This is a community of people who have come together online to escape the immaturity and dross found on public online gaming servers. It focuses on team-based strategic games such as Counter-Strike and Ghost Recon. N42's motto is 'Play it Right' with a focus on 'Professional play' which means playing as a team rather than with a Quake III deathmatch style.
Founded several years ago by its creator and general ruler Apophis as a LMCTF Quake II server it has since blossomed to embrace many other games. It also has a lively forum where members come to debate gaming, technology, politics, the internet and every day life.
The name Network 42 is inspired by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy series. During the course of the 'trilogy' we learn that the meaning of life is in fact 42. This also spawned the URL of the N42 website www.xlii.com (XLII being 42 in Roman numerals).
One of the defining moments of N42 and 'professional Counter-Strike,' or PCS, was a post by Apophis on the alt.games.half-life.counterstrike newsgroup on Usenet. Here is an extract from it.
<frost@xlii.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.15b3b3fca09259e9896da@nntp.bx.net...
This is a bit of a rant, but fully open. Treat this message as an RFC;
I've been running a CounterStrike server for a little over a year now. Over the past 6 months, I have tried turning our normal run-of-the-mill
CS server into almost a CS Purists server. I'm trying to get people to
understand the concepts of teamplay, of offensive and defensive
tactics, as well as respect for the purpose of the game.
What does this all mean? Well, I started repremanding people for doing
things like bunny hopping, ditching their teams when they're supposed
to be playing defense so they can run out and do some glory killing,
etc.
If you don't understand what i'm talking about; here's an example.
In cs_italy, the CT's are the offensive team. It is their job to get
and rescue the hostages. Rescuing the hostages is more important than
hunting down every last T and killing them. The Terrorist team's job is
to hold the hostages and eliminate any CT threat. This means the
Terrorists are a defensive team. What should a defensive team do?
Well, play defense of course! When italy starts, and both teams
blindly go rushing in to each other, the end result is just a simple
slaughterfest. There is no objective here other than to kill. There
are no tactics other than to shoot fast and shoot a lot.
This completely ruins the game, IMO. When you play as
a CT, you should thinkactwork/and cooperate with your team like a CT.
The same goes for the T's..
Forcing people to stick to their roles as players isn't as hard as
trying to teach people what teamplay really is. I have sat and watched
people on my team, be it T or CT, allow fellow teammates to be
ambushed from behind because a single individual player wanted to be
able to sneak up and get all the kills themselves. They would allow
their teammates to be slaughtered so they could get ahead. This isn't
teamplay.. this is MEplay.
Over the course of operating this server, I have gotten plenty of 14
year old kids complaining that they should be able to bunny hop. They
should be able to sacrifice their whole team for their own personal
"statz". It sickens me.
Well, this about concludes my rant. If any of you people like playing
CS the way it was meant to play; I would LOVE your input! And your
presense on our server!
Since then a CS clan called 'dead men walking', or dMw, adopted the PCS standard and so created the second PCS server, and the first one in the UK.