - Team/Clan directory and roster management to support the tournaments and ladders. Allows sub-teams so large teams can have multiple teams in the same tournament, or organize their members into starters, subs, and training players.
• Community
  • Profile - Public display of your profile including XP/Level/Rank, metadata, gaming library stats (more on this later), social interactions, info input in your profile backend, achievements, and recent activity log.
  • Game Guides - An additional editor and workflow for users to create their own guides for games, speed runs, tactics, achievements, collectables, whatever they like. Includes tagging for different item and information types, progress tracking checklists, and custom glossaries that can be populated by searching guides for tagged text.
  • Groups - A way for interest groups to have isolated discussions and organize events.
  • Events - Public event creation and listings.
  • Marketplace - Just a marketplace to sell things.
  • Share Content - Personal content feed / expression with the ability to follow users to ensure you see their content in your feed.
  • Leaderboards - Rankings across all site areas. Everything you can do on the site is recorded in one way or another and used to increase XP and rank etc. Leaderboards show users where they're upto against others but also splits the metrics to where the social points come from (competitive play, social interaction, etc).
  • Businesses - A business directory and map where any user can submit a gaming business and tag what sort of products they sell. Backed by a workflow for admins to review and approve before it goes live.

Features List (Backend)

• Dashboard - Summarised information and links around the site. The 'Gaming Config' menu here is the only unique feature that isn't just data pulled from other pages.
• Profile - Lots of options here on information to display on your profile, display picture, the ability to connect to Steam and Retroachievements to import game library data and achievement stats. Can also see teams you're in, people you friend or follow etc, site achievements, social stats and XP.
• Messages - Internal messenger / mailbox for users to chat 1:1 or in groups.
• News CMS - WYSIWYG editor with SEO/meta settings, tags, and featured image fields, designed for writing content in a variety of templates for the front page and filtered news type pages. Articles can be drafted and saved for continuing later, submitted, reviewed by admins and published (to front page) or rejected with reasons.
• Forum Management - Exactly what it says on the tin. Simplistic but also able to lock forums (like admin) to RBAC roles under User Management.
• Tournaments - Top level tournament management to manage and create tournaments and ladders, as well as configure game data (CS2, TF2, etc) and positions (IGL, Rifler, etc). Also contains the tournament and ladder analystics dashboard
• User Management - The RBAC (role-based access control) headquarters where access roles can be created and assigned to users, user analytics and stats, audit logs, and user functions such as suspend/lock account, delete, set custom title, and impersonate (act as user and mimic their permissions).
• Business Directory - Approval center for any businesses submitted on the business directory page.
• Settings - Time/date settings, theming (not done), privacy and API settings, microservices architecture map and controls, and health monitors / graphs / statistics.

So how is feedback best given, tracked, discussed? Well again I'm all ears... at first, I'd suggest using the Discord server (which is yet to be revamped) but will keep everyone in one place and conversation flowing. Again, EVERYTHING is open for discussion as I'm dedicated to making the entire site as useful and intuitive as it can be for all gamers.

 

Know more people wanting to test? Invite them!