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So who are VIA and where did they begin?

Well I'll start from where I (-=VIA=- Skitz) came into the picture. One night in early 2005 I came across a guy called -=VIA=- Justice4@ll while playing on the wh00pass server. He was from Ireland (like myself) and there aren't many of us about in the CSS world! So we got chatting and he was telling me he was thinking of setting up an Irish server with his clan -=VIA=-. He introduced me to Sean(/Kaiser) who was also Irish and good mates with Justice. The problem was they had no way to pay for the server... unfortunately for me (lol) I had a credit card and was quite interested in the whole idea.

Justice and Sean already found a hosting company and we set up a small server. When I started playing CSS I loved AWPs but at this point they were really starting to bug the hell out of me, they just seemed to encourage camping and were imo rather gay. Justice wasn't a big fan of them either so we decided VIA would be a No-AWP server. This I believe was to be one of the best decisions we ever made.

The server did quite well from the start, mainly cause myself, Sean and Justice would spend hours and hours on it so others would join. After a while it began to fill regularly from about 18:00 till 22:00 and was going well. Happy with the way things were going, we wanted to expand the server and we did. We moved companies once or twice before we decided we needed a dedicated server and we got our first dedicated server from a company called gameage, it was a 3.0 P4 with 1gig of RAM. Back then this was more than enough to run a large server. We brought the server up to 44 man as well as running a match server.

So at this time the clan was expanding, but it had already become clear there was no need to keep the server exclusively Irish, there was a lot of people from other countries we wanted to join the clan, so VIA went from Virtual Irish Army to Virtual International Army (as it is today). Times were good and things were going well, the server was getting visited by a lot of regulars and would be 90%+ full from about 16:00 till 23:00 or so.

As time went on and Steam released more and more patches, the server started to lag a lot and we were forced to cut things back, the server's reputation was still strong however and we were getting busier all the time but we had to close our match server. By this time I'd started to get into understanding how the server ran (I didn't know a thing when we got the first one!) and started experimenting with a CSS scripting language known as EventScripts.

In October 2005 I think it was, I released my first ES script on the server, the skin by score system (still in use today, although extensively rewritten ). I think from then on I focused a lot more on server side of things while Justice and Sean were more involved in the clan side of things.

January 2006 I'd had enough of our 3.0 P4, with all the patches Steam had released, the server just wasn't up to the job anymore! I began to look around, did the sums and figured I'd go the whole hog and buy a dual xeon Dell PowerEdge server, I didn't have the money for it but got a bank loan and figured the money we were already paying to rent a server, donations and renting out a server or 2 would cover the loan repayments (lol yeah i was being over optimistic!). Anyway after a few delays we got the new server up and running around Feburary 2006. We took a big step up the world rankings (in terms of average number of players on the server), moving from around 12-18th position into the top 10 and very shortly after we became World Number 1 where we have been ever since!

While things were going great numbers wise, Steam as always were releasing patches and a major one in April 2006 really messed up server resources and cut back what we could do, renting out servers as we planned was no longer realisticly possible and i was left with the bulk of the bill every month (thanks Steam!). Around this time Sean and Justice were also playing some DoDS and talked about a DoDS server, so we set one up: The -=VIA=- Avalance Only server. It played DoDS best map (imo) Avalanche 24x7. Almost immediatly it was a big hit and very soon it was in the DODS top 3 servers (hit No.1 and one point). Ultimately the server would come down in the late summer of 2006 due to more Steam patches eating up even more resources needlessly.

I did however set up a GunGame server, a mod of CSS. It too did extremely well, amazingly becoming the no.1 gungame server in the world too. But ultimately, what else but another steam update in December 2006 was the death of it, I hope to bring it back again one day.

Through out this period (early 2006 onwards) we were getting some extremely skillful players playing on the server. Sean and Justice were mainly behind the recruiting and we began to get some major talent in the Clan. We started to enter Ed and were winning nearly every match, we came very close to the top of the ED rankings. But the problem with skillful players is they sometimes get too big for their boots and are ultimately not fun people to play with. There was a split in the clan as many of the more competitive players were removed/left due to various conflits largely coming from big egos.

From that point on -=VIA=- never got back into competitive stuff seriously again, the community that grew around the server began to overtake the clan itself. Today we are more of a community than a clan, although the clan does still exist we are careful who we recruit into it. VIA is now more about a server that brings people together to have fun. Will we ever get back into competitive play again? Well only time will tell, with such a high profile server we never had a problem recruiting the tallent needed, maybe one day if the right person comes along to lead a competitive team, -=VIA=- will once again prepare for war!

In the summer of 2007 VIA had its first LAN in Cork Ireland. The event was a great success and a LAN for the summer of 2008 is already on the way!

On the server side of things, these days the VIA servers run off an intel Quad Core Extreme 3.0GHz. A custom built server from www.cybernetic-servers.co.uk (Promo Code: VIA for 10% discount by the way ). It is just about the best processor on the market and continues to ensure we have a great place to play. Thanks must always go to those people in the Hall of Fame who's donations make all this possible.


-=VIA=- Skitz