As the topic implies, this post is meant to explain what's going on with Black-Cell.
People leaving and why
There have been some people that have recently left for various reasons. There seems to be a strong Black-Cell/Renegade association still. I would like for people to move away from that and the 'you must play Renegade to be a part of Black-Cell' mentality. That seems to be partly the reason some people are leaving. The only thing that applies to is being a Black-Cell Renegade moderator. You're all welcome to stay around and hang out on the forums/IRC and play Renegade and other various games with us from time to time if you so wish. I would like for the community to grow as a gaming community in general and not solely as a Renegade community.
The Renegade clan
The Renegade clan is stagnant at the moment after some issues and the long WOL downtime. We'll be working on trying to get it back on its feet if there's still a good amount of interest in it.
Numbers in Renegade dropping and server consolidation
Whether you want to admit it or not, the numbers in the Renegade community have been dropping. This has left our servers under-used and if we don't find a good use for the extra resources it'll be best to consolidate to one server (one physical server, not one Renegade server). This would have the effect of requiring less donations in the meantime but make it harder and more expensive to expand later on. We can try to do some things to bring in some more people (like the GMC, etc.), and then there's also the next topic..
The future and growth of Black-Cell
If you're not already aware, we are interested in supporting/hosting servers for other games in an effort to expand the network. You may have noticed the quick movement into BF2 and the sudden abandonment. In the beginning we had a demo server, which was full a lot of the time, and then a retail server when the game was released. However, most people prefer to play on ranked servers and thus our retail server was mostly empty since it wasn't ranked and I ended up shutting it down. Sometime in August an offer was made to us from someone, whose name I won't mention for their sake, which would of allowed us to put up a 64 player ranked BF2 server. Unfortunatly that plan fell through, so unless we can muster up an extra $140/month there will probably be no BF2 server, aside from an unranked one for private use perhaps. I suppose we could try it, as there are some popular unranked servers, but I imagine it would be hard to get a decent playerbase. That situation only applies to BF2 though, due to the hoops you have to jump through to run a ranked server. We have the server capacity to run a bit more than we are now (if we consolidate that capacity will shrink), we just need a good game, or games, that we can run a server, or servers, for. I don't know where the majority of interest lies, but some games that have recently been released are: Day of Defeat: Source, Call of Duty 2, Quake 4, and F.E.A.R.. All of these plus some older games such as Counter-Strike: Source or Unreal Tournament 2004 are all options. There are also some promising games coming out in the future, such as UT2007 and ET:QW, but those are a ways away (mid 2006 and TBA, respectively). We will of course also continue in Renegade.
There's also the possibilty of creating guilds/clans for certain games and not necessarily hosting a server for that game (if possible that is).
Any ideas to help BC grow/improve are welcome and it doesn't necessarily have to be about game servers or guilds/clans.
You, the community, have helped keep BC alive through donations/etc and we are very grateful for that. Most of you who have donated have donated to the Renegade servers, but if we're to expand donations will go to BC as a whole and not just Renegade. I'm mentioning this because I do not wish to deceive anyone.
It's cliche, but here's to a better year for BC!
