one decade

[izzy]

aloha.pk was registered 10 years ago today on February 14, 2011. wow. i can't believe how fast time flies. at the time, it was rare to experience peaceful gaming communities that respected everyone fairly and recognized people for good behavior. too often i'd find myself involved with communities that had power-tripping know-it-all admins or bullying environments where carelessness was the road to popularity & power - and i had enough. i wanted a place where "hardcore" gamers (like myself at the time) could have a lax but serious gaming environment with roots of sincerity, respect, fairness, positive reinforcement, giving credit where due, etc. you know, the good ol' raw human stuff like how we'd treat friends & family in person, essentially "aloha" by definition. that's why... aloha... player killers. and so as the story goes, on one lonely Valentine's Day in 2011, aloha.pk became an existence on a mission to bring together respectful gamers from anywhere in the world.

• we began with a Battlefield: Bad Company 2 'Heavy Metal' 24/7 server - a huge open space 32 player FPS map full of drivable tanks & helos - in California that had lots of players connecting to it from Japan, so we duplicated the CA server as a second server in JP that became one of the most popular BFBC2 servers for a while (that's why some of our first members are Japanese).
• a couple months later we became so heavily engrossed with Ace of Spades that nothing else mattered, not even BFBC2! at one point we were running 30+ full pyspades servers and our colo'd server got kicked out of a data center for bogging down their rack because they thought the 1,000+ simultaneous players were a massive DDOS attack. to their defense early pyspades wasn't exactly optimized. thrilling times! fast forward to today and remarkably there's still plenty of fun to be had. nearly 10 years... it's a long lifespan for a game, and although we as a community are admittedly only as perfect as any human, overall i feel that our collective early involvement, organized staff operations, content & code creations, hosting services, and most importantly respectful attitudes had and continue to have a positive impact on the game. good job guys.
• then of course there are the multiple awesome Minecraft worlds we built together, such as from the already shutdown 'crew and friends' server, and the newest alohacraft server which is live and can be played right now. check it out!

over the next 10 years all of our lives inevitably will change, but aloha.pk will still be here one way or another. we intend to continue our support for Ace of Spades and Minecraft as long as people want to play them. we're also aiming to expand our reach into other unique/interesting/creative games, technologies, and activities. please always feel free to share your finds & interests, maybe we'll be interested too and we can dream and build cool stuff together!

in the nearish future, web changes are planned that will help the community's social aspect grow, with the ultimate goal being to provide better recognition to everyone who contributes their time & effort. this community is where i met some of the most kind, smart, genuine, and interesting people that i know (friendships for life?) and with the right balance of careful thought and change i believe we can all have more of those kinds of connections.

regardless if you joined today, 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, this is probably still relatively early for aloha.pk. so aloha/welcome, and mahalo/thanks for all your past, present, and future time & effort. a decade ago i couldn’t have imagined a community as special as this and i know all of our combined efforts are the reason it became what it is. i am grateful. <3

[Froelich131]

This is a great articulation of aloha and what it means to be part of here. Here's to another 10 years, aloha!

[Atreyu]

Absolutely insane, kudos to everyone! 💙

[FerrariFlunker]

Extremely well said!  Here's to another 10!

[Oxlot]

10 years of banning legit people and trusting hackers wooooo

jk, happy anniversary

[shywolf91]

Extremely well said!  Here's to another 10 100!

FTFY


Good write up Izzy. Nice seeing the history on on aloha first started.

I can't believe how the years have flew by. I started playing AoS on aloha exclusively in late 2012 (seems just like yesterday sometimes)

I'm excited to see what changes are brought upon us in the future and hopefully we can continue to build an everlasting community.

regardless if you joined today, 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, this is probably still relatively early for aloha.pk. so aloha/welcome, and mahalo/thanks for all your past, present, and future time & effort. a decade ago i couldn’t have imagined a community as special as this and i know all of our combined efforts are the reason it became what it is. i am grateful. <3

The golden age of classic AoS seems to have been past us but the golden age of aloha has just begun.