Team Awesome (an affiliated group with BlackOut Gaming) are hosting a pyro tennis competition on Sunday the 9th of June! There are teams of three competing against one another for delicious pyro prizes, and you have the chance to get in on it! Pyro Tennis for those of you that don’t know, is where a group of pyros air blast missiles back and forth at one another until somebody loses. If you’re interested, be sure to register your team of three participants on their website.

You can find more by checking out their forums at http://www.teamawesomegaming.co.uk/phpbb/viewforum.php?f=367!

Hi guys,

We’ve implemented key donations for VIP now. We will only accept TF2 keys, aka the type you buy in the Mann Co Store.

The prices are the same as if you were to donate using money;
4 Keys = One month
7 Keys = Two months
10 Keys = Three months

Please contact Mikey (me, and me only) and make sure to check that the player you are trading with is an administrator of this group and a member of the BlackOut Gaming Clangroup.

Link to the main group: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/black_out_gaming
Link to the clangroup: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/blackoutgaming_clan

Here at BlackOut Gaming, we like to reward our loyal regulars with offers from some of our sponsors. Today we have some discounts for UK2.NET for you!

BLACKOUT30 – 30% Off Hosting
BLACKOUTSB – First month free on any SiteBuilder package
BLACKOUTVPN – 50% Off first month
BLACKOUT10 – 10% Off any server on any contract length

Go pay http://www.uk2.net a visit and check them out!

Are you interested in competitive TF2? Check out this game then! It will be casted on BlackOut TV (http://tv.blackoutgaming.org) by Sal & MagicalKillaCow @ 20 CEST tonight!

For further information, click here to go to the match thread on our forums.

We’ve been really busy the past two days with SteamPipe for TF2 being pushed, various other updates also being pushed and issues with the mapcycle on all the servers after the update.

You might have noticed that suddenly our #4 VSH server ran the Trade map, and that #6 and #12 was running Dustbowl, and that #10 was running Surf maps. Well, we’ve fixed these issues now.

In other news, we’ve also added full IPv6 support to all our websites thanks to our sponsor UK2.NET, click their banner in the sidebar to go visit them, we recommend them for all your hosting needs.

We’ve also now completed the swap of #9 to Dodgeball, which we had some real fun playing yesterday evening, so if you want to play something fun and exciting, visit #9 and have some good fun

Oh yeah, we’ve also resolved the crashes on #6 and #12.

Good morning.

Somewhere in the evening Tuesday the 30th of April, Valve will release or enforce a mandatory change from using the old content delivery system to the new one called SteamPipe. This will give us much faster loading times, more control over the files in the filesystem and hopefully less issues when adding models and so on.

What will this mean for me, you might ask? Well, the change we will be doing on our TF2 servers shouldn’t affect you if you have opted in for the SteamPipe beta for the TF2-client, however if you haven’t opted in for it, and you haven’t converted, it will mean that you a) will not be able to see the servers in the server browser, or b) whenever you try and connect to one of the servers it will drop you for having an old client.

When will we perform the change? We will perform the change whenever we see fit in the evening of Tuesday 30th of April, during this time there will be a few hours (or less) with downtime on the TF2 servers only, other servers for other games should not be affected by this maintenance.

The effects of this change server-side will be invisible to you as a player, however there might be a few bugs after the conversion, aka some plugins not loading, models not showing and so on – so be prepared for a few server restarts and whatnot while we work out the bugs.

We don’t have any further details on the time the update, all we know is that it will most likely be tomorrow evening.