The short but disturbing problem with no leadership for the Ez guild is over for this time.

Amazing community after all. It didnt take long time until several people offered to help out continue checking demos for the Ez guild tryouts. But what I was looking for was leaders of the guild, not just people who check demos and nothing else. But being leader is mostly about that, checking demos, but also discuss and implement changes to the current setup of the guild.

Without further ramblings from me I'm happy to present the following leaders to the Ez guild:

Im proud to have Mr White on board and it feels like a garantee for a certain level of professionalism. Involved with the -uc- and ^vi guilds. Been around a long time. Has helped out as beta tester for several of the larger skills mapping projects.

Diablo offered to help with the guild to keep it running, and have done so rapidly and already approved several new members. A very good soldier and a solid friend of our sub culture :D.

Pro climber, upcoming concer, leet mapper and what not? Sim is well-known by most people by now and specially on Euroskillz – Fun. Not just me, but I think many of you think that this is a very good choice of guild leader.

Ez lacks active leadership atm, and I cant handle it all alone. Until Ez have people in charge who actually checks tryouts without any delay I put the guild on hold for the moment.

I am sorry for this as Ez have become popular, but its more annoying to wait week after week for someone to check his/her's tryout. Hopefully this will be solved shortly.

Valve and Steam has added a new friendly function in the Steam client, the Steam Community. It is basically a way to get together a group of people with same game interests. Euroskillz have their own group here http://steamcommunity.com/groups/euroskillz. Be shure to join :). It is still in beta and has a lot of bugs but it will hopefully soon be fixed.

To celebrate this I have scheduled an event, The Voice Chat Mania saturday August 25th at 8 PM. That is 20:00 GMT+1. Be shure to be there with your old records, your mum and dog and anything that you can create sounds with. Sing or RAWWRR or just STFU and enjoy the show. Personally I will play old classical midi files.

Be shure to invite as many people as you can to our group.

It seems again that there are people trying the oldest trick in our Steam world, to try steal your account and promise you access to all Steam games. Watch out for this, and never click any of those links. Another trick is to try and pretend you are an Valve official sending you a mail asking for your account info. It is easy to say that 'If you are so stupid that you believe this you deserve it'. There are people who barelly learned to read who play TFC. Kids can easilly fall for this, and if you have a relative who is a minor playing this then watch out, and warn them for this.

Thanks Turbohjelle for highlighting this problem. I hope it makes some less people be tricked.

To get things going and give Renegade some inspiration to continue mapping I urge you to give him some feedback on his map concmap_renegade_beta3_a. For nothing else its worth following his post and watch the friendly flaming between Mule and Renegade. They are probably the two most gifted TFC skills flamers ever to emerge. (That said in total respect).

The map can be found in the download section.

At last the new servers are up so step on in and try them out. I have disabled the skillsrank plugin on the old servers and moved your stats to the new ones. If you are stubborn and stick to play on the old then you wont get any points. As already said the old Euroskillz will run to the 22nd of june. I promised you 1, maybe 2 big surprises. Well, the plan has changed. It is now 1 big and 3 quite big surprises.

Euroskillz guild [Ez] is launched

Its been requested for quite some time with a guild for Euroskillz. So what is a guild then, if you didnt know? It is not like a clan where you battle it out against other clans. Skills guilds has tryouts where you have to finish certain maps to become a member of the guild. Euroskillz now have 4 differant divisions you can tryout for. These are:

It shouldnt be much of a challenge for the average concer or soldier to do the [Ez|eC] or [Ez|eS] tryouts. But I promise you, the hard ones will keep you busy for a while. The fun trial is to say the least challenging.

The ones who have been working on this and who will be responsible for checking your tryouts are:

So head over to the forum where we have opened a new thread with info on how to do the trials.

More slots on Easy and Fun

The Easy server has now 20 slots and fun has 25.

Climbmania on Fun

Some people just cant get enough of it, and some people just cant stand it. Yea, I'm talking about climb maps. So for all of you who love it we have added the following maps:

All maps have been checked and approved for speedrunning, balls added and checkpoints. If you have any issues with these maps remember to post it in the forum.

INTENUDDAMARK: A new skills map by span_

Mappers like span_ really doesnt grow on trees in TFC these days. A humble guy who just announced he was working on a project. And the screenies he showed was just great. It is span_'s first skills map, but it really doesnt look like it. Grey maps can be dull and depressing, but I dont know how span_ managed to make grey look so fresh and new. The texture theme is consistent all over the map. Fun jump ideas for both sollys and concers. Custom designed bags, also grey. A new skybox, at least I havent seen it before. Overall a way above average quality map. The only issue is the polycount at end, but who cares, its just an end room? And what an end room :D. Great work span_ and be shure to post your feedback in his thread in the forum: intenuddamark thread

On saturday our new servers will be open for public. Ingame the server redirect will bring you to the new servers. The old servers will run until they are shut down by the provider. remember to change your favorites in steam during this time. The new ip's are

Everything should be the same as on the old servers, but hopefully better running. We have 1 GB more ram and an Opteron 1210 dual core and 64 bit suse. To bad the amd binary for hlds doesnt support 64 bit. But hopefully the dual cores do some good anyway. If not for the game servers so for mysql and Apache.

I really hope you will enjoy the new shiny servers. We have plenty of space for more crazy things to add the coming year.

Surprises coming on saturday

At least one, maybe two big surprises on saturday.

Lt Llama's praising section!

I had noone to curse and praise except Charlotte in irc during the migration work. And I tell you, I hope I never have to do it again. So I hope this provider is good enough to stay on for the next 10 years ;).

Lt Llama's whining section!

Maybe you think I am crazy to not accept donations anymore. Well, the only purpose was to get enough funding for a new server for Euroskillz. This goal has been reached and I'll announce shortly when and where we are moving. You will probably not notice much of this, hopefully :). This means one more year for Euroskillz.

Many have asked about the rewards the donators have, and become jellous, and contacted me to donate so they can get the same rewards. I have to say SORRY but it can't and won't be done. The ones who helped donate during the time I asked for help are also the ones who will have these rewards, noone else.

I hope we will leave the Lag monster behind us when we leave the current server. Some of can be blamed on our plugins, but mostly on the limits of the server. Thats hopefully going to get better with a:

Still lot can go wrong, but I really hope this will go as smooth as possible and that we will have no downtime for Euroskillz.

Master Dark Jedi-g1 has used his mapping forces again and made a map where you surelly need THE force to finish. This map is not for earthlings with a weak spot for concmap_rax, concmap2k3, concmap_r. It is not entertainment, in the normal meaning. If you see pain as a higher form of pleasure, then you come to the right place. It is a map for the few of you who really are masochistic skills players, who enjoy the pain of standing at the start and look at jumps that never end. This is a map which would make any other normal person go "Your not normal", if you enjoy playing it :D. 6 jumps with lots of space for sollys, demos and concers.

Don't expect any cosmetics, this map doesnt try to seduce you with fancy lights, secrets and disco music. It is straight on. It is for you who are ready to follow in the path of the Dark Jedi of TFC. Prepare to fail!!!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

================================
concmap_force2 | May the force be with you
================================

Hi,
this is my 3rd map !
There are 6 jumps and every jump should be possible.

Beta Testers :

Lt.Llama
Crusher^vi
Son Goku^vi
Dark Jedi^vi ( Me )

Special thanks to -kNuCkles.dC- for helping me with some entitys ! :)))

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I bet you all have missed the dizzy effect. The wait is over!

Several months ago Ramon started working on a plugin for chosing to have dizzy effect turned on or off. What he showed me was awsome. Its not just a plugin to turn it on and off but also log who conced you, change to any rate of dizzy effect you want, or block certain players. Due to some restrictions in the current amxmodx scripting language he wasnt able to fix the conc logging properly, until now.

Whatever this means, was the key to solve the mystery:

Finding out who conced you was by far the hardest problem to solve for Ramon. The plugin now do a spherical search for players in range within the open space radius around the players origin.

Main menu

Concuss Menu

Non-stop Concuss Menu

Try using the non-stop concuss menu and set dizzy to 250. Very useless but very fun.

To use the anticonc plugin ingame say conc_menu. The plugin is added to Euroskillz - Easy/Medium/Hard

As requested by Ramon this plugin is not public, until Ramon decides otherwise. Thanks for letting Euroskillz use it :)..

Someone said "A gathering of retards", wtf???

That is lies, ugly mean lies. TFC players can co-operate without messing up the general plan in 10 seconds. I mean we learned to team play, right? I mean, we have no problems making up a strategy and then we all go ahead and do it together?
Anyway, Sackratte a.k.a many other names, jumped of joy of the idea to gather all admins for a group photo. And it had to happen NOW, not later, NOW. Alright, sleeping on my duty as usual, i slowly woke up and Sackratte gathered all avaliable admins, and mercs for afk admins for this historical moment. How long time would you say normal people would need to make a group photo? 1 minute? 5 minutes? Well, we needed 35 minutes, of which 32 minutes where spent on chatting. But we all wanted it done, so here you have it.

In the back row (from left to right): Turbohjelle, Hannes, Lt Llama, Demon, Galdur (a green Demoman), Ramon.
In the front row (from left to right): Sackratte, Freeman, Inky, Dark jedi.

Some of our admin models where misssing, but maybe we can do them all at a later point.

I want to thank Kalchi, [] 0o7.pt and Andreas.dC aka Balls.Mp3 for helping us as standins for the admins we couldnt gather. Muleh was a standin to, because he didnt have any model. Well, we make you an oven model later, ok?

A very special Thanks to our photographer Groove Salad who patiently waited while we where jumping around with a vague idea of what to do..

Gratz to Groove Salad who reached 1000 finished maps

Groove Salad has done what no other human has ever done before on Euroskillz, finished more than 1000 maps. Some may think this is pathological (sick) but here at Euroskillz you are the king now and you have earned your Gold stars.

The stats have been running since februray 2 2006, and Groove finished his first map 5 days later, conc_juggle_mmr. Some popular maps on the way to the top has been concmap_sore, concmap_rax, concmap_jungle2, concmap_esad series and many many others. He is an allround skills player, fluent with concs, rockets and pipes. Well, who wouldnt be after 1000 maps. But one thing I dont understand is how he always have time for a nice conversation, and still have time to finish so many maps. Anyway! Awsome achievement and hope to celebrate you when you finished 2000 maps :D.

Official Euroskillz Concmap in production by Knuckles

Knuckles have offered to make Conc_Euroskillz, a map deisgned by YOU and mapped by him. You can read all about it here. If you havent played any of Knuckles maps you should, they are all over the place on the skills servers. Very fun maps with a lot of ambience. If you want him to make a jump designed by you then go ahead and make a drawing as described by Knuckles in the forum.

Dark Jedi into ^vi

Congratulations to Dark Jedi^vi.dC who worked hard to get into ^vi (Vertical Impact) and finally made it. I met a restless DJ waiting for necro^vi to check out his final demos so he could add the tag to his nick. He was very thrilled about it, which anyone would be who knows how hard it is to get into ^vi. I think DJ was a CS player before coming to TFC skills. I havent met many players who made it into ^vi only 14 months after they started to play. The fact is that ^vi is a concing guild, and Dark Jedi started out as a solly. If you meet a concing Yoda on the servers (a suitable model now), remember to congratulate him for the amasing achievement.

Ramon hax pic :)

I cant say its been any spam in the upload section. Checked this morning and found this little work of hax art (entmod?).

After some massive group pressure, the admins on Euroskillz Easy/Medium/Hard have got their own designed player models. Thats what you are now downloading when you connect. I am sorry if this slows down your connecting to the skills servers, but its a one time download, and it should go quite fast. For those who played on Esporthalle before it closed, you know that there was an ingame player model menu where you could chose among about 100 models. The models where not precached, instead the players who wanted to use the models had to download a model package from Esporthalle's webby. This was very very popular, and I think most players downloaded it. If enough people think this would be fun also on Euroskillz we can add it to. It wont be a priority for now, as there are other things waiting to be done. But you never know, group pressure can do wonders :D.

Ok, i touched something which I shouldnt have touched in the forum. I think thats solved now. Ill make the width of the forum a priority. It sucks if we cant post any bigger screenshots than 250 x 250 pixels. I have moved all the content for the downloads so that should be restored. A Firefox bird whispered in my ear that the banner wasnt visible. Seemed like FF didnt like \ in the image url, but prefered /. So among tons of other Firefox problems, at least thats solved.

Ok, thats it, i uploaded the new webby today. It is not what I planned it to be, but as we reached the goal for a new server I thought this was a good day to upload it. It was supposed to contain much more, but I guess I have to save some surprises for later. The template was xhtml valid before I touched it, but im not so shure anymore. You will probably have problems with other browsers than IE, and in particular the tables. They work, but they dont look as I designed them. I'll try and tweak that later.

Why is it so green?

Probably because I have been concing to much looking at this texture for years .

If anyone would ask me to associate a color with TFC it would be without doubt GREEN.

Some comments about the content

Today we reached a goal which I thought was impossible 2 months ago, enough funds for a new server. We now have 620 Euro which will grant us the same kind of server as Euroskillz runs on today. That means the same, with good and bad. You all know whats good, and you know whats bad. The bad side is that we really dont have enough RAM on the server for what we do. Thats why you get occational lag spikes. The low fps depends on how the Linux kernel is compiled. That can be solved, but the RAM problem remains. If we where able to rent a 2 GB RAM server everything would be much easier. What happens is that our 1 GB fills up quite fast, and the server starts to swap, aka use hard disc space to store what should be stored in the RAM memory. And that slows things down. But a 2 GB server rent would be somewhere around 800 €, which is probably to far away for us.

Officially the donations stops now, but if you feel that you really can afford it, and want Euroskillz to be even better, then you are very welcome to donate. It is not a must anymore, but would be a super bonus for all of us.

You really gave me back my belief in the good hearts of gamers. We might be seen as the scum if the earth by some ignorant people, but I know you are the best. Today I am really proud of all you concers, climbers, fraggers, whiners, helpers, admins and donators. Final decision about the new server will have to wait a while. I keep you posted.

You might wonder whats been going on with the donations, and where we stand with the server renewal. If you have been ingame you have seen how much we got at the moment, and how much we need. This is how it worked. When i see a donation in Paypal i send the donator a BIG THANKS and add his/hers donation and steam id to the database. Ingame a plugin checks if the one who connects have donated. If so he/she sees a message thanking him/her and a set of new commands, some of them fun, some of them useful are given to the player.

Those who donated 20 - 100 € has been offered a 2 GB user account which some of them have accepted.

Donations so far

So what now?

I have started looking for other providers, and there are a lot to chose from out there. I far from decided. Here are the ones im looking at for the moment.

Teamplay.de

Me and turbohjelle tested the pings and for us it is 10-20 better ping. Feels good. I sent them a mail asking them about their service, and everything I wanted to know was ok. After my mail they started working on their root server info page, which is a bit odd. Well, they have servers similar to what Euroskillz runs on at the moment. Until they updated their price info I cant tell what it costs. But before they took the page away a 1 GB ram server costed about 600 € / year. A 2 GB server, which would be what we need costed about 700 € / year.
What I dont like about them is the setup fee which is 50,27 € if you rent for a year, but 0 € if you rent for 6 months and 0 € if you rent for 2 years. Really odd! They also charge for just about anything you want extra, like software to control the servers, which I think should be included. But overall they seem to be ok.

Hetzner.de

Wherever you look people only have good things to say about this provider. They dont have any control panels, so it has to be installed by me, which im not looking forward to. For 1 year a 1 GB server (DS3000) would cost 687 €. This is almost the same as Euroskillz have now. A 2 GB server would cost 807 € for a year, which is above what we can afford. 2 x 160 GB disc space would be awsome, and enough rooms for all we have x 5. That would mean room for all avis and uploads of things you want to host.

Webtropia

I dont know anything about this provider, and I dont know any game server using them. It was a random find. They have flatrate on the bandwitdh usage which can be good, it can also be bad if they see your are using extreme amounts of bandwitdh, which we wouldnt? They also have Confixx which means an easier way to administrate things on the server, and it is included. No setup fee. Same location as Euroskillz now use, Düsseldorf, so the ping should be the same. Their Root starter AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (1 GB ram) would cost 504 € / year. The 2 GB server AMD Opteron 1210 (Dual Core) would cost 819 € / year.

So as it looks now we will have a similar server as Euroskillz have now, but much more hard disc space. I know all of you would miss the enormous lag spikes from Euroskillz, so maybe thats good :D. Also, it doesnt hurt if we have a little extra funds left. I am thinking of a highly configurable flash chat.

Flash chat maybe?

Thats it for now. If you want to help with something you could go try and find some servers using Teamplay. Hetzner or Webtropia and tell me what works best for you. Or even if you have heard anything about them which is good or bad. During may I'll keep looking for servers, and start working on the move. As soon as a new server is ordered I will start to move Euroskillz. This will probably be done sometime during the beginning of june. That will take some serious coffee drinking and cursing, but it will be done.

P.s. I will be forever greatful to all people who have helped making Euroskillz survive, and become popular. A ist of the donators will come in due time. Im still thinking what else you guys should have for benefits. Without you this would have ended sadly, so your worth it.