the daily inxling!

I am about to do the unthinkable. I am about to utter ghastly words of sacriliege, the likes of which have never been heard before. My blasphemous cries will rouse anger, hatred, and condemnation from the entire world. I will be shunned by the gaming community. I will be flamed as an enemy by my entire 360 friendslist. I will become an outcast by my public declaration of hatred of Gears of War.

“Wtf!?” you cry. “It’s the most awesome Third Person Shooter out there, and one of the best 360 games!” Those I cannot disagree with. But if you’d have just been on a 4 man team that dropped to a 2 man team when the turncoat buggers discovered that the other 4 players play like world champions (I mean how else could they do that with the shotgun?) you’d feel the same way too. If this happened twice in a row, you’d be up in arms.

Now I am no n00b. I am on chapter 4 of insane difficulty of the campaign, which I think merits itself. I can active reload, and roll out of harm’s way at precisely the right moment, throw frags accurately and get the odd headshot. I also once on XBox Live took out the entire opposing team using only my chainsaw (yes I was trying for the achievement).

The problem with Gears of War’s Live games is that there’s no balancing. You can get put on a team of first timer French people (nothing’s worse than being on the losing team if you can’t tell your team mates that it’s because they’re n00bs) against a team of 4 professionals who spend their after-school lives doing this instead of homework. Gears of War Live should be redesigned to include a ranking system, and a redistribution system for if 2 players on one team leave. In fact, why not a team redistribution system between rounds regardless of dropouts? Although I realise that that would decrease variety, give the more skilled players a challenge, and make it less frustrating and addictive for the rest of us…

I’ll finish this rant later. Right now I’m off to try to get the Down with E.P.I.C. achievement.

John

Play Nice

So the beta Orange box has been released. Hurrah! whoopee! Great. No, er wait. Why STEAM, insist on putting the games in a folder called “orangebox” when we load the server files? It doesn’t keep in with our file structure. It makes no sense. It’s irritating. Please change the full release back as normal, where game folders go into the srcds folder. It’s easy
/me gets off his orange box

We have a pre-order page for Team Fortress 2 servers. Unfortunately the usual instant setup, and marvellous instant availability we like to offer isn’t on offer yet. Hopefully it’ll be only a couple of days for STEAM to pull their cyber finger out.
Team Fortress 2 servers are available in Windows only. Here we go again. Again, this seems daft. Why are beta’s so increasingly ‘BETA’! Linux servers out number Windows servers two to one. Give us what we want, I say, damnit!
Why? Because generally Linux offers far better performance than “point and click” Windows. I love my Linux, me. To use Linux and to use it well, you have to have a clue. With Windows (sorry all those Windows (majority) GSP’s out there) but any old fool could do it. Point click….point click….type….click click….’har har lol I’m a server genius, lets start selling some cs source servers to some n00bs’

Give me a few pints and I could handle Windows. Actually, no, I’d need some class A drugs and a team of cheer leaders to lower my standards that far.

Rant over, just next time STEAM, us educated GSP’s like using Linux. Windows we do not like. And yes, your beta could have been betta.

And as soon as TF2 is on linux servers, we will have a jolly good session

/Olly publishes blog post and closes Internet Explorer.

Autumn’s always great fun for new releases. And wow, we’re spoilt for choice at the moment. Having tested, we’ve added a couple new releases to the website, and to the panel. You can switch to these games immediately on the panel if you are current customer, or add a new order if you want! Go on…

The first game we’ve added is Warsow. Not exactly new, no. Take a look at our Warsow game servers page for some more detailed info on the game itself. We were asked to test this by a customer and it seems to run fine. Very popular it seems for competitions and the likes.

The second game we’ve added is the appetite wetting Team Fortress forever. We’ve added a FF gaming servers page for it, naturally. I’m not sure how Fortress Forever is going to take off, given Team Fortress 2 is out very shortly. Not the best timing, but hey, it’s free. Switchable on the panel, so why not give it a go this weekend?

I’m currently suffering with the flu, so I am going to go and die in the corner with some lemsip and Bioshock on my 360.

Olly

Here at INX-Towers, we’ve got a bet going.

We all know Enemy Territory Quake Wars is going to be big this summer. Without getting too carried away, I’ve got a few games I think will pip it to the post of Summer king. It takes me back to A-Level history. 14th-16th century history, no less. Think of Counterstrike Source as Louis XII of France. A true warrior king. And France, the long living giant, set for the gallows as the proletariat hang the game dry. Is Counterstrike a game that will live for ever more, but ultimately doomed to disappear.

Then there’s Battlfield 2. Let’s not include Battlefield 2142. Battlefield 2 the Charles of Burgundy. The queer shaped chin on the face of online gaming. The fantastic game with amazing reaching power, but limited from growing to its full potential by the ranked farce.

Quake Wars, the Henry VIII. Glamorous, revolutionary. Pushing back the boundaries. We hope not ridden with syphallis. This will be a big game no doubt, but what else is there to challenge the big three.

Roll up the first online-gaming equivalent of Perkin Warbeck, a pretender to the throne. Team Fortress Forever. Reviving an old, oldie (a kind of Henry VII). Will it be enough to challenge at the top? Will the game fill servers and fill the coffers of the game server providers coffers?

Call of Duty IV, a different direction. A revolution in the tradition of COD based war games. It has to big. Will the dedicated server files be released on time, and without restrictions? Not like the problems with Medal of Honour Airbourne. One member on INX-Forums claims that a week long delay on server files is going to kill the game. It’ll never take off. Are they wrong?

Which is going to be the biggest game this autumn? And what will be the biggest surprise outsider?

Let me know.

And Mrs Lee, 7 years on and I still remember my A-Level history. Impressed?!

Unfortunately I don’t bring any good news in this blog post. In fact, it’s the news I was expecting, and dreading bringing you for a while. For this moment in time on release, we won’t be able to offer you Enemy Territory Quake Wars servers. I had a hint this would happen when we weren’t chosen to host the beta servers.

It’s a huge shame because we were going to offer you, our thousands of game server players, the chance to switch instantly to the new game on release via our custom control panel. We will however, be offering the unranked version hopefully on release. So it’s not all that bad…I guess.

So why weren’t we chosen? We tried to work with the developers from the start, but we feel it was quite apparant that two other GSP’s had already got in. I think we were too late, although this isn’t really confirmed or know.

From what I’ve seen so far, there are two definite providers, although I can’t confirm this. You can probably guess the first provider. We’ve a lot of respect for them. They are a large gaming community and deserve the reward of hosting the game. The other provider host Battlefield ranked servers (shock). Other than that they are relatively small. They must have had something special

So for now guys, we’ll keep working on this, and work on what we need to bring these to you. In the meantime, please support the games we’ve been hosting for the last 5 years. The games such as Counterstrike that don’t seem to have these unfortunate limits.

We think we should be able to host Quake Wars ranked servers:

1. Lets look at Counterstrike Source. Look how many branded servers we host. Try a search on game-montitor.com. Type the other competitors in. It’s tiny in comparison. Counterstrike Source is the biggest and most popular FPS around. We must be doing something right? We are literally huge in terms of how many game servers we host. According to game-monitor, twice as big as one of those that we believe has been chosen to host Quake Wars ranked.
2. A custom control panel. Not something rented, or bought off the shelf. Our own, customisable and made for our customers every whim.
3. Friendly and active community that’s growing rapidly.
4. Top ranking for gaming search engine phrases.
5. A proper business. So many providers are run from bedrooms. We’re a fully audited and long established UK LTD company. We’ve been doing this shizzle for five years now.

I’ve spent those 5 years working my arse off to grow INX from our own personal funding. No daddy-loans. Everything we have is paid for. Long hours, blood and sweat. We’ve got to such a huge size now that it’s quite shocking at times when I consider. So I do find the fact we’re not hosting Quake Wars servers a bit of a shock, and moreso a big big disappointment.
We would really make a go of hosting this game.

Unfortunately it is Battlefield ranked servers all over again and it is a shame the publishers do not seem to have fully listened to the gaming community.

I am biased, I know! However, I think it’s of huge detriment to not allow a gaming community and provider of our size not to host this game. Thousands would have switched on release. They won’t now. All those potential gamers lost.

We all wish the developers and the game in general the best of luck. I’ll certainly be playing it this autumn. I just hope they’ll rethink their policy and let INX host ranked servers. So we can see the game grow as big as it deserves. And not go the same way Battlefield has.

Would you like to see INX host Quake Wars servers? Please leave your comments below.

This is the first of many more tutorials to come. In this tutorial we will be going through setting up your Web Hosting using the INX Control Panel.

Firstly you need to log in to your Control Panel. The link is http://panel.inx-network.com/login.php

Once there, you will be logged in to your Control Panel and will see somthing similar to this.

You need to go to the Web Hosting part of your Control Panel, the link to it is on the bottom of the nav bar, circled on the above picture. Once you have clicked on that, you will be presented with a page just like this.

If you have a domain you wish to use with the INX Web Hosting please fill in the top box, if you wish to use a free subdomain, use the lower box. As advised, this can take a while so please be patient.

Once you have installed your Web Hosting, you will be presented with a page with all the information you need to connect to your Web Hosting. If you come across any problems, please try Reinstalling or in the worst case, contact INX Support.

Canceling Your Web Hosting

Canceling your Web Hosting couldn’t be easier, a button is available at the bottom of your Web Hosting information. You can cancel your Web Hosting for any reasons, some are -

• Changing the name
• Removing every file.
• No use for it.

Hope this helps,

INX-Gaming Matt

Matt@INX-gaming

www.INX-Gaming.co.uk