There is not much to report on site updates. I have done a little bit of back end work to keep the website manageable, but its nothing you should notice as the user. Some of the legacy pages have been removed. Different parts of the site that had been "turned off" have now been archived, and in some cases removed completely.

So what has been going on? 

Teamspeak3 - Has gone from a 512 to a 32 user server. Why you ask? Because we now have a paid licence freeing us up to collect dues, donations, and/or sell products and services. We will upgrade this licence to include more slots as the group grows.

DBA - We have taken out a DBA for Late Knights Coalition. This allows us to open up a bank account in the coalition's name. You may be starting to see a theme here. 

You may have already noticed the dues page has been up since last Sunday (4/13/14). While the page is set up, you can not currently place an order. I do not yet have a Paypal account hooked up to the system. To do that, I first need to get a bank account set up. This will be happening soon. 

We are still sorting out what benefits will come with each level of membership. This will also be sorted before Dues go fully online. We want you to know exactly what you are getting at each level. For starters, this will be paying for web hosting, our domain name, and our teamspeak3 licence. These are all benefits to you the members.

Currently we plan the following levels.

- Common (F2P) Member - No Dues

• Website Access
• Forum Access
• TeamSpeak3 Access

- Uncommon (Online Only) Member - $5 per Quarter or $20 per year

• All of the Above Benefits
  
• Special TeamSpeak3 Icon/Rank with Preferred access. (If the server is full, it will kick off a Common member or guest to allow space for people with Preferred Access.)
• Special Forum Icon/Rank 
• Name and/or Handle Listed on the website

- Rare (Online/Offline) Member - $5 per Month or $15 per Quarter or $60 per Year

• All of the Above Benefits
• Free Late Knights Winter Retreat Ticket (Must have full years worth of paid Dues otherwise ticket will be discounted accordingly)

- Epic (Online/Offline) Member - More then $5/month (Averaged over 1 Years Time)

• All of the Above Benefits

On the Store page, there is a button (Just like the one above) that will take you to the new Cafe Press store. The store is fully functional and taking orders now. Currently everything in the store is Late Knights Coalition branded. I do plan on adding branding for other games and groups, but I have to be careful about copyright violations. Look for these coming in the future. For now head over and get your Late Knights Coalition gear.

Myself and a couple others are working towards setting up a YouTube channel for the Coalition. Currently we are looking to include some Lets Plays, How To's, and Mod spotlights. There is no ETA on this project at this time, it is merely something in the works. If we can generate a following the money from adds will go a long ways towards, paying for all of the Coalitions needs. If anyone has ideas to help with the project, PLEASE get in touch with me. 

~Luke "Bloodgarde" G
Late Knights Coalition Leadership Team
Officer - Basement Wizards
CEO - Terra-Celestial Logistic Services

This post will be short this week as I am short on time.

All of the Coalition Pages are done and online. These are draft pages and need polish, but the content wont be changing much.

Basement Wizards - WOW: Got a cosmetic update as well as content update. I will let steve review it, and update / change it accordingly.

Late Knights - WOW: Got a cosmetic update and a starter content update. There is more to do here.

Terra-Celestial - Star Citizen: Got a cosmetic update, content is coming soon, however the group is still under construction.

Thats all for this week. Thanks for dropping by,
Luke "Bloodgarde" G
Late Knights Coalition - Leadership Team
Terra-Celestial - CEO
Basement Wizards - Officer

All of the "Gaming Groups, Guilds, & Clans" pages now have custom banners. Check them out. Group Leaders, if there is an issue with your banner please let me know so I can work on it.

Happy Gaming,
Luke "Bloodgarde" G
Late Knights Coalition
Leadership Team

The game menu has been reworked into its final form. More game categories may be added over time if they are needed. 

All of the game pages now have their information and a video post. They contain a link to the Official (or Un-Official) website and have a listing of the gaming groups that play them. I have also made sure to include a logo for every game so the days of the generic picture are numbered.

Please take a look and tell me what you think on the Contact Form and if you think of a game I am missing, please submit it on the Add a Game Form. 

So... I kinda lost the old banner. But that OK... It had a spelling error on it anyway. So while I could remake the old banner, I thought I would try something new. Please let me know what you think. If you like it, it will stay, if you don't I will look at trying to rebuild the old banner. 

That is all for now. I'm going to be tackling the Groups section next. 

Ill keep you up to date,
Luke "Bloodgarde" G
Late Knights Coalition
Leadership Team

Happy Gaming

There is a lot going on around here today. Here is the list of updates. 

Star Citizen is a Crowd Funded MMORPG/FPS. It is do out in 2015, but some features are already available for alpha access. This game has set records for donations (Crowd Funding). It will release as a single player space fighter sim called Squadron 42. Upon completing the campaign you will be released into the MMO sandbox world. This game is being developed in a modified version of the Cry 3 engine, and looks to set a new standard for game design. 

I highly recommend checking this game out. I am extremely excited about it and will be working to develop its pages on our site in the near future. 

There is now a TeamSpeak 3 status app in our header. This will now appear on every page. Please continue to use the TeamSpeak 3 page to update your server address as the app runs between 5 and 10 minutes behind the actual server status. 

The old game page is gone, and the games on it are all getting there own pages. This is still a work in progress. All of our active games have pages now alone with game logos, Official Site links, and link buttons to the the coalition groups that play them. Please take a look at the new format. 

The Add a Game / Add a Group form has been moved onto its own page. A link to it appears at the bottom of the "Gaming Groups, Guilds, and Clans" Menu, as well as the "Games" Menu.

Both fore mentioned menu's have also been placed in alphabetical order.

We are working to improve our Teamspeak service. For most of last year and the beginning of this year, we ran a 99% up-time. This is the same up-time promised by the pay for sites. Unfortunately the last few weeks we have been plagued by internet issues. From ISP's changing our IP address, to hardware failures, to power outages, our up-time has dropped to 96.36% at the time of this writing. We do not find this to be acceptable. 

Currently Matt is developing the first piece of software that will help with the problem. It is a simple app that will run on our server that will email or text our admins when the servers IP address changes. This will allow us to react quicker to getting the new address listed when this happens. I am hoping that eventually we can add the ability for the server to detect and notify us of power outages. (We already have the server on battery backup. It will keep the server alive for up to 2 hours in a local outage. If we have an outage that effects our ISP however it will still take the server down.)

Thus future plans. We are looking into setting up a backup server on the other side of town. This server would be used in the event that the primary service is unavailable. Further down the road we would like to have the two servers "Talk" to each other and email/text server status updates. Finally way down the road we would like to explore the option of our own "pre-launcher" for teamspeak. This app would be run client side, and would detect which server is online and log the client into that server saving you the user from having to update IP addresses at all. 

Now some of these plans may prove to much for us to pull off. But we really want to improve our services as we go forward with the coalition.

We have taken this website from having a separate menu for each game (under the old Lake Knights Gaming setup) to having two primary menus. One menu (Gaming Groups, Guilds, and Clans) contains a list of the groups that make up the Coalition. Some of this groups have a fly-out menu containing more information, lists of addons used by that group, rules, recruitment information, and more. Should a group need enough pages we may explore linking to a separate site when going to that groups area. Also please keep in mind, we do have and will have multiple groups playing the same game. 

Because of this fact we also have the "Games" menu; the other major section of the site. This menu contains a list of the games played by Coalition groups. On each games page we have or plan to have a link to that games official site (if one exists), links to all the Coalition groups that play said game, a video or trailer for the game, and possibly more. 

The goal of this system to to allow current members to quickly get to the information or updates they need, while allowing members looking to branch out, or potential members, to review the games we offer before exploring the groups that play them.

If we find that this format is not working we will look at changing it but I am hoping that between this explanation, and the updates still coming to the "Games" section that this will work out.

Wow, this has got to be the longest list of updates I have posted to date. Thanks for sticking through it. There is a lot of exciting stuff going on around here as we continue building the foundations of the Coalition. As always if you have any ideas, comments or questions, feel free to contact us. Also keep trying to get new people and/or groups involved. 

Happy Gaming,
Luke "Bloodgarde" G
Late Knights Coalition
Leadership Team