An Exclusive Donators Only Group!

I have accepted a job at VALVe. I am very excited for what the future will bring and am ready to take the next big step. With this said, I will be stepping down as leader and will no longer have an active role in running the Top Notch Clan community/servers. I am not deserting the community or running it into the ground. I am hopeful that we will find a way to continue running the servers uninterrupted. Please private message me on our forums if you have any ideas.

I started the clan, servers and community on December 25, 2007 with myself and ‘Visitah’. Six years later the community is something that I had only dreamed of when I started. My goal with the community was always to provide a fun, safe place, for all players to come together and play a great game of TF. For me, it was most important to give players what they wanted and only provide the very best. With 2,000+ other servers out there, I had to ensure exceptional was a requirement. I have learned a tremendous amount of skills in this time ranging from coding to server management. I am extremely grateful to everyone that has supported the community, including everyone who has ever donated or contributed to it in any form.

I began dabbling in game servers when I was just 13 years old after joining a Counter Strike Source community named ‘[cvar]’. I gained an interest in how the servers ran and how I could improve them. Ultimately, I started to satisfy my curiosity by renting them with what little money I had and created servers others would want to play in for fun. In 2006, I joined a newly formed community called ‘Clan Woof’ and started their GunGame server. It was very successful in terms of popularity and loyalty. I spent most of my time improving it and adding content to the servers, such as sounds and maps along with my first dabble into the world of coding. When Team Fortress was released into beta we saw a door for expansion, however after a few months, I decided it was time for me to start my own community. At 15 I created a single 24/7 Warpath server and spent hours populating it, creating a website and building a community. It gained popularity and I experimented with different maps such as 24/7 Dustbowl. When Payload came out, I jumped at the opportunity of a new and exciting gameplay mode that I felt had huge potential. Our most successful server was created as a result, 24/7 Badwater/Goldrush. During its lifetime, it reached one of the top 5 TF2 servers worldwide based on popularity. Since then, the player base has shifted to Payload Rotation where players can play exciting new community-made custom Payload maps. For those of you that are curious, I am currently 21 and recently graduated college with my BA in Business MIS.

Sincerely,

Jacob "DontWannaName!"
http://steamcommunity.com/id/jacobu