Astrum

Tards who would rather use a horrid control scheme rather than a good one. FPS games on console are infuriating. I play Gears of War 3 with my room mate on the 360 and aiming is just atrocious compared to a mouse. Depends how you define "great PC". I have a 9800gtx+ with a core 2 duo (would have to look up the exact one), and 3GB of DDR3. The alpha ran well (except it crashed a lot in full screen), the beta ran quite a lot better, and I'll see how the final game runs when I get home from Las Vegas tomorrow. The game is pretty scalable and the tech that went into Frostbite 2 definitely helped.

No. =P

Post your (serious) questions below.

Closed for now.

I'm not sure if this is one of the hardest posts I've ever had to make or one of the easiest. I've been here at SteamGamers for years now and have grown very fond of the people here and those who have long since left. I did take a sabbatical some time ago for personal reasons but I still loved the community, for all its faults and promise, and still felt welcome. This time is different. It's hard for me to accept that this is the end of an era, although part of me realizes it ended long before this. This decision was made easier by recent events which have severed any notion of camaraderie I felt towards the community, although not necessarily individual people within it. I've always been one to focus on the technological progress of the community rather than the political progress. The thought of unifying our ban management system with our forum database, or creating a web application to administer servers whilst providing useful information for players thus increasing the usefulness of the website beyond general conversation excited me. It was a labor of love, one that most of us understood. We never thought the community needed to be profitable, merely self-sufficient to attain its goals. With this recent change I can no longer ignore the political farce that SteamGamers has become. Truth be told I haven't done much work for this community since GarfieldH bought it. Now you may be asking why even though the answer should be plainly obvious to most people. This was never a labor of love for him. This was a challenge, a challenge to attain power by buying his way in. Once he "owned" the entirety the challenge was met and bested, and he cut and run. For Haggard this was a passion, a passion which unfortunately collided with his personal life forcing him to make a tough decision which ultimately ended in the sale of the community. Haggard was a true joy to work with. I remember staying up late talking to him and various others about how we could make the best community we possibly could with the funnest servers we could muster for the members. GarfieldH was the equivalent of an MBA with only a vague inkling of the technology that kept the community running, the kind of person who wants feature X, Y, and Z at the expense of the engineer's soul who is working 80 hour weeks but only being paid for 40. With Haggard it was like working with an artist, with GarfieldH it was like working for a clueless boss. This is the reason why SteamGamers doesn't have feature X, Y, and Z. I have the time and the knowledge, just not the will. I personally have no qualms against either Amit or Charles. They have a business venture and it's their prerogative. They arrived in a storm. However, be careful about how strongly you flap your wings lest you cause a storm yourself. This community is the marrying of both forums as well as game servers, a self-contained ecosystem where friends can discuss the latest news and play games on well regulated servers. The down side to this is that this community has extremely high maintenance requirements. With a forum you can set it up, gain a user base, and allow moderators to clean it up. With this community you need to constantly improve the servers, offer new options, and keep the website relevant to the gaming. I personally can't put in my free time to do this when I know someone else is getting paid. Especially not when access has already inexplicably and silently - and poorly - been revoked without prior discussion. Even though Haggard had the final decision in this community, it was never run like a dictatorship. You posted that not much will change in the operation of SteamGamers, however, your actions have thus far proven otherwise. Be very wary of what you do. In all of my time in this community I have never had a true problem with anyone. I'm even still friends with Suri. Perhaps it's my congenial nature. This changed with the sale of the community for the second time though. As a personal message to GarfieldH I'd like to say you have betrayed this entire community. Not only that but you betrayed the people, past and present, who poured hundreds if not thousands of hours not into gaming, but into building upon this community and keeping it running and relevant. There was no prior discussion with us or the community to see if this is even what we wanted. You took the community that was entrusted to you and made this decision on our behalf without our consent, opinions, or advice. Your unapologetic and quite frankly cavalier attitude towards this sale has sickened me. I honestly don't care about your reasons for doing this, it's unforgivable. You absolutely do not, nor have you ever, owned everything on SteamGamers. Posts are copyrighted by their respective authors and the copyright is not transferred to you merely because you wish it. Do you also think that you own the maps on the servers that were picked up from fpsbanana, or even the maps that Paul made for Minigames, or the scripts and mods that I wrote, or the countless other pieces of work created by other people? No, you do not. We own the copyrights to our respective works and you have been granted the ability to use these, but have never received the copyright for them and hence do not own them. The web server is located in Canada, the game servers in the US, and you are in the UK, all signatories of the Berne Convention. You fundamentally misunderstand what you bought and what you sold. You owned a lease to the domain name, web server, and game servers, a license to vBulletin 4 (although not vBulletin 3), and you also currently own (copyright) your own works which mainly consist of posts. What you bought was a pre-built community, not the content. You're granted the same abilities that were granted to Haggard, but you do not own the vast swaths of content that has been generated. Don't misconstrue this as a legal threat, merely a correction to an incredibly vain and ignorant statement. In closing I'm not going to beguilingly say I wish SteamGamers the best in the future. I have made my peace and closed that chapter in my life and no longer care if it succeeds or fails. Neither will bring me joy or remorse at this point. I'd like to personally thank those of you who I have grown close to over the years and that I will cherish the memories I have, the joyful as well as the tragic. Many of you have had a deep impact in my life, some of who will never read this, and for that I'm grateful. Regards, Astrum

If you delete me I'm murdering you.

You're not getting banned. I have no knowledge of TNS stuff since quite honestly I don't care. I'm still friends with you and Suri. I've never been one to care about this stuff though. Petty squabbles that someone else can can care about. Last I checked this was always the goal so we didn't have to rely on donations which can be flaky. So, not sure how that can be bad in itself. I'm debating whether or not to lock this, so keep the comments constructive or I'll be back.

I honestly don't think this thread is warranted. If you don't trust us, then don't fucking donate and leave. What the hell is so hard about that?

Now, since I'm extremely aggravated today due to working 16 hour days for the past week and a half, let's get something straight. It's great that everyone here is bitching like a baby and demanding to have their ass wiped with gold tissue, but I do this shit on my free fucking time. Every one of the higher-ups does. Most of you aren't trying to help either. So rather than entertain further bitching, either do something or shut up. Feel free to either pay me my going rate or do it yourself. If you do it yourself it had damn well look professional and mirror the structure and style of our new theme. Of course you haven't seen our new theme, yet you're already bitching. Thread closed.

Has nothing to do with being "hardcore". A lot of people prefer a darker theme for readability. Hell, look at my terminal window compared to the default. I find the first much easier on my eyes and way more readable: If you don't like a dark colored theme because you think we're trying to be "hardcore" then deal with it. If you don't like it because you find white more readable, then you're in the minority, but we'll look into a secondary theme. Problem is we don't exactly have the best graphic designers in the world around here. I can only do so much since I'm more of a programmer. Initially the theme will have a very similar color scheme as this site. We'll look into a secondary one but it's not going to happen over night. In case you missed every post from the last year, that's why we're moving to a CMS. Having said that nothing is going to be perfect when the site launches. We have very few people competent to do this sort of stuff and they're all busy with their real life, me included. Thanks for the color suggestions, Virus. I'll look into it.

Feel free to suggest colors, Virus. The theme we're using will be basically the same color scheme as this.