Hi there gang. New month, new news. Yay :-P

Hardfought/Fragwire LAN party – got some more details for ya about the LAN event of the year… well, except maybe for Quakecon. Or some of the past CPL events. OK… other than those, it’s the LAN event of the year :-P Let’s see… we’ve got a couple more sponsors, among them are CompUSA and Belkin. I don’t even know the total list of sponsors anymore, it’s gotten kinda big. Just that the amount of prizes and stuff to give away/win will be impressive. I can’t tell you what some of those items will be, so don’t ask! :-) One thing I can divulge to you, is that the CounterStrike tournament has gone from $300 to $500 dollars for first place… that’s a hundred bucks a piece for each teammate. That could cover your entire room expense while staying here for the LAN. There will also be prizes for those who do well in the Descent 3, Unreal Tournament and Quake mini-tournaments that will be held during the weekend, too. I’m running the CS tourney of course as well as the Quake3 matches. I’m thinking Quake3 is going to be 1vs1 deathmatch rail-only, so if you wanna compete in that, you better brush up now. Rules for the CS tourney will be very much like the Hardfought Invitational rules that we held here this summer. Some server settings are being tweaked as well as round times and maps will be revamped, with probably more custom jobs thrown in. I’ll announce those soon. Oh yeah… just so ya know – the CS tournament will start at 11:00am sharp on Saturday morning (the 20th) and we’ll finish up the majority of it around 8-9pm that night. Or try to at least :-) The final matches will take place starting the following Sunday at noon, or whenever I sufficiently recover from my hang-over from the past night’s boozing and whoring around…. whichever comes first ;-) Teams will be limited to 5 people total… if your clan has more people, you can sub them in between team changes and bracket advancements. More on that soon.

Accommodations for the LAN party… there’s been some discussion of this already on our msgboard here. There is an official ‘sponsor’ if you will from Motel 6 in North Richland Hills. Anyone that books a room there and tells them it’s for the Fragwire LAN party will get a special discount rate of 30 bucks a night (that’s tax included) for that weekend. Their address is 7804 Bedford/Euless Road, North Richland Hills, TX, 76180. This is very close to where the LAN party is being held. Their phone number is 817-485-3000, option 3. Make *damn* sure you mention Fragwire and that you’re attending. I just called them to make sure they’d cut you our special rate over the phone… took the girl at the front desk a moment to remember, but yes, they are giving out that special rate for those of you that call in to book a room.

If you haven’t done this yet – go friggin’ sign up already! :-P Attendee list currently shows 61 peeps but we have indications that 200+ people may attend. We can only make room for about 180 or so, and those on the list get priority. Did I say go sign up already? http://www.fragwire.com is where you go to register… go go go!!

Mini-Hardfought – yeah, that’s right. I figured what the hell… so I brought HF1 port back up but limited it to 8 players since it’s running off my home DSL line (less upload bandwidth, less players you can host without lagging them out). The IP address is 64.218.4.161:27015… It’s been up for a couple days already, with a new custom CSCop script written by [fah-q]Dio and modified slightly by me. CSCop now handles team wounding as well as team killing. If you TK, you get buried now and glow for ninety seconds as well as dropping all your weapons, so chances of your survival are pretty slim. Because of that, you will *not* be killed and made to sit out next round. Now, for team wounding… it’s a bit complicated, but not too bad. Here’s how it works. CSCop will now keep track of exactly how much *damage*, and also how many *times* you hit a teammate. Should you do X amount of hit points of damage against a teammate, or hit them X amount of times, you will receive what’s called an ‘injure’ – receive two injures and that becomes counted as a TK, which cannot be forgiven. And of course you’re all well aware if you receive too many TK’s, you get kicked and/or banned. Also, if each TW does enough damage, you get slapped for it. I also added in a nice lil colored admin_tsay that announces to everyone whether you’re team wounding or team killing. I think I might add exactly who you’re abusing as well… muhahah :-P Anyways… go have some fun on Mini-HF, and give me some feedback on the custom CSCop script I got goin’ there as well.

Welp, back to work for me… I’m getting my servers ready for the LAN. The main HF server will be there of course, with three CS ports and a Quake3 port. I have also refurbished an old Athlon 650, and this will provide for your gaming enjoyment an Unreal Tournament port, Return to Castle Wolfenstein Multiplayer test, and a Half-Life: Day of Defeat port. That Athlon 650 is a workhorse, too… seems to run all three just fine. We’ll find out for sure when we fill ’em up at the LAN.

G’nite folks… see you soon.

K2