|AOW|

In 1999 |aow| started out as a server called Team SSX. The server was comprised of a bunch of friends who got together and wanted to have a full time place to play where everyone would want to come. In June of 2001, SSX became the Art of War. We had two factions from the original Team SSX server regulars and friends break off at that point. [Sun --][--Tzu] who mostly lived in the southern California area and |aow| who lived in the Northern California area.

In case you don't get the meaning behind this, Sun Tzu wrote the book called The Art of War. Make no mistake though, even though we both had different tags, we are all good friends and respect each other.

Since that time a little more than three years ago, |aow| blossomed and became a pretty popular server with a lot of dedicated regulars with a much better web site, a lot better content, and a busy forum section.

Unfortunately, as with all things people got tired, real life happened and our players and admin roster became stagnate and, in essence, tired. Our Grand Pooba Special Sauce no longer had the time or the energy to continue putting valuable hours into a server especially with a little Special Sauce running around. Because of this, |aow| was dying.

In a grand coup, a few admins began planning a way to keep the server alive and keep the community that still was loyal and special to us. This plan began with trimming the admin roster, adding more dedicated individuals to admins who were regulars to the server and moving the server to a better host for better ping and where we had to do virtually no service whatsoever.

Thus, in August 2004 the |aow| on NuclearFallout was (re)born. With the release of CS: Source we continued to make improvements in the product and to our dedicated loyal regulars.

The popularity of CS:Source fell and we saw a considerable decline in server and forum traffic. In an attempt to revive |aow| the admins agreed to leave Counterstrike after 7 years and moved to a Battlefield 2142 server.

The Art of War BF2142 server first went live on December 23rd 2006. Since then we have switched providers and changed server locations in an attempt to find the best location and server options for maximum server traffic. We moved to Trinity Gaming Servers located in Dallas, Texas in March of 2007.

In late 2007, |aow| shifted once again and moved to a new game: Call of Duty 4 (COD4). This brought us back closer to our roots of CS and CS:S but gave us a new toy to play with as well as a chance to grow our community even further. We liked COD4 so much that we added a second COD4 server to play different game modes and to add new maps and features via the many excellent mods made by the talented people of the COD4 gaming community.

We also expanded beyond COD4. Killing Floor was a surprise hit while ARMA II proved to be a detailed and engaging war simulator. Left 4 Dead and its sequel took the zombie genre by storm and many people here at |aow| were a part of it.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 arrived in March 2010, bringing with it that trademark Battlefield strategy in a more compact and tactical form. Then Call of Duty: Black Ops arrived in November 2010. Echoing our time with COD4, we eventually ran two COD:BO servers but unfortunately the popularity of the game didn't last as long. After a period of quiet, Red Orchestra 2 arrived, for which we opened a new server on release day.

Battlefield 3 is arriving soon and we eagerly anticipate its huge maps and teamwork oriented play. Join us on our new BF3 server! We expect to encounter new gamers, make new friends, and hope that our community continues to grow in the process. And as the years pass, there's no doubt that this won't be our last stop.

We hope that you, too, will become a part of our community. Join us on our game servers, in our forums and on Vent!