Mostly everyone in this community, including the large majority of the people posting above me, have the wrong idea of the outlands. While I will admit that the actual server is almost 100 percent safe (Little to no xenians, extremely rare combine sweeps), ICly, and according to Canon, the city is MUCH safer than the outlands. The outlands is INFESTED with aliens such as headcrabs, antlions, and other xenians including vortigaunts. The outlands would also be under CONSTANT bombardment from the Combine via shelling and sweeps.It took the Combine Empire 7 hours to take over the entire world, and that's when we had fighter jets, tanks, the military, and a population of ~7 billion.You really think it'd take much longer than, say, 5 minutes for them to kill a few rebels armed with some shotguns and mp7s? However, Half-Life 2 is a game. White Forest is probably completely unknown to the Combine (until of course, as you saw, it got raped by striders).Black Mesa East lasted about 10 minutes after Gordon Freeman arrived.The fact is, it doesn't make sense that "The Outlands" still even exists, after the Combine know about it.