IT for games
A lot of the tools we need to organize players are the same tools large enterprise use. Of course the cheapest (read: free) wins. That’s why we use Google sheets, Discord. But I do wish we could use things like Airtable sometimes for example. Most of them are in $5 or more per user per month* range. There’s just no budget for that in an alliance of 1000+. That would be a lot more coffee we’d need ;)
But the free stuff is pretty good. And even better when you actually use it effectively. Which is why I was so embarrassed it took me THIS long to figure out a simple way to organize VOID google sheets. We use a lot of google sheets. That means a lot of permissions. In EVE we want secret things to remain secret, so not having open permissions is important. And people come and go, so updating permissions is important and also time consuming if you have to do it for every sheet every time someone joins or leaves. Another issue was having to get myself, as Executor, added to just about everything.
Google Drive is all it took. I don’t know why I didn’t over a year ago. The trick is folder and files inherit the permissions of their parent folder. So you can effectively edit many permissions at once. This is the exact screenshot my post to my alliance had when I described what we were going to do. It seemed pretty obvious in retrospect.
As a bonus point it was then very easy to add a Google service account later to help facilitate Discord to Google Sheet integrations.
It’s the little things!
