Let me repeat that for you since I'm sure you thought I said February. FITES officially announces that registration is open for the LANFest FITES 200 Summer LAN. We will have our usual LAN room, console area, and, new for this event, a tabletop gaming area. Please feel free to bring some games along for everyone to enjoy.

In order to register for the event you must do so through LANFest. Once you have registered there be sure to checkout http://intranet.fites.net/ to register for tournaments and join any Pick Up Gamer groups if you don't have a team of your own.

So buy a seat for you and your friends, come on out, and have a great time at the party! More announcements are sure to come so stay tuned to FITES on Facebook, Twitter, and our forums to get any information on coordinated game nights or other events that we have coming up.

Yesterday a link appeared in my twitter feed from gamer and FITES forum member duder about ESEA. It went something like this:

Well, yes, that would get my attention. The link was a post on Reddit, a decidedly juicy wall of text that described a massive betrayal of trust scandal and one apparently cocky idiot admin at ESEA.

Software installed on the machines of ESEA players and users mined over $3,700 worth of bitcoins that were held in accounts owned by ESEA and all done without the consent or knowledge of the end user.

I encourage you to read the details fully yourself and know that we, the general public, may never see the full telling of the story in this case. I say case because what happened at ESEA was a violation of Federal law (see section (5)).

ESEA was found to have installed bitcoin mining software in their clients. The ESEA client is a software piece that users and subscribers of ESEA services use to play on ESEA servers. It is prudent to point out at this point that ESEA is a "pay to play" service. It is a premium quality service, but comes at a price.

While players were running their ESEA clients the software was mining bitcoins. A process that is potentially harmful as long term use of your CPU and GPU at 100% can have permanent damage to your components.

The reddit link above does a fantastic job of showcasing evidence and displaying a great timeline of response from ESEA as the case was breaking. Great as in a LOT of backtracking of responses.

Although we may never see it, what this case needs is a whistleblower to come forward from within the ranks of ESEA and tell the general public what happened. I'm sure people within the organization are currently worried about what their own culpability might be, but I am confident someone is sitting on a smoking-gun pile of evidence that was not involved in this process.

I'm trying my best not to speculate on the outcome of these events, but I'll admit that I am in no way trying to be objective. This is ludicrous, and a huge betrayal of the part of ESEA. Their organization faces criminal culpability as well as what should be a mass exodus of users and sponsors. I for one hope to see a league rise up that is based on the integrity of community and players, and less on money. Here's hoping that groups like UGC and eXtv can be the driving force behind a positive future of e-sports.

Currently this story is still developing and has been over the past 24 hours. Facts stated here are true to the best of their knowledge at the time of writing.

Is this news? No, but it should be. Any time the FITES crew seeks to amass a large army of players, the world ought to know about it.

Announcing a coordinated game weekend for May 10, 11, and 12, we're calling on all able bodied gamers to load up Planetside 2 and join us in the battlefield.

PlanetSide 2: War Correspondent - Episode 3

If you've never played Planetside 2 before, imagine it as the most massive never ending game of BF3 you have ever played. Classes, vehicles, massive maps, hundreds of players, and C4 hijinks. Best of all, have I mentioned that it is FREE TO PLAY?

So here are some things to know going into this. Currently a lot of our players already have characters on the Vanu faction on the Watterson server. So if you are new to the game, make a character there and join us. Don't worry about this forever limiting your options, you can make new characters on other servers if you like, but the best experience is in playing with A LOT of people all at the same time.

Some people may have frame rate issues. This can be due to either a series of patch updates or you may need to modify a file that determines your render distance. Here's a guide to help you out with that.

Planetside 2 is a pretty massive game with a lot of constant updating. It's hard to keep track of every little change and explain everything all at once, but here's a playlist of videos made by Levelcap Gaming that has some guides, explanations, and frag videos. It's not a complete telling of everything, but it gives you some basic help with it.

We're going to do our best to fill out some squads and send people on multiple tasks. It's tempting to lone wolf it, but coordination and strategy will help out, especially if defending a "zerg rush" of enemy players. To that end, be sure to join us on our Team Speak Server. And for the love of God, there are no spies, but there is Friendly Fire! So don't spy check your team mates! And don't let me see an entire squad of infiltrators either!