DarkStar Communications

This is our administrative assistant. She is special and we are proud of her.

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.

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.

Christmas season is here! So don’t forget when you ask for your new games this Christmas also to ask for a game server from Darkstar. You’ll get instant setup, low pings, and lots of frags when you sign up today.

I’m feeling the Christmas spirit. I’ll give away a free year of a 25 slot Ventrilo server (an $83.45 value!) to the best 100-150 word essay about why you like DarkStar. Just reply to this article with your essay (be sure to use your email address, it won’t be visible after you submit it but it will let me contact you.) All submissions must be turned in by Christmas morning. Then I’ll take a few days to decide and we’ll make sure your vent server is up for the full calendar year 2008. DarkStar reserves the right to use your submission for advertising (or we might hang it up in the break room or show it to our moms or something. Gotta make mom proud.) I should mention that if you already have a server I’ll credit the $83.45 towards future service.) What have you got to lose? Submit it now before you forget! There are no strings attached, the deal is exactly how it sounds. If you’re on the main page, you won’t get a comment form, you’ll need to be on this page to see it.

I’ll leave all the replies invisible until Christmas day so you don’t need to worry about someone else seeing yours and copying.

In the mean time, you can go to these links for game servers, Vent servers, and TeamSpeak Servers.

UPDATE: A special thanks to everyone who submitted. We’ll judge our favorite in the next 24 hours. A few went over the word limit, and while we’re flattered, we think the most fair solution to this is to judge only the first 150 words.