DarkStar Communications

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.

As you have probably noticed, we’ve launched a new site. With this, we have streamlined our product line, mostly by reinventing our gameservers line. From top to bottom, we’ve renewed the way we do game servers, allowing for greater flexibility and increased quality of service.

We have a new AJAX order form and soon we’ll be launching forums for our clients to communicate both with us and each other. We have a realtime network graph showing how many gamers are connected to the DarkStar voice network (which may look strange for a day or two as we tweak the code.)

I’m personally excited about this blog being integrated more prominently into the new site. I really think this blog lets users have an inside glimpse into the world’s leading TeamSpeak and Ventrilo host.

Well, that was the surprise I had been talking about. But if the whispers around the office are true, we’ve got another thing coming. Namely a new Ventrilo and TeamSpeak location - how’s Tokyo sound? Sounds good to me. Don’t count this as a promise, but it’s looking like we’ll expand there next.

You want more new stuff? Well you’ll just need to let us know and we’ll look into it. Want a game that we don’t have listed on our site? Let us know, we might be able to work something out. Wanna earn money? We’ve started an affiliate program, so check that out.

We got a new server a few days ago, replacing the ancient server our support center was run on. The new server is an Intel Xeon Dempsey 5050 and has 4 GB DDR 667 ECC. It was about time to see Ol’ Betsy go, she had been in commission as our support center server since early 2005. We set her free on a farm. She’ll have more room to run around there.

We’re working on a few big projects around here, but I can’t announce them yet. We doubled the size of our support staff and next week we’re moving to a new office. Naturally, we decided on a new office after we finally finished setting up our new 30 gallon salt water fish tank. Now we need to figure out how to transport 30 gallons of water (and tropical fish!) down three flights of stairs and across town to the new office. We have a lot of fish, and I can only fit two, MAYBE three in my pockets. You know, for clown fish, the situation is not that funny.

The fish got me thinking; they aren’t the only thing in the company that is tropical. Our Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers in Brazil and Hong Kong are all tropical. Perth, Brisbane and Israel are just barely not tropical. That’s a whole new angle we can take on servers. We sell tropical servers!

Hopefully I’ll update soon, unveiling what we’ve been working on for you.

Mac users cannot, without an elaborate workaround, connect to a voice server unless it uses the Speex codec. Fortunately, both Ventrilo and Teamspeak allow Speex to be set up as the server codec, allowing more universal connectivity. To set your server to use the Speex codec, just log on to http://my.darkstarllc.com/ and navigate to the control panel using the lefthand menu. Select your server, and pick one of the Speex codecs provided. We allow you to use all codecs, including the highest quality premium codecs, so I encourage you to use the highest quality that you can squeeze through your home connection.

On a side note, GSM codec is widely used in other VOIP (voice over IP) communications, including cell phones and most office VOIP phones. I personally prefer the GSM codec when there are no Mac users.