New Initiate/Clan Government

Hey all,
First, I'll address our new government system. S.T.A.R.S. and I have decided to model ourselves after the Roman Republic. We are both consuls, and Motor.On, Illuminox, and BF-109 Elite have been appointed to the Senate. All new recruits will be citizens, and we have yet to decide whether or not they will ever be elligable for senatorial appointment.

I'd like to send my personal congratulations to Knappenburger, who has recently been added to our list of citizens. He is our first recruit to the clan. Our recruitment policy is such - the consuls will decide whether or not they want to add a hopeful gamer to our list of citizens. If the senate disagrees, they can vote unanimously to veto the consuls' decisions. The consuls will again look at the case and have the ultimate decision. Any problems with this?

-Free Gun Here!

Ranking System Changed

Today, I changed the way the Counter-Strike: Source server ranks its players. Usually it is done by kill-death ratio, but I don't like that. Relatively new players have absolutely no chance to get ranked well on the server since they're just not that good yet. Second, everyone has bad days. Bad days destroy ratios. Third, all you have to do to get the top rank is hack when an admin's not there and get 10 kills or so in one death. Then, you quit and never play again. That'd be an impossible rank to beat for an honest player. If it's by kills, you have to play a lot. It gives the underdogs a chance by playing a lot rather than playing better than everyone on every round. Overall, it's a better system.

-Free Gun Here!

S.T.A.R.S.: The new ranking system is by total kills. I personally think that's B.S. It rewards the most devoted players instead of the best. To refute FGH's three points: first, new players shouldn't get ranked better than more experienced and more skilled players. That's just not fair. Second, if you have a bad day, then you need to have a good day after to make up for it. Third, VAC is on. It'll be hard for hackers to hack. And if they do, we can always reset their ranks. So FGH, I'd perfer if the CS:S server stays as K:D rankings instead of kill rankings. Fantics who play 24/7 should not be able to surpass good players.

FGH: There are definitely benefits to both systems. Trust me, one bad day can make it impossible to get back where you were. If you're a good player and you get 10 deaths in a row, you're royally screwed. You have to get 10 kills and no deaths to get back where you are - it's really fricken hard. If you have one bad day, you need like eight good days to make up for it. Who says new players would get ranked better than good players? Good players rack up kills faster. True, new players can get higher ranked than good players by playing obsessively, but that adds a new challenge that wasn't there before for the good players. VAC doesn't do crap. There are tons of VAC proof hacks. Anyway, new players probably won't get higher ranked than good players. Most new players don't ever come back to the server. Good players can easily outrank them since they can get more kills faster. That's where kds come in. I just like this system better since it offers players who aren't quite as good a shot at getting a decent ranking. The other thing is that kd ratios can be royally screwed up by bots. Whenever you play against one bot and one person, you're at a disadvantage. I always end up killing the bot but taking damage, and then getting killed by the person. The death counts, but the kill does not in that situation. So even though you got one kill, your kd went down. Since we're in disagreement, I think we should take a vote among the consuls and the senate. Please leave your comments.

Several Servers Established

Last night, S.T.A.R.S. and I established a few more servers. First, we set up a backup ventrilo server at vent2.noobcakes.com for when S.T.A.R.S.'s computer is sent in to be repaired. We also set up TeamSpeak (available at goteamspeak.com) at ts.noobcakes.com. Both servers run on the default ports. Check the website for details. Finally, we set up an IRC server at irc.noobcakes.com (surprise, surprise). It's also on the default port for IRC.

-Free Gun Here!

Vent Server Back Up!

Our most notable update for today is that our Ventrilo server is operational once more. Thanks to the brilliant rearrangement of S.T.A.R.S.'s desktop, the hard drives are now operational. S.T.A.R.S. cleverly swapped the HDDs into the space where the CD and DVD drives once were, effectively bypassing the burnt out controller on the motherboard. Long story short, S.T.A.R.S.'s desktop PC is now operational and will be restored to its old, full computing power shortly. The perks for us - we now have our Ventrilo server back up. The bad news - S.T.A.R.S. still has a lot of stuff to do and so far has rarely been available on X-Fire and Ventrilo. More good news - I'm there :).

We also have recently had a bit more action on our forums. It turns out that the Urban Dead branch was a good idea for boosting popularity, since we've had two new forum registrations - both from our group's allies in Urban Dead. I've also taken the liberty of promoting our servers at my tennis club, so we may have some new players as well.

Lost the train of thought, if I think of anything I'll be sure to tell you :).

-Free Gun Here!

Computer Restoration Process

Okay since S.T.A.R.S. has been unable to post due to the crash I described last post, I'll give the update for him. To my understanding, both hard drives from his desktop have been recovered and are in perfect working condition. The problem is that the disk controller on his motherboard is burned out, so he needs to get that repaired. Fortunately everything is still under warranty, so it's only a matter of time. In the near future our ventrilo server will be back up and running. A while ago I called for Motor.On to set one up at his house, but he's to oblivious to check the forums or the blog. I guess we'll just have to wait for S.T.A.R.S. to get his computer up and running. All other clan members have so far been out of touch. This is falling apart before it started...

-Free Gun Here!

I'm here and alive, sorta. I can kick Motor.On for you tomorrow at school if you'd like. I think that if we press on, we'll make this work, if not amazingly. Anyway, I actually can't kick Motor tomorrow, since he has some field trip. Whatever, there's always Tuesday.

-S.T.A.R.S.

Computer Crash

Hello all, S.T.A.R.S. here. My hard drives have both crashed (I'm thinking virus). We're considering going to a pro data recovery place, if it isn't amazingly expensive. Anyway, read about that on my blog. But in the short term, my main computer is down. What this means for you: not much. I won't be online often. And the Vent server is down. Other than that, all other clan servers and operations are continuing smoothly. Oh yeah, and the blog's banner is down. FGH, can you change that for me?

-S.T.A.R.S.

Taken care of. Good luck with the restoration process. Motor.On, you should set up a temporary vent server on your computer, since you're the only other one who can forward ports. (I'm currently unable.) See the forums for details.

-Free Gun Here!

Membership Drive

Okay, I've decided that in order for our servers to actually have players using them, we'll need to expand the clan. We've gotta get more members. I think the best approach is to have a membership drive. We'll put it in our scrolling server messages - "We are recruiting!" and put the frequency for the forums thing really high so that it comes up all the time. Same with the recruiting message. We need to put in a few server messages encouraging growth since our clan community is still far to small. I'm updating my own scrolling server messages now, and I'll update S.T.A.R.S.'s when I figure out how to, since Mani is waaaay different than AMX. Anyway, beggars can't be choosers as they say. In order to gain respect, we need to have good players on our servers too, but we'll pretty much grant membership to anyone who applies.

-Free Gun Here!

PS - Remember, the Urban Dead thing is different. The game doesn't require much skill, and anyone who wants to be part of our group and is willing to serve is in. That's separate from our FPS branch of the clan.

Urban Dead Support

Yeah, in case you guys haven't read the forums at all recently, I've added clan support to the MMORPG called Urban Dead. It's a lot of fun. I reccommend that you guys go to urbandead.com and create an account. See our wiki page for the information on our clan so that you can get to our safehouse. I'll add a member list on our wiki page for the Urban Dead section so that you can see who's in our clan. I plan to ally ourselves with other survivor groups. When you make your account, be a survivor and not a zombie!

-Free Gun Here!

My username in Urban Dead - sweirdo

Popularity

We've gotta increase our servers' popularity - that's the only way our clan will ever grow. Right now, our CS 1.6 server is more popular, but really 1.6 is a worse game. I'd rather play CS:S with people, but they're never on the server... If any of you have suggestions on how to increase our server popularity, please leave a comment or something. We need some sort of advertising campaign. Unfortunately with no money, it might be difficult.

-Free Gun Here!

Forums Reorganized

Not much going on this week. We reorganized the forums so the layout now is a little better... We've got different categories - servers, games, and miscellaneous. Much better than a category per game, I think.

T-shirts are in the near future for us. We've pretty much got the design down, we've just gotta find somebody who'll do it for cheap enough.

-Free Gun Here!

Treasury Established

Okay, so I failed to get VAC running on the servers. S.T.A.R.S. doesn't really know what he did to fix the Source server, and as it turns out, VAC's not running on it anymore... I'm not really sure what the problem is. However, we did work on something this weekend - a treasury. We may be creating an online store soon, where we will sell t-shirts and other merchandise. Right now, we've got a Google Adsense account running on this blog. If you don't mind, S.T.A.R.S., I'd like you to be treasurer of the clan since the adsense account is already in your name. As soon as I have your ok, I'll update the website listing you as treasurer.

Since my computer can't handle Battlefield 2, I decided to get Battlefield 2: Modern Combat for the PS2. It's a pretty fun game, but I still suck at it. Anyway, for those of you who have this game, I set up a clan there to be our BF2:MC branch. It's under the name of NoobCakes, with a tag of NBC. I still need to get myself under the Username of Free Gun Here!, since right now I'm operating under the handle "scotaro007". Add me to your friends list and I'll invite you to the clan, if you own the game.

-Free Gun Here!

VAC Security Problems

So far I've been experiencing problems starting my CS 1.6 Server with VAC security enabled. It fails to establish the connection with the VAC servers. As far as I know, however, the problem has been fixed on the Source machine. I just wanted to let you know what my project was for this weekend - getting VAC to work. Without VAC, the servers attract cheaters and hackers, which is something we discourage. S.T.A.R.S., since you seem to have fixed your server's VAC problems, would you mind sharing your secrets with me? I think that's a pretty high priority goal for the CS 1.6 server.

-Free Gun Here!

Well FGH, I'd love to tell you, but I have no idea what I did. I just ran the patch and tada, it worked. I didn't even realize that it worked. I suggest posting on several forums if you haven't already.

-S.T.A.R.S.

Okay I'll work on it... Maybe you can come over here today and we can work on it... Or I can go over there, which is much easier since you've got way better inet.

-Free Gun Here!

New Server MOTD

Today's update - a new message of the day. I made it an image instead of just text, since text is excruciatingly lame. If it doesn't work, let me know, but so far it seems to be working. Well I haven't got much else to say for today, so have fun on the servers!

-Free Gun Here!

Image URL - http://css.noobcakes.com/motd.jpg

Forums

Hey gang.
Exciting news - the forums are up today. Finally! Somehow S.T.A.R.S., being the miracle worker with computers that he is, managed to get MySQL (a database program) and PHPBB (the message board software) to communicate properly, a task that has daunted us for a long time. Please register and post to be part of the clan community. Pretty soon I'll have some new functions added to that forums, it just went up today so its still a work in progress. Well, all I have to say is please help us get our forums going strong!

Forums URL - http://forums.noobcakes.com

-Free Gun Here