Calling All Pilots!
VARO Rebuild Well Underway!

All racers can understand the strong desire of holding events in a fair, competitive atmosphere. We came to the realization a major change was needed. VARO CEO, Sryth, put the season on hold and Erik Thompson, CEO of West Coast ATC, volunteered for the task of Support Professional. Much deliberation and long hours of effort by many created a process of certifying pilots, to get all on a level playing field.

Some racers that attended were kind enough to send me their comments on the certification process. Roscoe was the first to get scrutinized and was very impressed with Eriks' expertise. Also, WarX says, "Erik did a very good job helping me out. Found out a couple new items about my computer as well. When connected, I can now run about 75% resources free on the dial up and get a decent enough connection to hopefully not be bouncing around anymore. I'm running a PII 450 mhz machine, with a 56k dial up modem (only thing available in my area…bummer), so I'm a bit behind on the power/processing speed, but seem to have enough to run."

One of VAROs newest pilots, Wombat, offered this. "I thought my session went very smoothly. Erik walked me through shutting down all non-essential start-up programs to free up as much systems resources as possible. After that he had me get in the cockpit and check my in game frame rate. He was impressed my slower 600Mhz P3 had a sustained 25 FPS rate, and suggested I may do better with 22FPS. I did change to that afterwards. After that he had me take off and he hit me with a barrage of packets with zero loss. All in all a very pleasant and educational experience........." Wombat was noted not to have updated to DX9 and although Varo would like to see all pilots updated to DX9, it might not be mandatory.

Many seem to have neglected the chance to get the new process going. It's real disappointing to think Varo will loose racers that aren't scheduling certification sessions. The determination to see Varo get through these growing pains has taken a toll on many concerned. Readers will notice, the two comments quoted were from racers on dial-up connections and fairly dated systems. They have been certified, proving that most that desire to race, indeed can!

More changes are in the works to keep VARO a top-notch organization and the premier site for online air racing!

Stay tuned for more developments!
#19GOferBROKE