2 Years Anniversary

Two years is a long time. Two years is an eternity for an internet based -anything. For that, and a thousand other reasons, I am thrilled to be writing about Better with Age Gaming on the occasion of its second anniversary. Better with Age, or BwA, is a community of PC gamers aged 25 and up. The community exists to provide a relaxed, good natured environment for the older gamer. Skill isn't a requirement for membership. Instead, all that's required is a good attitude and friendly demeanor, a microphone to chat and laugh with us, and a love of PC gaming. BwA hosts servers for Counter-Strike Source, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2,



Team Fortress 2, and Call of Duty Black Ops. There is a large group that is further interested in various Battlefield and other Call of Duty games and regularly plays together.




What is BwA?
Now there's a question that can be answered in a couple of different ways. By the numbers BwA is a solid group of 120 or so PC gamers that have a common interest in first person shooter PC games. Every month 8 to 10 new members join us while 3 to 5 fade to inactivity. Our forums are incredibly active, having recently surpassed 50,000 posts. In addition to game related news there are numerous common interest community boards on topics like PC building and component buying advice or troubleshooting. It's also where our Fantasy Football league is played out, and where all of the other things message boards are generally used for occurs.



On the hardware side, our donation-supported dedicated server is an eight-core monster with dual Xeon 5620s, 24 GB DDR3, and four 1-TB harddrives in raid-10 to ensure that no matter what is going on in one server the others remain buttery smooth.

More important than the hardware, however, is how we use it. These numbers may vary, but there are roughly half a dozen Counter-Strike Source and ten Left 4 Dead servers running at any given time. The Counter-Strike servers include stock CSS, gungame, turbo death match, and various private servers available to members for scrimming along with specially configed privates for league play. On the Left 4 Dead side there are similarly numerous public servers as well as an abundance of private servers for stock play and a rotation of popular mods.

To avoid letting things get stale members occassionaly volunteer to organize intra-community tournaments and "Fun Nights." The former usually involve a psuedorandom team selection of some sort followed with a few weeks of match play. We've done this kind of thing for several games and had a blast each time. The "Fun Nights" are much less formal and usually a free or inexpensive (sub-$5) game/mod that very few people are familiar with. An advantage to administering our own dedicated hardware is that creating new game servers only requires that someone with access upload the necessary files and configure the server. Goldeneye Source and Team Fortress 2 have both worked really well for this kind of event.