Last year, we announced that we’d been working closely with Valve to deploy Steam content updates via our massive, Australia-wide content delivery network. Now that we’ve fully switched off our old Steam content servers and moved to the new SteamPipe system, we thought we should remind you to take a moment to reconfigure or switch off any Steam filter programs you may be running.

Due to the fact that Steam content is now piped through our distributed Australian network instead, your Steam filter programs may no longer be functional. We highly recommend you either disable or turn off your filter as it will probably no longer be effective.

The one Steam-filtering program that seems to be still working with the new CDN system is Steam Limiter, which can be found here. Please note of course that no Steam-filtering program is 100% effective and, as before, iiNet and Internode can not guarantee that any updates will be quota free. However, the new CDN system does mean that you should be able to get more quota-free Steam updates more often — if anything, this change to SteamPipe means you should get less unexpected metered traffic.

There are many benefits to switching over to the new SteamPipe system, which are outlined here on Valve’s developer wiki. However for you, the home consumer, all you need to know is that your game updates will be faster, smaller, and more efficient — and just as quota-free as ever.

TL;DR: It’s business as usual. You probably won’t even notice that anything has changed. Happy gaming!

Last night, Funko mercilessly killed and resurrected the games.on.net free-for-all Minecraft server. No longer the ’3FL’ or ‘Wild West’ server, it’s now called the games.on.net PVP Minecraft server.

What’s it all about? Glad you asked! You can find all the rules governing the server by clicking here — there aren’t many, since the whole point of the server is to go nuts and murder and betray each other in creative ways. If you’re looking for a safe place to build and trade with people, try our regular, white-listed Minecraft server instead (details here).

Connect to the games.on.net Minecraft PVP server at minecraftpvp.games.on.net. We’re currently running CraftBukkit 1.5.2 and we’ve already noticed a few bugs, so please contact us or post in this thread if you notice anything weird.

Recently, we took the step of implementing advertisements on some of our game servers in order to help cover the costs of providing you with Australia’s best gaming network. The response we received from you, our player base, was very clear: you did not like them at all.

We understand. Nobody likes advertisements, and we didn’t take the decision to implement them lightly — our number one priority was that having ads on our servers did not impact the user experience. After reviewing feedback, it became clear to us that these advertisements did not function as intended and were hurting your experience on our servers.

Today, we’re announcing that these advertisements have been pulled from all of our servers. Most of them have already gone, and others will soon follow suit.

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In 2010, we kicked off the original Adopt-a-Server Program and gave our admins a server of their own to customise and kit out in any way they saw fit — and a huge number of new servers opened up, boasting all sorts of game modes and configs we just weren’t expecting.

Now, in 2013, we’re taking this a step further. The new Adopt-a-Server Program isn’t just for admins — it’s for you. That’s right, you, reading this, right now. We want to give you the chance to take one of our servers and make it your own.

Our games servers are a huge part of the games network here at GON, and we love them to bits! As work continues on bringing all of the awesome old 3FL servers over to games.on.net, we find ourselves with more and more servers each day in need of configuration, tweaks and attention from our fantastic admin team.

Here’s where you come in! Pick a game, any game, and tell us what changes you’d like to see to the way we run our servers. Maybe there’s a special config one of your friends is running that you’d like to see on a public server. Maybe there’s an awesome map that you’ve found and we should be adding to our rotation ASAP. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Jump into the comments section below and sound off on what sort of changes you’d like to see as we move into April and the rest of the year.

If you’re having a problem with one of our many glorious servers — maybe it’s down, or it needs an update to the latest patch — you can now have your concerns sent directly to our admin and maintenance team by using our Contact page.

Choose the ‘Report a problem with a game server’ option in the drop-down menu, fill in the details, and then hit send. Our team of game admins and system engineers will cast their robotic eyes over your message shortly (though if you report something in the middle of the night, please understand that we are still 98% human by volume, and thus need sleep).

This process is used for both 3FL and games.on.net servers, as all admins will see it. See you in game!

When February 21 rolls around and your download of Crysis 3 finishes, look no further than games.on.net for your multiplayer fix.

We’re rolling out no less than 25 servers across our Australia-wide network, so if you enjoyed your time with the multiplayer alpha and you can’t wait to get your hands on it again, stress less.

Just hit the server browser and look for games.on.net, and you’re set! You might also want to prep up for the game by grabbing the latest Crysis 3 beta drivers. AMD users can find theirs here, while NVIDIA users should go here (32-bit also available).

See you in game!

After the rousing success of our first Community Games Night, our regulars have got together and organised for another one! And we are of course only too happy to bring it to your attention.

So! Tonight, Monday the 18th, starting at 8:30 PM AEDT, you can enjoy hot, hot Team Fortress 2 action on the following servers:

games.on.net #001 – Community Games Night! (203.26.94.58:27015)
games.on.net #002 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.36:27015)
games.on.net #003 – Community Games Night! (203.34.186.70:27015)

Remember, all-talk will be turned on and staff and admins will be popping in to share the fun. Come and join us for some guaranteed good times!

Lovers of classic multiplayer games, rejoice! Games.on.net have just announced that we are deploying a number of servers for some older classic games. These servers are here to stay and will never be shut down!

These public servers will run as is, with little to no customisation. So what games are to be catered for? Well, let’s look at the list. We’ve got the original Call of Duty, as well as Call of Duty 2, Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 3. What a list!

So next time you have a LAN with a few friends, fire up some old classics. The servers will be rolled out over the next few weeks and as they’re public servers, if you could let us know when they’re down or broken or otherwise not working, that’d be great. Check out the forum thread for more info.

Source: Cas!

games.on.net will be going offline between 10AM and 11AM tomorrow (Adelaide time) as we update the site, add in some changes, re-grease the pig, and generally twiddle the whatsits that makes whatever this whole thing even is work.

Our game servers will continue to be functional, but the front page, forum and file library will be unavailable for this hour. Please plan accordingly!

Check out the official advisory notice for more information.

As it is Christmas Eve, we’re Officially Pulling the Plug on games.on.net’s front-end news coverage for 2012. Our forums and game servers will of course continue to be operational, but we’ll be running on low-power mode here at the front page until early January.

Throughout the rest of this week, we’ll be posting our games.on.net Staff Picks for 2012, and stay tuned in 2013 when we’ll roll out our 2012 Reader Awards: our annual massive hardware giveaway in which you, the readers, get to win some spectacular hardware prizes in exchange for voting for your favourite games.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff here at games.on.net for their passion and dedication, all our tireless moderators and games admins for stepping above and beyond the call of duty, and of course you, the readers, for helping to make games.on.net what it is today. On a personal note, this marks just over a year since I stepped into the job of Editor-in-Chief, and it’s been great to be a part of this amazing site and to be a part of such an important Australian gaming community. Thankyou all for putting up with my rambling nonsense!

It’s been a big year for us, and 2013 is going to be even better. We’ve got some amazing stuff waiting in the wings, and I can’t wait to talk to you about it soon. From all of us here at games.on.net, have a safe and happy Christmas, and a ridiculously good new year. Catch you on the flip-side!

As we head into Christmas, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to iron out more and more bugs and improve the way we do things around here at games.on.net.

Today we’ve very proud to announce that we’ve rolled out a major release from our development environment — here’s some of the things you’ll notice around the place.

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