DarkStar Communications

I see a lot of tickets and emails come through asking for a sponsorship from DarkStar. I want as many of you as possible to get sponsorships, so I just thought I’d write up a few tips. These tips don’t guarantee sponsorships, but it might help you get a better idea of the middle ground sponsorships seek to reach.

1. Be honest in your application. I cannot stress this enough; lying on the application always means no sponsorship. If you claim you won CAL-I, we’ll be very impressed and go look to see your name at the top of the list. If it’s not there, “Lucy’s god some splainin’ to do.”
2. Having a website is worth tons of points. You need to show that you’re organized. Guilds come and go, and we want to know you’re not fly-by-night.
3. Win some tournaments first. Remember, if we want our ad shown at the World series, we’re going to sponsor the Yankees before we sponsor the Cubs. I love the Cubbies, but let’s face it, winning speaks louder than losing. A couple wins really bolsters the application.

We’re looking for people who will get our name out there. Be prepared to tell us what sets your guild apart from every other guild out there. Odds are, if you’re getting a sponsorship, you are also an ideal customer. We need a reason why both parties are better off sponsored than as a customer/provider relationship.

Mailing a case of imported beer is a great way to put us in a mood to accept your sponsorship. Inquiring for the sponsorship, and then including at the bottom, “Oh by the way, I was hoping I could send you a case of imported beer, what’s your address?” will win points, assuming you follow through.

Of course I need to note that following these tips doesn’t guarantee you a sponsorship, but should put you a step ahead of whoever didn’t read this.

I’ve been playing around with this voice chat in WOW, and I don’t really like it. The voice quality is relatively low; I’d equate it to the Counterstrike voice chat. It’s probably useful for public groups, but far below reasonable standards for guild and private use.

I’d use it for a 5 man public group, but I wouldn’t raid with it. Likewise, it’s ok for a public Counterstrike server, but I wouldn’t use it on the CAL level.

It does, however, provide evidence for the computer gamer saying, “male until proven female.” You’ll finally have some evidence that AWPgirl83 is really a dude. Or, strangely, her mic is always broken.

I get a lot of people asking me what the difference is between DarkStar and our competitors. At the risk of starting some mudslinging, I’ll dive into that here, with the nitty-gritty deep down differences.

We wear underwear with the Teamspeak logo on it. I thought that would look cool as a paragraph opener. Actually we don’t do this, and you shouldn’t believe any competitor that claims it. It’s a whole mess of copyright law, and anyone who actually does wear the underwear should probably be avoided.

Most importantly, DarkStar uses Mzima bandwidth. Mzima is route optimized for home users, making it the lowest latency bandwidth possible. It’s more expensive than normal bandwidth, but they took it out of my paycheck, so the company breaks even on the difference in cost. Most bandwidth, such as what our competitors use, is standard commercial bandwidth. It is designed to transfer data from a server at one datacenter to a server at another datacenter – and it does this very well. But that isn’t what a voice server does. Your server transfers data from you, to the server, to another end-user. Mzima works directly with ISPs to limit hops – we use bandwidth designed with stuff like Ventrilo and Teamspeak in mind.

Secondly, DarkStar gives all possible administrator rights to the owner of the server. Not everyone does this. Through advanced proprietary software, we are able to offer all administrative rights. This isn’t possible without Brett, our programmer that lives in a cage. Its August, my month to feed him, and I’m too busy blogging.

DarkStar has size. With size we can buy larger bandwidth commits, allowing us to buy bandwidth cheaper than our competitors. We pass this savings on to you. Through that savings, we are able to offer premium codecs at our regular price, which is rare in the voice server industry. At any given time, 300,000 users are connected to our servers. If you laid those users end to end, it’d be twice the distance that Ohio State will travel to the University of Michigan in a battle royal this November. If you rounded up all those users, and measured their body heat, it might be enough to possibly power a server or more, possibly, if the power was enough. You know, math and stuff.

We provide true 24/7/365 support. No really, I worked last Fourth of July. Send us a ticket on Christmas. Send our competitor a ticket on Christmas. See who responds. We answer support tickets when even Santa doesn’t. That’s a guarantee.

If you want to research this, feel free. You’ll probably also find that our locations, variety of payment options including ClanPay, and our custom control panel all set us far above the competition.

Oh, and instant setup. But everyone does that, and it’s really the same anywhere. I can’t really think of a way to improve on *instant*. But, you’ll still find a whole lot of competitors who use that as their main selling point. Watch for it.

I guess with a third post, I’m beginning to convince myself that I’ll actually keep up with a blog. Within the next week I hope to start doing promotions (read: give away free stuff) but I’d like to get a little more readership first. I tend to judge that almost exclusively on unique page hits, so be sure to tell your friends to visit this page, if only to run up the hit counter and make me feel good about myself.

Lastly, I’m thinking about making my undead priest go hybrid discipline/holy for end-game raiding, because we already have another holy priest but I don’t like how deep-discipline looks. If you have any thoughts, please let me know at blog@darkstarllc.com.

Alright, I figured out a way I can get into a little trouble during a raid. For most of you this is old news, but for some of you, this might be good for a laugh. Ventrilo supports keybinds for Text-To-Speech, which basically takes whatever you type in and converts it to speech, playing it back whenever you press your hotkey. I’ve loaded up my num-pad with lyrics to 80s hits and comments like “Lauren always slows down the raid.”

To set up text to speech, select the right arrow next to “bindings.” Click on “New” and type in any name you want. This name is for your group of bindings, so if you use one set for CS and another for WOW, this is where you’ll put that identifying text. Select a bind key by typing it in the “Bind key” box, and select “Text-To-Speech” as the function. Type your text in the Text-To-Speech box, and refine it using the play button. Make sure you hit “add” to save the bind, and then press ok at the bottom of the dialogue box.

In the main Ventrilo window, select your binding set from the third dropdown box called “Bindings.” You can now use your keybinds for some hot text to speech. These even work in-game. Enjoy!