- Joined
- Jan 2, 2008
- Messages
- 25,039
- Age
- 36
Q: What is TBG's history? How did TBG form?
A: TBG (True Born Gaming) was established on January 1st, 2008. Prior to TBG it was called Steel Rain Gaming (www.steelraingaming.com). SR was originally a gunship group in Battlefield 2142. We definitely owned the skies in that game for years, until the game's death. We had multiple TWL gunship teams and won almost every single match in 2vs2 gunship battles . Our teams finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd. We were banned on many 2142 servers for being very good which forced us to start our own little community and server, opening our doors to everyone (regardless how good of a player you were). Unfortunately, we ran into into many issues with SR. We had 6 founders and it was very difficult trying to work things out with 1 of the founders. The 5 founders were very open and reasonable while the one individual wanted to go one direction without seeing the negative repercussions. Long story short, this individual was starting up avoidable issues, fighting for sole direction of the community, disagreeing about logical things (such as proof of cheating before a banning a player) and was not willing to communicate with the other founders or members. As a result, two of the founders were "booted/willingly left" to start on a new adventure. Turns out that second founder decided to not continue with the new community which just left only one founder. Eventually the other remaining founders made their way over here along with some core guys (some are still here with us after so many years). We discussed on a 8 man ventrilo the new name and fundamental principles of the new community: TBG was suggested as a name and accepted. During the early birth of TBG, we ran into another issue here when one of the founders that migrated over started to become unreachable and had sole access to our funds using it for his own personal use. This was unacceptable and a huge step back but with the determination from the remaining founders and core members we reinvested the funds back into the community. Since then, we've been aware of our past mistakes, made some changes and decisions we knew would make this community last for good. We went from one small 32 BF2142 server that didn't even belong to us to hosting over 20 servers and having a large fan-base.
While have 20 servers in the past was an amazing experience, shrinking the servers was essential to build chemistry and regulars. We have slimmed down to an optimal amount of servers.
Q: Where are the servers located
A: Our primary location when we first started (2008-2011) was New York and then Virginia. We even had servers in the UK at some point (2008-2009). Logically it made sense to move everything over to Chicago, Illinois. It has a better hub and great routing. Chicago has been our location since 2011
Q: Does TBG plan on expanding location eventually?
A: Eventually yes but not priority at all.
Q: What boxes does TBG use to run their servers/service.
A: Currently we have 2 x high end machines that run all our servers - 8 cores per box with plenty of ram, bandwidth, SSD space
Update: We no longer use Teamspeak. We have moved on to Discord. Also our box are still running great and plans for minor upgrades in the future.
We are always on the ball with box upgrades when they are available. So never worry, we are always running high quality boxes.
Our high end operated boxes run many different gaming servers. Our goal is to always be under 50% for each box.
Q: If that's the case why do we experience crashes or lag?
A: Having the best gaming boxes in the world does not mean it is immune to network issues.
Network issues varies from our datacenter, to loss connection to the master server (Battlelog for example, which can be unstable on DICE's end) or DDOS attacked (denial of service). All of these affect our servers and these issues are beyond our reach. Our provider is always finding ways to mitigate and filter the attacks before it reaches to us, or rectify the network/datancenter hiccups when they do arise. Yes occasionally servers do crash if the game itself is unstable, memory leaks (running for a long time without a crash). It is important to realize that gaming servers is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many reasons and factors behind the scenes that contribute to unstable network. It is easy to blame on a server if you don't understand the root of the issue. Keep in mind this could be a personal connection issue or a bad routing to the server as well.
Q: How can I spot if it's a datacenter issue or DDOS attack?
A: We run services on few different boxes. If Teamspeak (now discord) and all our servers are experiencing issues then that means network datacenter hiccup or an extremely large DDOS attack handicapping the whole network at the datacenter. If a handful of our servers lag then crashes that means someone targeted a specific server on a specific box causing that box network capacity to become unstable including any other servers that might be on it.
Q: Why does the maplist play the same map twice?
A: That varies, we use 3 different admin tools one can overwrite the other when a setting is updated/changed. One of our admin tools can also be bugged, triggering duplicate commands. It can also trigger this if the server lost connection to battlelog kicking all the players (this is not a server crash but client side crash). Or if it was manually changed to another map, it may revert back to play once more. Please note that maplist will always correct itself just need to be patient when this occurs. One last scenario, If the server map list has a preset of "random" it can play two maps twice in a row. Either we can have unpredicatable map rotation including the possibility of playing two maps in a row or we can have predictable map list and avoid this issue. Conquest all maps and gunmaster currently have their maplist set as "random". It may play the same map twice.
*UPDATE* We have now incorporated vote-map option. And the use of multiple admin tools have stopped. It has been consolidated into one
I want to join but I am not 21 can you guys make an exception?
A: Sadly not, the main reason, we want this to be as selective and restrictive as possible. We used to allow 18 and over but it proved to cause more issues.
Q: Do you guys provide sponsorship?
A: At this time, we do not, maybe in the future if there are benefits for both parties.
Q: What type of gameservers do we run?
A: Given we originated from the battlefield series we are primarily a battlefield community. We are however a multi-gaming community which means we've expanded into other games. Normally whatever is popular or hot at the moment we try to support those. If we get enough demand from our members for a specific game (given dedicated servers are available) we try to accommodate. We are a PC community hosting PC servers.
Q: I want reserve slots! How can I achieve this?
A: We have recently open doors to those that appreciate us as a community. With a little support on your end, we can enable reserve slots for individuals. Usually the games we support will have that option.
Q: Why is racism not allowed in your servers?
A: Pretty logical reason as to why and not sure why this even comes up but it does. Simply put, in most societies out there, this isnt tolerated at all so why should we tolerate it?
We run public servers and do not want to give off the image that it's okay for you to use slurs while being in our servers. Yes this so called "freedom of speech" is a thing but also it's our freedom and right to choose who we allow to play in our servers specially if we are primarily paying for them. We do our best to warn you in the welcome screen and scrolling messages. We can't do much more than that. We aren't going to hold your hand. It's your job to read and respect the server rules.
A: TBG (True Born Gaming) was established on January 1st, 2008. Prior to TBG it was called Steel Rain Gaming (www.steelraingaming.com). SR was originally a gunship group in Battlefield 2142. We definitely owned the skies in that game for years, until the game's death. We had multiple TWL gunship teams and won almost every single match in 2vs2 gunship battles . Our teams finished 1st, 2nd and 3rd. We were banned on many 2142 servers for being very good which forced us to start our own little community and server, opening our doors to everyone (regardless how good of a player you were). Unfortunately, we ran into into many issues with SR. We had 6 founders and it was very difficult trying to work things out with 1 of the founders. The 5 founders were very open and reasonable while the one individual wanted to go one direction without seeing the negative repercussions. Long story short, this individual was starting up avoidable issues, fighting for sole direction of the community, disagreeing about logical things (such as proof of cheating before a banning a player) and was not willing to communicate with the other founders or members. As a result, two of the founders were "booted/willingly left" to start on a new adventure. Turns out that second founder decided to not continue with the new community which just left only one founder. Eventually the other remaining founders made their way over here along with some core guys (some are still here with us after so many years). We discussed on a 8 man ventrilo the new name and fundamental principles of the new community: TBG was suggested as a name and accepted. During the early birth of TBG, we ran into another issue here when one of the founders that migrated over started to become unreachable and had sole access to our funds using it for his own personal use. This was unacceptable and a huge step back but with the determination from the remaining founders and core members we reinvested the funds back into the community. Since then, we've been aware of our past mistakes, made some changes and decisions we knew would make this community last for good. We went from one small 32 BF2142 server that didn't even belong to us to hosting over 20 servers and having a large fan-base.
While have 20 servers in the past was an amazing experience, shrinking the servers was essential to build chemistry and regulars. We have slimmed down to an optimal amount of servers.
Q: Where are the servers located
A: Our primary location when we first started (2008-2011) was New York and then Virginia. We even had servers in the UK at some point (2008-2009). Logically it made sense to move everything over to Chicago, Illinois. It has a better hub and great routing. Chicago has been our location since 2011
Q: Does TBG plan on expanding location eventually?
A: Eventually yes but not priority at all.
Q: What boxes does TBG use to run their servers/service.
A: Currently we have 2 x high end machines that run all our servers - 8 cores per box with plenty of ram, bandwidth, SSD space
Update: We no longer use Teamspeak. We have moved on to Discord. Also our box are still running great and plans for minor upgrades in the future.
We are always on the ball with box upgrades when they are available. So never worry, we are always running high quality boxes.
Our high end operated boxes run many different gaming servers. Our goal is to always be under 50% for each box.
Q: If that's the case why do we experience crashes or lag?
A: Having the best gaming boxes in the world does not mean it is immune to network issues.
Network issues varies from our datacenter, to loss connection to the master server (Battlelog for example, which can be unstable on DICE's end) or DDOS attacked (denial of service). All of these affect our servers and these issues are beyond our reach. Our provider is always finding ways to mitigate and filter the attacks before it reaches to us, or rectify the network/datancenter hiccups when they do arise. Yes occasionally servers do crash if the game itself is unstable, memory leaks (running for a long time without a crash). It is important to realize that gaming servers is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many reasons and factors behind the scenes that contribute to unstable network. It is easy to blame on a server if you don't understand the root of the issue. Keep in mind this could be a personal connection issue or a bad routing to the server as well.
Q: How can I spot if it's a datacenter issue or DDOS attack?
A: We run services on few different boxes. If Teamspeak (now discord) and all our servers are experiencing issues then that means network datacenter hiccup or an extremely large DDOS attack handicapping the whole network at the datacenter. If a handful of our servers lag then crashes that means someone targeted a specific server on a specific box causing that box network capacity to become unstable including any other servers that might be on it.
Q: Why does the maplist play the same map twice?
A: That varies, we use 3 different admin tools one can overwrite the other when a setting is updated/changed. One of our admin tools can also be bugged, triggering duplicate commands. It can also trigger this if the server lost connection to battlelog kicking all the players (this is not a server crash but client side crash). Or if it was manually changed to another map, it may revert back to play once more. Please note that maplist will always correct itself just need to be patient when this occurs. One last scenario, If the server map list has a preset of "random" it can play two maps twice in a row. Either we can have unpredicatable map rotation including the possibility of playing two maps in a row or we can have predictable map list and avoid this issue. Conquest all maps and gunmaster currently have their maplist set as "random". It may play the same map twice.
*UPDATE* We have now incorporated vote-map option. And the use of multiple admin tools have stopped. It has been consolidated into one
I want to join but I am not 21 can you guys make an exception?
A: Sadly not, the main reason, we want this to be as selective and restrictive as possible. We used to allow 18 and over but it proved to cause more issues.
Q: Do you guys provide sponsorship?
A: At this time, we do not, maybe in the future if there are benefits for both parties.
Q: What type of gameservers do we run?
A: Given we originated from the battlefield series we are primarily a battlefield community. We are however a multi-gaming community which means we've expanded into other games. Normally whatever is popular or hot at the moment we try to support those. If we get enough demand from our members for a specific game (given dedicated servers are available) we try to accommodate. We are a PC community hosting PC servers.
Q: I want reserve slots! How can I achieve this?
A: We have recently open doors to those that appreciate us as a community. With a little support on your end, we can enable reserve slots for individuals. Usually the games we support will have that option.
Q: Why is racism not allowed in your servers?
A: Pretty logical reason as to why and not sure why this even comes up but it does. Simply put, in most societies out there, this isnt tolerated at all so why should we tolerate it?
We run public servers and do not want to give off the image that it's okay for you to use slurs while being in our servers. Yes this so called "freedom of speech" is a thing but also it's our freedom and right to choose who we allow to play in our servers specially if we are primarily paying for them. We do our best to warn you in the welcome screen and scrolling messages. We can't do much more than that. We aren't going to hold your hand. It's your job to read and respect the server rules.
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