About RAW
Based on an idea from late 2007, the RAW community began in January 2008, it started out as a small group of individuals playing F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon), fed up with poorly run servers, we rented a small 10-slot server with a few simple rules to keep out the cheaters which we rigorously enforced.
Players liked the atmosphere and the server was regularly full so we moved to a 12-slot, then later a 16-slot server and then soon added a second 16-slot one, by now our numbers had grown from four members to a dozen so we also set up a TeamSpeak voice server, which we later changed to Mumble.
In July 2008 we registered and set up this domain name server.
In November 2008 we decided to get our own dedicated server located in the UK, which today runs all of our games. We put our success down to us only having 3 basic rules, all of which revolve around a sense of fair play and decency, but most of all it’s down to the dedication, hard work and loyalty (and the money) put in by our members which by this point now numbered sixteen.
In 2009 we expanded into UT3 and then Cod 4, this resulted in further growth in our membership. We would have liked to have expanded into more recently released titles but sadly the Game Industries lack of support for dedicated PC games of late has resulted in seeing many poorly console ported games with either no server files being released or only official licensed ranked ones. We are currently hoping that the recently released Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad will change that. This doesn't stop us playing the likes of Battlefield Bad Company 2 etc. together, just that we are unable to host them ourselves.
By March 2011 we had over sixty members from more than twenty different countries, a truly International Community. We have never accepted strangers, membership has always been by invite only and only offered to those taking an active part that we have gotten to know well via the game servers, forum or Mumble voice server.
June 2011, our design team begin to upgrade the website with a new look and the start of many new features to come such as the new improved stats page.
July 2011, we started up a 24-slot mixed game type server for Team Fortress 2 as this game became free to play.
August 2011, in readiness for Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad, we upgraded the dedi, doubling the core and also quadrupled the memory. We also saw the welcomed arrival of 4 new staff members which means that staff members now account for 40% of the total membership.
September 2011, we now have a 34-slot Red Orchestra 2 server.
December 2011, we now have a regular weekly Podcast which keeps up with current news and events in the community.
January 2012, we see the launch of our official RAW YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/RaWRecruits, just part of our continuation of many new inovative features on the website and forum.
We currently have around 50 members, 15 of which are staff, helping to run the community and paying for the servers, we are looking to recruit more staff members. All staff members have an equal vote in how RAW is run as well as full admins on all the game servers, the Mumble voice server, the forums and website.
That covers us for now but as promised, we have added lots more to our history and hope to continue to do so as we progress further in 2012.