BlackOut Gaming now have their very own Twitch channel!

http://twitch.tv/BlackOutGamingTV

Make sure to follow our channel on Twitch to be notified of any upcoming events! We will be using this to stream not only our events, but also to provide coverage for ETF2L’s Highlander Season 4 which we are currently sponsoring!

http://etf2l.org/leagues/highlander-season-4-home/

We are also hoping to cast some UGC Highlander matches in the near future.

Also, if you have any suggestions about what we should cast, or even fancy having a go at streaming or casting yourself then please check out our new sub forum dedicated to BlackOut TV:

http://forums.blackoutgaming.org/forumdisplay.php?47-BlackOut-TV

Hope to see you tuning in!

We’re running a competition where 3 winners will each win a copy of BioShock Infinite on Steam! To enter, all you have to do is simply like our Facebook page, comment on the pinned post with your Steam username and wait! We’ll select the winners on Friday the 8th.

Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/BlackOutGaming.org

Like Highlander? Never played it but not sure where to start? Ever wanted to destroy the BlackOut admins in a brutal 9v9 hatfest? Now’s your chance!
We’re running an event on Saturday 9th March from 19 CET onwards.

Check the following thread to sign up and for more information: clickme

A lot has been happening within BlackOut even though it doesn’t look like anything has changed – we have been recruiting more admins for our awesome servers (which you should check out, btw), switched radio providers on our servers from epic.Radio to FragRadio, handled attacks, switched hosts, Christmas celebration and gift-spam.

Our servers has grown in popularity and we have gained a bunch of awesome regulars and our donation counts are sky-high – all in all it has been a great year.

While all this has been happening, we have had a bunch of internal meetings where we discuss stuff, and we have resolved a bunch of internal conflicts and our management are now much better than before.

It has been an awesome year and we hope to continue this great success into 2013 and beyond aswell.

PS: Donate whatever you can, we still need cash!

Happy new year
- BlackOut management

We’re going more and more mainstream for every day, we’ve added some nice “Share”, “Like” and “Tweet” buttons to our posts so you can do stuff. It’s awesome in our opinion.

Thanks and have fun.

The past night Valve released the Halloween update for TF2 which broke literally everything we were running on our servers. I have been working both day and night fixing all these issues and I believe we are now ‘stable’ enough. I haven’t seen a crash in three hours now, opposed to the three crashes per 30 minutes I saw earlier.

Changes done to all servers:

- Updated SourceMod to 1.5-dev and MetaMod: Source to 1.10-dev

- Updated all extensions and plugins

- Did a quick overview of all servers, removing un-needed files and cleaning up models

Changes done to server machines:

- Swapped out our old core2duo with a Xeon E3-1220 machine with 8GB ram from our beloved provider UK2 (UK2.NET) – this will keep us going in the years to come!

- Upgraded all packages

- Moved everything over to the new machine

We have done some changes on #9 (Rotation nocrit) so that it is now QuickPlay-eligeble. We have reduced the slotcount to 24 and added a new mapcycle to it. We have also removed nocrit and nospread in order to comply with VALVE’s QuickPlay rules. We do not hide our sv_tags as some other communities do, so we comply 100% with the ‘Policy of Truth’.

Changes done to #9:

• Reduced slotcount to 24
• Removed nocrit/nospread tags and features
• Added regular tags
• Added new updated mapcycle (http://pastebin.com/fBc5aT4M)

Changes done to general servers:

• Bought a new dedicated server for virtualization
• Added a few links here and there on the website and forum
• Set up Observium for server monitoring
• Added epic.Radio plugin to the HL2DM servers
• Added !needadmin functions to HL2DM servers
• Cleaned up and updated server plugins

We have seen the need for expansion on our web/mysql/everything server so we decided to buy a new dedicated server from GamingDeluxe to serve as everything.

I’ve added a couple of fixes to our Surf and Versus Saxton Hale servers, fixing the red X’s flying everywhere. I have also added/removed some plugins for some extra stability and stuff.

Enjoy.

We’ve added Steam Connect – a function that utilizes OpenID allowing you to quickly register and create an account on our forums. You can also link your account when you are already logged in, which gives you a nice little bar under your avatar in any of your posts. To quickly register an account, just click on the image on the forums that looks like this:

When you are done, it should look something like this:

And your post should now look like: