Shadowbolts

After reviewing options, I've deduced things. Year 1 of the Bolts cost me like $300 all in all, so Year 2 is going to clearly be a massive shoestring budget.

I've detailed a few options below past the jump, to keep the page clutter down.

Proposals

• Reclaim the URL - I let it expire, but I got about 20 days of exclusivity to reclaim shadowbolts.org on the cheap. Blog style sites seem to have free domain sitting, so I can use one of those to put up the old site design with our Valkerie and logo, as well as direct people to the not likely gonna be used Twitch stream and Youtube archive.

• Utilizing Hamachi - My ISP won't allow me to normally host, but Hamachi allows me to bypass such issues. I've looked into it and I can also host Teamspeak 3 for free up to 510 users, which also works using Hamachi to host.

With Hamachi, the idea of hosting games suddenly opens up, since hosting for Minecraft and stuff actually ate a decent chunk of money last year. We can also use it to host servers for games like THE SHIP, with no real issues.

Biggest issue with Hamachi is that it's a 5 person limit per network, and only 3 networks per free account. $30 for a year to host about... 32 people, which I doubt we'll really go over. If we do, we have more Hamachi options to explore. The Hamachi server will also be limited based on the time I'm around initially, but that's not too big a deal, since I can leave it on fulltime if needed, and I have an old battered 2006 laptop that somehow still compares to ones you can buy in 2013 that I'll eventually use to host with fulltime if needed.

All in all, I let things get out of hand last year when I got that rockstar mentality when we had about 40-50 members at once in the XIV group, and strayed from the original purpose. I just want to have a group of cool people to play games with that I can unwind after a stressful day of work or slow off day, and keep in touch once the games are done. Not really my fault people in the year of 2013 hate using forums for that and rather just Facebook EVERYONE to fulfil that purpose. Old school mentality doesn't die that easily, so I'm sure my vision holds merit.