Thank you to everyone who submitted entries to our free Ventrilo contest. We really appreciate all the kind words and it was fantastic to receive so many entries. We received some that were far longer than 150 words, in which case we only judged the first 150 words. Stay tuned in the future, we’ll be sure to have more competitions in the future. The winner was Tristan with the following entry. While longer than 150 words, we still liked the first 150 and enjoyed the creativity. We’ll be contacting him to set up his server.
At DarkStarllc.com,
their Quad Core servers are the bomb!
From CS:Source to Kara raids,
they’re putting in-game chat to shame.
California, New York, and Washington too,
there is always a server, just for you.
No rocket or raid or flash-bang grenade
can take your connection away!
When I’m gaming, late at night,
and I’m feeling rather lonely,
I can always count on my left ctrl key
to connect me to my homies.
And when I’m feeling pretty mad,
the auto-mute music channel always lends a helping
hand.
When im surfing online videos
and need a way to share,
the copy comment function,
is very just and fair.
I’m not that keen to bandwidth share,
with laggy DSL,
but there is yet hope for my jumpy AWP scope
and I hear they call it DarkStar.
I remember the day when we first met
way back in 2.1,
I didn’t have a headset yet
so my friends all muted me… one by one.
It was then that I knew
what exactly I must do!…
to make my gaming successful;
so I wrote three straight rules
for all the vent spamming fools
who will ever cross my server.
1. Never EVER scream in vent.
2. Never EVER play heavy metal in vent.
3. Never EVER leave and rejoin the same channel in
vent more than once
per second.
So that is why, after all my years,
that I have come to believe…
Those DarkStar servers are simply the best.
From the rumor mill:
Sunwell Isle
* Sunwell Isle will be located off the coast, north of Silvermoon, and will be patched in with patch 2.4
* Sunwell Isle will be a major questing hub with a 5-man Normal and Heroic Instance (Magister’s Terrace) and a 25-man raid (Sunwell Plateau). The goal with Sunwell Isle is to close the Burning Crusade storyline before the release of the next expansion.
* There are still a few scenarios left that could be released to provide the players with more content if WotLK gets delayed for any reason.
* At the release of the patch, players will access a small expedition camp where they can start questing. However as the questing progresses, players will expand the camp and make it grow to a small town by retaking building to the enemies (running daily quests mostly). You can consider it as a AQ Gates opening event, the more daily quests that gets done, the faster the whole server will progress.
* The quests will end the Tempest Keep story arc.
* “The Shattered Sun Offensive” will be the new faction of this quest hub. It also seems that Aldor and Scryers will finally start fighting together against the new threat.
* Both 5-man and 25-man dungeons will be accessible from the start, but some bosses will have to be unlocked by running the daily quests (server-wide) and/or leveling your reputation. The 5-man instance will most likely requires Honored reputation with The Shattered Sun Offensive, the first three bosses of the 25-man instance will be accessible from the start, while the three last ones will have to be unlocked through questing.
Sunwell Plateau
* Kael’thas will be one of the boss of the 5-man dungeon, he’s still alive and he’s now got a huge green crystal etched to his chest.
* Kil’jaeden will be the final boss of the 25-man instance. The other bosses include Brutalicus, a giant Pit Lord who has lost his wings, Kalecgos, a blue dragon enslaved by Kil’jaeden, a Fel Dragon, the female Eredar Twins, and a Dark Naaru.
* The 25-man instance will be slightly harder than Black Temple, and is tuned for Tier 6 geared players.
* There will not be any “real” Tier 7 set, but some of the drops will be set pieces (not necessarily class specific). The drops quality will be above T6.
Daily quests
* Patch 2.4 will raise the cap of Daily quests allowed in a day from 10 to 25.
PvP
* Balancing actions will be taken in regard to PvP for certain classes.
* Blizzard have large plans for, and they will be aiming to bring it closer to e-sport acceptance.
Alright, in all honesty, the sheer number of COD4 server signups we’ve had in the 30-45 days has me a bit worried. I realize the game is fun, I really like the way they implemented it. But is there an oncoming armageddon that you all are training for? I’m not just flipping out over nothing. We all get it – if a game is good, and COD4 is good, it’s not unreasonable to expect sales to do well, especially right after the game release or during the holidays. But since the COD4 release, a whopping 86% of our game server sales have been COD4. And here’s the kicker – COD4 hasn’t hurt the volume of other games sold. Can anyone explain this?
Exit COD4, enter abrupt topic change.
The entries are still coming in on the free Ventrilo server contest so look for that in the near future. We have one week left on the free Ventrilo contest, so go ahead and get those submitted soon. We will no longer accept submissions after we post the submitted entries on Christmas day. We’ll decide at the DarkStar Christmas party on the 28th, inform the winner on the 29th, and announce it publicly shortly thereafter. The submissions are so good we’re looking into doing this again on future holidays so make sure you keep checking back.
Feel free to join our Facebook group, we’ll probably run more promotions through it, not unlike our current free Ventrilo server contest. Who isn’t on Facebook these days?
While I’m not going to directly link to the Youtube videos (a link from a page with as popular as this one only helps their search rank), rest assured a simple Google search for Ventrilo harassment will return a whole slew of links to people connecting to random Vent Servers and annoying the users on the server. Honestly, after three videos I stopped watching; I didn’t laugh at these and all three times I stopped after the first 30 seconds. If you’ve heard one you’ve heard them all.
Thanks to proxies and dynamic DNS from their ISPs, they often keep coming back, even if muted, kicked, or banned. They’re as resilient pests as cockroaches. (These Ventrilo cockroaches quickly ruin a raid, whilst Raid can quickly ruin cockroaches. Ironic!)
Ventrilo Harassment isn’t just a fad, it’s here to stay. It happens regardless of who your Ventrilo provider is, and there is nothing practical we can do as a Vent and Teamspeak server company to prevent these. If you are frequented by people dropping in to play obnoxious or offensive sound files, there are a few things you can do to stop or limit their harassment.
1) The most secure thing you can do is to lock down your server with a password. The password doesn’t even need to be complicated, most harassers just move on to another server. Something as simple as your guild name can help prevent 99% of all harassing users.
2) Ventrilo 3.0 allows for more elaborate permission in Ventrilo. Silencing all unregistered users is a good way to make sure they can’t harass you with sound. Don’t forget to make sure they can’t use keyboard TTS and wave macros and make sure they can’t play music. While slightly less powerful than suggestion #1, this allows people to connect to your server where they can then communicate with you via text chat or editing their comment.
3) Request an IP or port change. DarkStar is always happy to move client servers to a different IP or port – just submit a support ticket letting us know you’d like your server moved.
4) Do what your mother told you; ignore them. If all of your guild members ignore them 100%, they might leave. Hah. Sure. Well, if you’ve explored all other options, this one might work.
I know comedy, and Ventrilo harassment is definitely not comedy. Good luck out there, the internet is a wild place.
To end on a better note, this looks like a lot of fun.