Blizzard announces Diablo 3! The 3rd sequel to Blizzard's dark fantasy-themed action role-playing game! This finally puts to rest the amount of rumours circulating the web about how Diablo 3 will look like and what the gameplay is like.

All of the Classic servers today went offline for a couple of hours due to a server maintenance from yours truly. Lately, I've added some additional plug-ins in one of the Classic servers to test how it affects the overall playing environment of the Classic servers. The plug-in I was testing was the AFK Manager written by hoboman in AMX Mod X. What it does is it scans the game server for players that have joined a team and are currently AFK for XX or more seconds. If it finds one, it then switches the player to 'spec' - that way game rounds are so much faster since the other players don't have to go to the CT spawn area or T spawn area to kill the AFK player. Moreover, once the amount of players in the game server reachers 31/32, then it will kick the AFK player thus opening a slot to a potential active player. Game server administrators are not affected by this plug-in and so they will not be kicked for staying in 'spec' for a long time.

The past couple of days, I've been testing Psycho Stats 3.1 (I'll call it PS31 from now on) on all our servers. My first choice for the new ranking system was an overall ranking system where all the players are ranked under one database regardless of mod. However, some of our mods have a huge advantage compared to other mods, a perfect example would be CSDM vs our Classic servers where kills and deaths are twice as fast on CSDM compared to Classic. And so I have decided to make the ranking system rank the players based on the mods they play (Not per server, but per mod). This way, all Gun Game players are ranked under one roof, and the same goes for every other server we have.

After updating all the PGN game servers, I decided to update or should I say, add a bit of functionality to our web portal. For starters, we now have a web chat! That means you don't have to use any IRC client anymore just to connect to #PGN. Just head over to Chatroom and connect. It's as easy as that. Second, I've implemented something that I've always wanted in a game community web portal and that is custom user profile URLs. You can now make your own profile URLs in our web portal. For example, my profile URL is http://www.joinpgn.com/P4rD0nM3, I can then change it to whatever I want. Just like My Space or whatever social networking web portal you use.