Another long week over and done with… *whew* I live for the weekend! Let’s see what we got goin’ here news-wise…

Nexus defended it’s number one spot against XcP on the OGL CCTF ladder this past Thursday, defeating XcP by a score of 10-0. Unfortunately the capture limit on the server we played on was not set to 0, so the match ended a bit prematurely. XcP opted not to continue with the remaining 16 minutes left in the match. Probably a good thing the match ended when it did… this time around it took us a very long time to find an agreeable server :-/ Good game to XcP ;-) We’ll play again sometime, I’m sure.

YES it’s finally up and running! Hardfought is now hosting a CounterStrike Match port (yes… I said match :-P) which can be reserved for use via our ‘Reservation’ link to the left. Friendly fire is ON by default, and I currently don’t see any way that players can vote this on or off, so for the time being, this match port is only going to cater to the ‘FF is ON’ crowd. Hopefully Adminmod will release another version that allows this variable to be voted on… that way the match port would cater to *all* of the CounterStrike OGL teams out there, not just the ‘Friendly Fire ON’ ladder. The match port IP address is 63.89.108.18:27020.

A couple things to note about the CounterStrike Match port… I am running PunkBuster on this port (remotely, so it doesn’t consume any of the game server’s resources :-) ) and full compliance is turned ON. There’s a couple reasons why I am using PunkBuster on the match port… 1) there’s no way I could have an admin there for every match. Wouldn’t ask my admin’s to do that anyways… they’d have no free time left… and 2) I’m not going to tolerate *any* kind of cheating during an official match. PunkBuster (hopefully) should be able to take care of that. TK’ing isn’t going to be a concern… who wants to kill their own team during a match? :-P Also… the match port server variables are set EXACTLY to comply with current OGL CounterStrike rules. And, because of adminmod, players can use ‘rockthevote’ in public chat to vote for whatever map they need to play their matches on without having an admin present. Soooo… go reserve the port for your next clan match/practice/scrim, and be sure to e-mail me for the join password… and don’t forget to download the latest client version of PunkBuster, you’ll need it.

Other server news… due to the severe lack of play on the Quake3 public ports, I took them down :-/ Team Arena has turned out to be one big flop… the number of people playing that game has dwindled considerably. I’ve talked to a few other server admins and they’ve all reported the same thing. I’m leaving the Quake3 match port up, of course… that’s always been used, and the community actually appreciates having that type of server available. I also decided to resurrect the Classic CTF port. What the hell… it’s the only variation of Quake3 that I play anymore, might as well keep a port up… maybe it’ll get some use… heh :-)

Nexus has been challenged by Immortal COIL on the OGL CCTF ladder, we’re to play early next week. More news then… see ya folks.

K2