Community Announcement: Expansion to 75th Ranger Regiment & BF:BC2

Dear Community,

I'm writing this to announce a few changes going on within and that are about our community that you are all a part of. There are many of you that already know what's going on, as I invited many of you to our new Steam Community group last weekend, some have seen the change via our server names and in our tags, and I'm sure there are some that may have no clue at all what I'm talking about. The biggest announcement is this: the 5th Ranger Battalion is expanding into the 75th Ranger Regiment and this will result in the 75th being comprised of two Battalions. With this move, into being comprised of two battalions, we are expanding our gaming community and launching ourselves into the soon to be released, Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Our new Battalion, the 1st Ranger Battalion will be committed to supporting our launch into BF:BC2.
Our 5th Ranger Battalion will remain committed and dedicated to supporting Day of Defeat: Source.

Our tags have also changed and to understand them, I'll list them below:

[75RR:HQ] is for our 75th Ranger Regimental command members.
[75RR:1] is for our 1st Ranger Battalion members that are assigned primarily to our BF:BC2 Bn.
[75RR:5] is for our 5th Ranger Battalion members that are assigned primarily to our DoD:S Bn.

We expect that to start with, we will start very small with the 1st. We have already pre-reserved a 32-slot public ranked server that will go live with the game's launch. At that time I will make another annoucement with the server information so that those that are able to, can go play and participate in our new server. But, intially, we will only install a small support staff in the new game, while we continue full-time in DoD:S and build up our efforts in BF:BC2.

This move is not a departure from our community, from DoD:S, from our servers that we currently maintain now, or the realism community in any capacity. Rather it is a great opportunity for us to expand our reach and community base in order to help not only ourselves ensure future viability, but also to ensure that the realism community that has treated us so well, continues on and expands its reach into other ventures.

There is much caution and hesitation that is being exercised in a move such as this capacity and we hope that you will continue to participate in our community oriented events and that you bring your friends, that may not be aware of our community, to our doors so that we can welcome them in. And, to ensure that we are being more inclusive of our community, and to help foster the growth that we want to see happen, we are also making some changes that reach beyond our own members and will directly affect all of our extended community members.

In order to ensure that we are providing an environment that you want to be a part of, we are taking more of an open door approach in regards to some of our activities and offerings. Listed below you will find some of the enhancements that we are making to benefit all of you.

Public Ventrilo Access: We want you to be more connected to us, so that you can see and hear all that we can offer including getting to know our members on a more personal basis. In order to do this, we have come up with a MOTD that will need to be accepted upon entering our Vent server but is similar to our MOTD on our servers and is just asking that you consent to show good common sense and respect for one another. We have also upped our subscription for Vent from 50-slots to 100-slots and should we have the demand, and financial support from our community, we will continue to increase the slots until we can accomodate everyone that would like to be on vent chatting to other members of our community. We will have multiple public channels that our guests can join, while maintaining private channels for our members. There will of course be privleges to being a regular member of our community and it's our hope that this will help some of you see the advantages to being a direct part of it and thus get you to join. The information for our server is posted below.

Our Ventrilo Server:

IP: vent11.gameservers.com
Port: 4273

Download Ventrilo: http://www.ventrilo.com/download.php (You want the "Client")

NOTE: You should login with whatever name we know you by. We all will have our names and tags on for our respective divisions. Please don't abuse any of the Vent features, but make yourselves at home.

Mid-week public realism: As many of you are aware, we currently offer public realism on the last weekend prior to our BT cycle ending. What we plan to do is host realism that is open to the public more frequently and that will include realism offerings in the middle of the week, on Wednesday nights, for those that are otherwise unable to make it the weekend offerings. While we won't hold the session all day as we do on the weekend, we will set aside a couple hours every other Wednesday for our public members to come join our regular members and play some realism with us on a more regular and casual basis than many may have been accostomed to in the past. The calendar of events will show these events and I encourage you all to keep it in mind when you need something to do on some otherwise slow and boring Wednesday nights.

Public Steam Community Group: We have created a new Steam Community Group, 75th Ranger Regiment - Official Community Group that is reflective of our change to the regiment structure and of our more inclusive community. It was created weekend before last, with some of you already receiving invitations to it, but is officially announced today. While it's somewhat necessarily plain to start with, we will work to have it fancied up over the near future and will use it as a platform/channel to communicate with the entire community on a more regular basis. Just to be sure that you understand a little more about this new public group, let me list a couple more important things about it. This will be a group that is open to the public (anyone can join) and one that you are encouraged to invite your friends, our pubbers that may otherwise not interact via the forums, and anyone else you may know or encounter. It will be used to communicate announcements, events, and news to our extended community so that they are able to stay abreast of this information and allow us another channel to communicate with you all and vica-versa. In the end this is for all of you to benefit from and we invite your comments and suggestions to help make it successful and be something that you all like being a part of. Also, we have a new public community for the 5th and DoD:S specifically. You can find that group here.

Finally, we all value what you are to us, our extended family. We value the time we get to share with you in our pubs, the discussions we engage in via our forums, and the fun game playing we get to have when we're playing DoD:S or any of the other myriad of games that I know I've played with many of you. With this move, we are hoping that you will continue to support us as you have in the past and that together we can make a community that everyone is proud to be a part of. And should you have any questions for us, please direct them to myself, Bisaillon and Broadaway so that we can do our best to answer your questions and reduce the spread of hearsay and rumors.

I thank you all so much for being part of the 75th Ranger Regiment Community and can't wait to see all of you helping us build the best multi-gaming realism public community out there.

Thank you again,
Major Joel W. Cabrera
75th Ranger Regiment Commanding Officer