Devlog KAG Keeping you in The Loop - September 2017 Roundup

Hey Folks,

The last month (plus change) has been about sorting everything out community-side. We've got new admins, the discord server has continued to flourish, the community repositories are hooked up to the internal ones properly, and we've got two new "direct" contributors. There's been a lot of fiddling in control panels, preparing paperwork, and peering at command-lines. Sorry for a boring text-only post, it's hard to take a compelling screenshot of this kind of thing :)

• New Admins:
  Definitely the most visible development for players; 10 new admins will be patrolling the official servers in addition to the existing crew. You can also call them to the game on discord with "@Ingame Server Admin" in the general or help channels. Huge thanks to @Galen for spearheading this and to the OKSA crew in each region who chimed in on the applications. Welcome to the new admins!
  
• Discord Server:
  For those that haven't joined yet, the official discord server has flourished nicely. There's currently over 120 users online, almost 600 users total. It's been a hub of discussion, organisation, memes, and cheery shitposting since it opened and shows no sign of slowing down, so if you haven't joined yet, get on it. Thanks to the administration team and three cheers to @Furai getting over his irc-itis and joining
  
• Repositories Aligned:
  This lets us directly use the github kag-base repository alongside our internal repos, which is much better than manually reconciling the changes like I had to before this change was made. In particular, I should be able to merge public pull requests much more regularly, which will reduce friction on community developers contributing fixes and features. If you're interested, check out the #development channel on discord.
  
• Direct Contributors:
  We've brought AsuMagic and Fuzzle on board to contribute to our internal repos directly, including the engine. This will let us service modder's requests and concerns more quickly and should help with finding bugs too as there'll be more eyes on the code. There will likely be a bit of a warming-up period as they learn to navigate the rough edges of our dated codebase, but we're looking forward to working with them.

The community has also been busy organising their own stuff:

• KAG World Cup:
  The 2017 KWC has started being organised and currently has 70 members. You can check out the social forum here if you want to get involved or find out more.
• Gather:
  The Australian community is hosting regular 5v5 gather games via their discord server. I took part this Monday - it was a nice collaborative atmosphere with some good coordination and would be a good alternative to pub games if you're feeling frustrated there or want to up your game. Anyone is welcome, but there's currently only one server which is located in Australia. There's talk of bringing it to the official discord server and other regions too, if that's something people are interested in. The system is currently developed by cameron (cameron1010 on the kag forums) so he's the one to bug about that.
• Groups:
  The "Groups" feature on the forums has had an activity purge to keep things neat and tidy. FuzzyBlueBaron was responsible for the spring cleaning.

Next month should involve another build with more community maps, a whole host of fixes and improvements game-side, and doubtless more community shenanigans.

Can't wait!
Max