First of all, I'd like to welcome you all to our first community newsletter. This newsletter might be a bit long, so I encourage you to print it out and put a copy in your bathroom for further reading. We've been doing a lot of planning in the past few weeks...and we're finally ready to roll out what we've planned. Sake and I had a long discussion and realized that our community wasn't running like a community, and we needed to change that. Our community has mainly been based off the actions of two people, and it's been run the same way since the first server was launched in September of 2007. We believe it's time for some community involvement, and so we're re-structuring the community to be more of ...well... a community. We'll be going over some of the changes we're doing to the community here, including community job postings, this newsletter, some rules we'll be updating and changing on the servers, updates to the Left 4 Dead servers to remove annoying exploits, an IRC channel, some notes on the forums, the Ventrilo, and a few other random issues. I'll try to make all the articles as short as possible...but there's a lot of information we need to get out. So sit back, grab something to eat or drink, and keep reading.
We've finally announced our second tournament. This one will be a Left 4 Dead tournament! Want to sign up? Visit our tournament signup page here. This tournament will be running sometime around the end of January (official date still to be announced.) We're hoping for a big turnout, and again, as before, we will be offering prizes to the winners, and possibly some raffle prizes again just for playing! We'll be broadcasting a few matches through SakeFox's TV stream, so be sure to keep watching the community news to find out when and where!
The first thing I'd like to touch on is our new community job postings. If you've wanted to help out some way in the community and never had a chance, feel free to apply here for one of the open jobs. Don't see something you think we need? Drop me an email at cc2iscool@gmail.com with what you think would be useful, and it might be added to the job listing. Some of our open jobs include admin positions, a PR position, IRC and Steam chatroom moderators, radio DJ's, server starters, and even map surveyors to help us find new maps for the TF2 servers.
We're also modifying some of our rules on the servers to be a bit more lenient on certain issues within the community. Model exploits such as the famed "spy-crab" will now be allowed during setup only. They will still be restricted during normal gameplay. As always, pornography sprays and other explicit items are allowed on the server, but please make sure your sprays do not contain racist content.
Make sure to visit our forums and make a couple posts! Don't like a map...or maybe you want to praise a map for being awesome? Visit our map discussion section and cast your vote! Remember, you can help us decide what's good and not good for the servers. Also, it's a great place to chat with some of our members. If you don't have an account, sign up, it's easy and best of all...it's completely free (not to mention advertisement free!)
We're creating a new IRC chatroom on BeyondIRC (irc.beyondirc.net,) so make sure to join us in the #cc2iscool channel. Please note that connection time to the IRC server may be up to a minute. We've chosen this network because it provides us greater security against raids, people using multiple proxies, and things of the sort. While the downside of this is that the connection time is high, the overall problems will be much lower. Don't know what IRC is or how to use it? Ask either Sake or Cc2iscooL and we can help you!
Remember, we also have a Steam Community chatroom if you don't want to download another program to be able to chat with us. Our community chatroom is one of the most active on Steam (especially during the evenings) and definitely one of the most friendly. Discuss servers, furries in general, or whatever you want!
In case you haven't heard yet, we're running a radio stream. This shows up in-game when typing !radio (on TF2) and also is listed on our main site as one of the links. If you'd like to become one of our DJ's for the radio, visit us on our job posting page and maybe you'll be able to help us out!