Terminology changes
As part of the process of taking a comprehensive look at the entire system and thinking about how it should work for all types of games and organized play groups, we’ve changed a couple of the terms we use in Warhorn:

• The attendee role once called “judge” is now called GM
• The use of “game” to describe an activity occurring in a schedule slot was confusing in a lot of different ways, so we now call this a game session or more generally an activity session

We’ll be continually adjusting the vocabulary as we go forward, especially as we start to look at enabling Warhorn to better serve non-RPG games and even non-game activities such as talks, classes, performances and other types of shenanigans that people get up to at gaming events.

One account to rule them all
Probably the most requested feature through the years has been the ability to have a single Warhorn account for all events. This was the first feature we built, and I think it will be one of the most welcomed. Now when you become a Warhorn member you have access to every event in the system (except private ones to which you haven’t been invited, of course)! No more confusion around why you can’t log in to AwesomeCon’s site when you already registered for FLGS Weekly LFR games.

Your account has many of the goodies you’ve become accustomed to with sites like Facebook, such as profile pictures and friend relationships. We recognize that gaming is at its core a social activity, and we are embracing that notion with 2e. Future features for paying members will make it super easy for you to find the events your friends are attending and sign up for games with them.

You can also specify your geographic location so that in the future we can help you find events occurring near you. We’re very interested in any other location-based services that will enhance your gaming experience, so if you have any ideas, let us know!

Dashboard
When you log into Warhorn, you immediately land on your dashboard. This page gives you quick access to the upcoming events that you’re attending and those that you’re organizing as well as public events that were published since the last time you logged in.

We’ll be enhancing the dashboard over time to provide search capabilities so that you can find events based on the games and other activities they’re offering, whether or not your friends are attending, and other factors. We’re also planning even more advanced search and notification features for paying members.

Event setup
Finn’s done a great job of making sense of the current site’s messy event setup interface and breaking it out into a number of simpler steps.

Perhaps the most noticeable new setup feature is the ability to publish your events without having to fill out a request form and waiting for me to approve it. Set up and publish your event on your own time while I play Rock Band and tank Icecrown Citadel!

Event setup is accomplished with a wizard-style, step-based interface that guides you through the entire process. When you’re done, you can publish the event so that it appears in the public event listings, or you can keep it as a draft and come back to re-edit later.

Event URLs
I have been very fickle through the years with my URL naming schemes. You may recall how I went through a http://www.warhorn.net/CamelCaps period of a year or two before switching back to http://www.warhorn.net/alllowercase URLs.

There was a technical limitation that kept me from being able to follow the lowercase, hyphen-separated convention typically used for news article and blog post URLs, but that’s gone with 2e. Now your event’s slug (the part of the URL that specifically identifies your event) is computed based on your event’s title. If your event is named “Awesome Con 2009″, then its URL will be http://warhorn.net/awesome-con-2009.

In the future we want to give you the ability to customize the slug. Use your own naming schemes, not one imposed on you by the man!

Venues
When you enter the details of an event’s venue, you can specify a street address, which gives us the ability to generate maps and include your event in location-based searches, and you can choose to make the venue private so that those who aren’t registered for your home game can’t show up on your front step 5 minutes before game time. Venues you create are saved so that you can use them again for subsequent events.

Overview content
The content that appears on your event’s overview page has been completely overhauled. Remember how the page had huge holes in it if you didn’t specify any “hotel” or “community” information? That goofy layout is gone. Also, we provide a full-featured WYSIWYG rich text editor so that you can format your content without having to be an HTML monkey. And you can preview the content as it will look on the overview page so that you can get it right before publishing the event.

Registration fees
We’ve also totally reworked the registration fee system. Rather than giving you a very low level, hard to understand system of “payment packages”, we’ve addressed the most common use cases for organizers who need to charge registration fees. We support all-access and daily registration, early registration discounts, and other arbitrary fees and discounts.

As before, we use PayPal to process payments, but this time around we’re integrating more tightly with them so that Warhorn will know when payments have been processed in order to automatically clear people to sign up for games. Attendees will no longer have to wait around for you to get email from PayPal and then come to Warhorn to manually clear them.

Slot management
After you’ve done the initial setup of your event, you’ll want to specify the event schedule. You do this by creating “slots”, or blocks of time to which activities are assigned. The existing site’s slot management interface is a morass of menus; 2e’s is much more compact, and the menus are hidden until you need see them.

Scenario management
Another long-standing complaint about the current site is the need to re-enter scenario information for every event. With 2e, we have created a site-wide scenario catalog. Over time, with your help, we will populate it with every known scenario, so that when you go to schedule a game session, you’ll simply type in the first few characters of the scenario’s name and choose the appropriate one from an auto-completed list.

Paying members can create customized scenarios for their events, either based on existing scenarios from the site-wide catalog or totally from scratch.

We’ve also built a much more comprehensive list of RPGs (295 at present) and given you the ability to add new ones yourselves without having to email me.

Finally, we’ve added the ability to tag a scenario with the level of rules knowledge needed, the scenario’s thematic content, and who’s responsible for providing characters (the GM or the players).

GM approval
Organizers need better tools to manage which people are allowed to function as GMs, so we’re giving them to you. The first such tool allows the organizer to approve or reject attendees who sign up for game sessions as GMs. Only approved GM signups are included in the summary counts for each session. When a GM is approved, if a game session has been configured appropriately, a new table will be opened (subject to available capacity) and the player waitlist adjusted.

In the future we’ll be adding additional GM tools for paying members, such as the ability to maintain a “whitelist” of trusted members whom are always approved to act as GMs at events you organize.

Registration management
As those of you running large events know, the current site’s registration list gets unwieldy very quickly as the number of attendees grows. And because the list shows so much data, it’s hard to focus on the specific information you need when you’re just trying to perform a routine management function. I’ve felt this pain myself, and I think we’ve got a pretty good solution to the problem.

The 2e registration list is automatically filtered to show you only particular sets of attendees, specifically those who are cleared to sign up for sessions, those who are pending (not yet cleared), and those who have canceled their registrations. You can clear pending attendees directly from the list, and for those who have canceled, you can see how much of a refund they are owed and their reason for cancellation.

There are also filters for those attendees who have been approved for GM sessions and those who have sessions which are still pending approval. The list shows the game sessions for which each attendee is signed up as a GM and allows you to approve pending signups.

The list is paged, so that you can scroll through the list 25 (or 50) attendees at a time, and you can sort it by a number of different attributes. These techniques keep the page size small and focus you on the set of attendees you need to work with to accomplish a specific task.

We’re still in the process of building the registration management section, so things may still change before you we roll it out, but I hope this gives you a good idea of how we’re addressing problems in the existing site.

What’s on deck?

Oh man, there’s still a lot to be done. Right now there’s no way to create game sessions and assign them to slots, and there’s no schedule interface for attendees to browse or use to sign up for sessions. We also have a bunch of work ahead of us to enable registering for an event and managing user account profiles and settings. And there are a number of additional features we’ll be building for paying members, such as table mustering and the character registry. Finally, let’s not forget visual design, where we put a skin on the as-yet-unadorned bones of the site.

When can you see it?

Though a small group of alpha testers has been working with us for months, we still need to take care of some of the work I mentioned above before we’re comfortable opening up the new site to a wider audience.

Those of you who are in the software business will be familiar with the phrase “release early, release often”. I’m generally in favor of this practice, but frankly, we are in a strange situation with 2e; we have 8 years’ of expectations built up as to what our site is supposed to provide.

We don’t want to make 2e available simply as an unattractive patchwork of disconnected features that winds up giving people a bad impression of what we’re ultimately trying to accomplish and driving them off. So, we’re waiting to show it off more widely for a while longer, until we’ve reached a point where we think people will be able to get really excited and see a migration path away from the current site.

Finn and I would love to hear what you think about all this. We welcome comments on this blog or on our pages at Facebook and the Wizards community site. Or, if you’d rather talk to us in private, drop us a line at info@warhorn.net.

Thanks! -bcm

In the course of building these features and planning the event signup interface, we’re making plenty of tough decisions. Building a platform like Warhorn with a team of only two people requires constant re-evaluation of the features we include and the way in which we implement them. Some features we considered initially have been thrown out. Some are under evaluation for later releases. Some have morphed into different shapes than we envisioned at first.

Most importantly, these constraints have helped us keep 2e clean, tight, and extremely functional. You know how a certain office suite just keeps spamming out feature after feature after feature, resulting in a confusing interface that seems to want to keep you from actually writing a letter or building a spreadsheet? You won’t find that in 2e.

As an interaction designer, I’m very pleased with the lack of clutter and the focus on task flow that we’ve manage to achieve thus far. Trimming the fat is sometimes frustrating but I can’t argue with the results.

While Brian makes updates to the code (and spends some time out of town), I’m moving forward on design for the slot/scenario/table setup function. We’re entering our next “sprint”—a block of time in which we develop a section of the new site. Sprints are part of a methodology called “agile development”. The idea is that you prioritize the project into manageable chunks, prioritize working software over comprehensive intra-company documentation, and rapidly iterate instead of exhaustively spec’ing. Put simply, you cut as much waste out of the process as you can without sacrificing usability or stability.

Agile is a development model that works well for small teams like Brian and me because it keeps both of us busy all the time. During each sprint, I test the things we built during the previous sprint and spec the things to build during the next sprint. This (theoretically) keeps Brian’s task list full of revisions and new coding. In a more traditional system, he’d be sitting on his hands a lot of the time waiting for a big pile of documentation from me—and then I’d spend a big stretch of time waiting for him to work through all the coding.

The slot setup design is pretty challenging so far but I think we’ve got some neat interface ideas that should make it easy and intuitive. Stay tuned!

It’s a long and fatiguing process, but it’s a majority of the brainwork for how the site is structured. Thoroughly documenting interactions ensures that we catch the tricky questions early on in the process. For example, if you’re “cloning” a previous event (a new feature in Warhorn!), how many options does Warhorn display? Every event you’ve ever organized? Only the most recent ones? If the latter, what does “recent” mean? These are questions we want to answer right up front so we don’t get caught in the middle of coding and have to backpedal.

I find this part of the design process fascinating because it’s the first time I get to put myself in your shoes. I’m not worried about how hard it is to code, or how the pages are laid out, or even what functions go on what pages. I’m solely concerned with how you, a Warhorn player or event organizer, go about your various interactions with Warhorn. Once I’ve got those down, I can start building screens that make your interactions easy to accomplish.

Please keep in mind that for now Warhorn LLC is still funded by donations and that we’re putting most of our effort into designing and building Warhorn 2E, the next generation of the site. This necessarily limits how much we can do to build out the infrastructure for hosting the existing site on the new server. That said, we will absolutely work to minimize or eliminate service interruptions. We simply ask for your patience and understanding during this time of transition.

Rest assured that when 2E launches, it will be professionally hosted and managed by expert system operators. Part of the value of Warhorn 2E will be an increased level of support and reliability across the board, for all users, whether free or paid.

After moving to the new server, some new troubleshooting capabilities helped me determine the issue was with Hotmail’s implementation of SPF, or Sender Policy Framework, a relatively new email standard that helps combat email forgery.

Here’s what was happening: Warhorn would send an email message using the address of the event organizer (e.g. somebody@hotmail.com), and Hotmail would refuse to deliver the message because the Warhorn server was not authorized to send messages from hotmail.com. Bad news.

I have updated Warhorn to now send all email from a warhorn.net address. This should resolve the problem of mysteriously missing messages. If anybody continues to see a problem with dropped email, please let us know (though, as always, make sure your spam filters are letting warhorn.net through). Thanks!

In order to deliver these features in a timely basis, the only real option was to quit my day job and launch Warhorn LLC, a company dedicated to developing and operating Warhorn full-time. I have turned to my long time friend, fellow gamer, senior user experience developer, and co-owner of the highly successful gaming store Endgame Oakland: Finn Kisch, to help build this product and company into the system you’ve been asking for.

I’ve always said that, no matter what, users will be able to use Warhorn for free, without having to look at ads, and I’m not going to break that promise. The foundation of Warhorn 2E is an improved, free service, with powerful new capabilities that let you:

• Establish a single user account for the entire site. No more re-entering your personal details every time you register for an event!
• Connect with your friends to see what events they’re going to and what games they’ve signed up for
• Setup recurring events (eg. weekly or monthly game days) via an easier and more intuitive interface
• View the redesigned main event listings, which will include recurring game days

We’re also introducing an exciting set of premium features that will allow Warhorn to transform your event gaming experience for a small monthly subscription fee. These premium features let you:

• Choose a specific table and/or judge when you sign up for a game. No more wondering what table or judge you will get assigned. You’ll be able to choose for yourself when you register
• Sign up for tables your friends are playing in. Now you can guarantee a spot with your pals rather than hoping it just works out for you to play together. You’ll even be able to simultaneously register for tables as a group!
• Receive personalized notifications when events are added that meet the criteria you specify (eg. proximity, campaigns/scenarios offered, etc.)
• Save and update your character details (eg. class, level, play history, and scenario “wish list”) in a PC registry. When you sign up for a game, you’ll be able to select which PC you’re bringing to the game right from the table registration menu
• Track your gaming schedule seamlessly via integration with iCal, Google Calendar and other popular personal calendar programs

Later this year, we’ll be bringing premium services to event organizers, including graphical table mustering, customized event skins and scenario descriptions, judge/volunteer management tools, and more. Further down the road, we’ll be powering up game store owners, organized play network and campaign administrators, and even game publishers. We think there are lots of ways we can help bring the different parts of the gaming community together to make playing games together easier and more fun.

I hope that you’re all as excited as I am about our plans, and we want to hear from you! Become a fan of our Facebook page and start a discussion, or follow us on Twitter @warhornllc. Also, drop by from time to time and check out our blog here at warhorn.net. We’ll be updating it often to let you know how things are going, and to give you sneak peeks as we build and launch new features and design the final look for 2E. Thanks for using Warhorn – game on!

–
Brian Moseley,
Chief Suspect, Warhorn LLC