I was chatting with extine the other day and I mentioned a pipe dream of mine. Thought I would elaborate a bit here with the comp community a bit to see what everyone thinks.

For those that are unaware, I wrote a server plugin called MatchMod. Details can be found here (http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=102299). In a nutshell it is designed to aid people in running league matches by providing First/second half, score announcer, individual ready-up, SourceTV management and so forth. Basically take the heavy lifting of a match out of the players hands to get thing running a lot smoother.

Now, I bet your wondering where Hawkeye is going with this.. I have this thought of having a group of servers, similar to the tf2.pug.na servers that are designed around matches. The servers would house the rules from various leagues. So matches can be run on central servers, SourceTV relays would be relatively easy to setup. The main idea I have is for a given player can join the server and issue a !match <ID> command and it will pull the config for the match from the appropriate league, and change the map and your ready to go for the match.

The reason I would go with this approach is a couple different things..

Centralized Match Reporting (not needing the screenshots and such)
Ability to police players in a match (only allow registered SteamIDs for the match)
Locked down server configs and up to date league configs
SourceTV recordings of matches and so forth
Stats would be possible if a package existed publically to handle seasons/leagues/matches etc..


Obviosly, there is a LOT of work for this to even go anywhere, mainly I am guaging what features people most want to know where I should update the plugin to do, but I think it would be easier of leagues basically shared the cost of the servers and save a LOT of hassles and keep it nicer for the players.

What do you guys think would be most useful?

While this has a ton of features that would be really awesome, isn't having third party mods frowned upon by leagues? Aside from ESEA's home grown servers and plugin, I know that the servers being played on are designed to be as vanilla as possible so that there are few issues while playing (crashes, bugs, etc etc).

i really like your ideas hawkeye!

Basically, the line of thinking I am going by is this..

Typically, Plugins/Sourcemod for match servers is a bad thing since you can never fully guarentee a group is playing by the rules. What the goal I had in mind is this.

Leagues could have a series of servers in various data centers to have matches that support, full logs, SourceTV, and so forth that team can use to guarentee good connections and using plugins in a 'secured' environment as in the league would have control. It would also take ALL the work of playing a match out of the hands of the players so no need to verify SteamIDs, automated match reporting and guarentee all the players are running the correct .cfg files for their server.

The issue here is, I am not 100% certain how many servers would be used at a given time, Monday Nights are big for TWL, others seem to bounce to other days, that so it's difficult to really figure out how many servers one would need. However, the Lobby system that Floor Master is writing could be coupled onto this concept, where the leagues have a website where players hit for the lobby to get all the players in and authenticated, from there they connect to the server.

So basically all of the perks of the ESEA client without the $6/month fee?

So basically all of the perks of the ESEA client without the $6/month fee?

That'd be great for TWL :-)

This is a great idea, and it sounds like in terms of servers there either needs to be a coalition of people willing to lend private servers, or this needs to be a mod people can utilize without giving up any privleges/usage from their team server.

Could a distributable server mod accomplish all thats desired without giving up too much corruptability?

BTW. The more reliable match times the better.

So basically all of the perks of the ESEA client without the $6/month fee?

In short yeah, that's really what it boils down to..

That'd be great for TWL :-)

This is a great idea, and it sounds like in terms of servers there either needs to be a coalition of people willing to lend private servers, or this needs to be a mod people can utilize without giving up any privleges/usage from their team server.

Could a distributable server mod accomplish all thats desired without giving up too much corruptability?

The MatchMod Plugin, in the ZIP includes CEVO/ESEA style configs (not official from either league, but I believe they are close), I did adapt the TWL configs into the format that works a bit better with MatchMod. The Config for the 4v4 KTH tournament that is on-going is really one I ripped out of the mod and made a couple changes on for class limit and disable 2 halfs and overtime. So in essence that is a potential server back download, and I did outline the recommended changes in sourcemod (Disable all but like 5 of the native plugins AKA Warmode for them) which keeps things very stable. The primary issue is most teams are and have no desire to learn/figure out server config at an in-depth level since it is really rather boring and unecessary for them to play the game. ETF2L actually has a slightly more difficult config since they use a single file and then you manually switch a couple of CVARs depending on the gamemode.

The biggies for the leagues right now (talked briefly about TWL needs with TrainRiderJ before the season started) is player authentication, Automated match reporting just to keep things easier for their players, as well as making sure the right config is being used by the teams. The stats personally I am kinda meh about but some players seem to like it.

So from my perspective, I can code an independent system easier, but that doesn't really help the leagues out in any way. So getting something that splits both worlds would be a good thing.

Shot you a PM. I think this is good stuff and could really be a benefit to a lot of competitive teams and the learning curve of managing a match.

It also has a big benefit to server admins such as myself who provide servers for over 10 comp teams which include our own community league.

Get at me if you want to talk about any of this in regards to CEVO.

i personally would love more than anything an ability to download and watch CEVO matches as i can do with ESEA.

just throwing my paper into the suggestion box...

Okay,

Presently I am working on a video on how to get it up and running and using it for server admins and players. The presentation will be broken up so there will be one section that can show players exactly how it works and the commands. Without sitting through all the server/admin side of things.

I am also reviewing all the .cfgs that are in the mod, mainly to make it a bit less cluttered. The base design of the configs has always been CEVO/ESEA centric, but I have been running a TWL config set for the past month or so without any problems. (PuGs are entertaining when people see it the first time). I will take a good look at the CEVO rules and update those just as soon as graham posts the KOTH rules for the league.

As far as the stats, Each match will have a log file generated that covers the opening respawn all the way to the end of the match. If someone can assist with stats parsing to filter out the haltime and postgame (if overtime happens) the stats would be pretty solid to look at any given match. I have a PILE of logs available (what I was refering to in the other thread).

Also, the SourceTV demos would be awesome to just upload, I run my server through NFO which is windows hosting were I cannot do a CRON job, so its the next day before I can safely pickup the demos once they are zipped up by there job. Having a poll every 15 minutes is iffy since the demo file is created as an empty file and sits until the end of the match from what I have been seeing. There is a CRON job on Linux that will make sure its not in use and upload it wherever, so Linux hosted servers (Apoplexy as an example) should be good to go.

The logs on the otherhand, according to Cinq, are created after they are closed, so that could infact work to automatically get them out and uploaded (similar to what he has setup with the IRC channels).

Once the video is off my plate (next day or so I am hoping) everyone hopefully will have a much better understanding of how things work and where things are dropped on the servers.

I just pushed the 1.0.7 release of MatchMod public. Can be downloaded from here: http://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=102299

Included is configs for CEVO, TWL, ETF2L and PUGs. Please bear in mind, the leagues really haven't formally approved anything for full on uses, the configs are mainly there for players to evaluate the usefulness.

I am about 80% through a Webcast that covers how to install, configure and use the plugin in detail which should help a lot of players get it up and running quickly.

If anyone wants to take a good look at the mod, please let me know. I know quite a few of you have hit my server and saw aspects of it.