It is with regret that we announce today that games.on.net forum regular and passionate gamer MrMoilT passed away last Tuesday night after a long battle with leukemia.

Our admin brimlad describes MrMoilT as “an avid gamer, passionate and dedicated to all the games that he played,” and that “even in hospital in Melbourne he managed to continue playing games on his laptop and would join us on ts for a chat about his treatment and his passion, gaming”.

I’d like to ask anybody wishing to convey their sympathies to head over to this forum thread. I’ll be closing the comments on this article.

Our sympathies to MrMoilT’s family and loved ones.

With this year’s E3 set to kick off in only a few short days, gaming sites everywhere are preparing to run themselves ragged trying to keep up with the ceaseless thundering of newsfire pouring from the convention centers and hotels of downtown Los Angeles.

Here at games.on.net, we’ll be funneling all of our resources into bringing you as much coverage as we possibly can over the three days that the convention will be running, and for several days thereafter.

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!

Our Adopt-a-Server program has been taking off, and one of the most enthuiastic adopters has been former GON admin toe2toe (now known as Chadwiko), who has taken this opportunity to build his own Australian hardcore survival Minecraft server exactly the way he wants it.

To explain more about why you should jump into this very hardcore PVP experience, I’ll hand it over to Chadwiko…

For those who have not played on a Hardcore SMP Deathban server before, there is really nothing like it. Knowing that if you die, you’ll be temporarily banned from the server means you take your own survival very, very seriously. You’ll think twice before trusting someone to build a base with. You’ll learn how scary the Nether really is. You’ll avoid lava and high cliffs. And most importantly, night time becomes a terrifying ordeal once again…

• AusHCSMP is a Hardcore SMP Minecraft server with a 3-hour Deathban,
• PVP, Raiding, Griefing all allowed and encouraged!
• No towny/faction mods – almost 100% Vanilla Minecraft, as it should be!
• Server hosted by one of Australia’s biggest gaming networks, games.on.net!

Come and experience lag-free Australian Hardcore SMP Minecraft, build a hidden base, stalk your enemies, betray your allies, and hunt for the mysterious Ancient treasure that is hidden somewhere on the AusHCSMP map. I hope to see you there!

You can find the (temporary) AUSHCSMP site at www.aushcsmp.com. The server address is play.aushcsmp.com and it’ll come online at 6PM AEST tonight.

You can also check out @aushcsmp on Twitter for a list of player deaths and other server events and news.

Enjoy! And if you’re interested in adopting your own GON server, why not read up on the Adopt-a-Server Program and send in an application?

As you know here at games.on.net we run a buttload of servers for many and varied games, and now we’re proud to announce that we’ve just deployed our first lot of ArmA 3 servers.

These are still development servers as the game is only in alpha, so please be aware it might not be fully stable or properly featured yet.

So! Help us test them by connecting and playing on them today — you should see them in your server browser. You’ll need to make sure you’re running the DEV build of the ArmA 3 alpha — details on how to do that can be found here.

Any questions or comments, post them in this thread!

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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So we’re sure you have noticed – iiNet is Australia’s 2nd largest DSL provider and one of the most reputable ISPs around – so we are not surprised you want to work for us! We have a great brand, great products, excellent service and most of all, a brilliant company filled with equally enthusiastic and inquisitive staff that know 1) How to make things happen and 2) how to have fun whilst doing it (most importantly)!!

Right now, we have a cool opportunity to work with our Content team in Adelaide developing the games.on.net platform on a 2 month contract.

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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.

Busy on Easter Monday evening? You are now! The first of our new regularly scheduled Team Fortress 2 Community Games Nights is set for Monday April 1 at 8:30 PM AEDT.

Much like our previous nights, head along to these 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)

..to get in on all the action. Regular TF2‘er and forum-goer Cupcake has also put up a schedule all the way up until December, so head on over to the forum and check it out.

With thanks to lucassot, Mearehear and lucassot again, some footage has appeared of the recent GONlympics Live for Speed event.

Take it away, GONnites!

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