THE MONTH IN BRIEF
The Star returned from its summer break, to report on several dramas that had happened in its absence - unrest amongst disgruntled CEOs who objected to Financiers investing in their companies, and named them Vulture Capitalists; problems when one of them got so cross she suicided twice and went dead-dead, but the game didn't dispose of her company properly so she came back as a GroundHog CEO; new Manufacturers finding themselves CEOs without companies, and finally a new player who was in the process of buying a ship when the game reset, with very strange consequences! Bella leapt into action and fixed all those bugs.
The taxman suddenly realized he had not been taxing Financiers. At all. They'd been getting away completely with paying no taxes. None at all. Shocking! Needless to say, he put a stop to that pronto, and it was only with the greatest of difficulty he was persuaded not to levy punitive fines against non-payers.
CEOs were given a command to split their stock, providing extra shares to sell to investors.
Messrs Trumble, Cruikshank & Bone offered some enhancements to their remote price check service. Those who paid extra could upgrade and get price checks of whole commodity groups, or a list of the price for a specified commodity on all planets. Great, another reason not to leave the barstool...
Factory working capital was standardized and the command to change the working capital was removed. This meant it was no longer possible to hide vast sums of groats in a factory balance where it would be safe from the taxman.
Married couples for whom wedded bliss turned out not to be quite so blissful were offered a new facility: a divorce! Only one of the two married people is required to obtain the divorce, so neglected spouses can rid themselves of absentee partners.
Bella started work on the Workbench that would let players build their very own planets, and gave the first version to the test team to play with. The limits for what Founders would be able to do with their planets were announced: 50 locations (upgradable to 80 by paying over some slithies) and customized no-exit messages, but no objects or events which are reserved for higher ranks.
Desertwolf's excellent FedTerm character picture gallery moved onto the ibgames web site.
THE WAR THAT WASN'T
It takes two to have an argument, and it takes two to have a war - at least, it does in Fed. Over the past week, one player spent her time running around complaining that another player was waging economic war against her. The other player - a Financier - denied this ridiculous claim, but still the complainant insisted that he had set out to deliberately muck up her company.
We've done our best when programming Fed to ensure that it just isn't possible for a player to have such a negative effect on another player, unless the 'victim' co-operates by mismanaging their assets or by doing something really dumb. We don't always get it right first time, but our test team usually spots the ways one player's actions can damage another player, and alert us so we can tweak things if necessary.
So there really wasn't any war, no matter how loudly the CEO shouted that there was!
THE WORST PLANET THEMES OF ALL TIMES
by Freya
As we test the new planet building tools and work on the design and code elements of the Founder rank, player thoughts and conversations turn, naturally, to plans for their upcoming planets. Some of the ideas being floated on the comms sound clever and creative, but there seem to be many more who want a planet but have no idea what to build. Herewith, to help guide the undecided, a selection of the Worst Planet Themes of All Time. The following is solely my opinion and does not represent the official IBgames position.
1. Planet of the Toxic Spelling Errors
It doesn't really matter what the planet owner intended the theme of this planet to be. It's so filled with spelling errors, not to mention tortured grammar, that it's impossible to figure out for sure what it is. If it's bad enough it gets 1 Pity Point for morbid amusement.
2. Xerox Award Winner
This planet's theme is plagiarism. Ha! And you thought we didn't read books so we'd never catch on to your cutting and pasting chunks of text out of the latest sword & sorcery novel or bodice ripper thriller. This planet theme is often combined with the It's Not Copyright Violation, Really! theme.
3. Copyright Violation Squad Planet
On the theory that Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery (and the easiest), the theme of these planets is totally lifted out of the favorite film or tv series or novel of the planet owner. Locations and character names, literally transferred to the planet complete with storyline.
4. Planet Behind the Green Door
The real theme of this planet is usually concealed behind a stock landing pad. Often a varient on the Xerox Award Winner theme, this planet is explicit material and only seen briefly before staff remove it from the game.
5. The Utterly Cute Planet
Teddy bears and puffy comforters on canopy beds in front of cosy fires with hot chocolate and cookies and a hot tub and...
Read the second part of the Worst Planet Themes here. If you have any thoughts about planet themes you have seen and hated in the past, mail them to feedback@ibgames.com.
REAL LIFE NEWS: SWIMMING POOL CAMERAS RESCUE DROWNING GIRL
Here's a great story of how modern technology saved a life - literally! A swimming pool in Wales has been fitted with an expensive monitoring system called Poseidon, which uses cameras both above and below the surface of the water to monitor swimmers. Software analyzes the pictures, and if it detects somebody motionless at the bottom of the pool, alarms go off to alert the life guard.
A ten year old girl was saved by this system recently. When she got into difficulties and sank to the bottom of the pool, lifeguards were alerted to exactly where the girl was, and were able to pull her out and resuscitate her. She was taken to hospital, and she has now made a full recovery.
Gwynedd County Council leisure officer Brian Evans explained that this particular pool is difficult to lifeguard, being "a typical 1960s pool, with a lot of windows that create a glare." The deep end of the pool is also unusually deep, being over 12ft.
As if this use of modern technology weren't impressive enough, you can actually see the movie footage shot by the Poseidon system, which shows the girl in trouble, and the lifeguards saving her. And you know what? Despite being in black and white, and rather herky-jerky, knowing that this is real makes it far more exciting than watching Baywatch.
REAL LIFE NEWS: GAMING ADDICTS IGNORE KIDS AND GET SENT TO JAIL
Fedders - do you have children? If you do, I do hope you don't neglect them in order to play the game. The parents of four kids in Scotland did, and ended up in jail!
Well, they weren't playing Fed, but another game that the news reports I read did not mention the name of. However, whatever the game was, they became so utterly engrossed in the online world that nothing else mattered to them. The 28-year-old father spent all of his waking hours playing online.
Neighbours called the police after spotting two of the children standing naked on a window ledge, and the subsequent investigation uncovered an appalling case of neglect. The youngest was found in a soiled nappy, and the other three were all dirty and wore hardly any clothes. Two of them needed emergency dental work, and one had to have all her teeth removed.
The parents have been sentenced to three months in jail. Normally I'd think up a quip to end this kind of story with, but it's just such a shocking situation I can't think of anything remotely amusing to say!
REAL LIFE NEWS: STUPID CRIMINALS FOILED BY TECHNOLOGY
Here's two stories about how criminals were foiled by technology. First we have two London men who were recently jailed for burlary after the satnav system in the vehicle they were using stored the address of every house they robbed. Ian Bansie used his work car to ferry his accomplice Steve Warrington to ten homes in Reigate, Surrey, not realizing that the satellite navigation system was dutifully keeping a record of every stop they made, thus providing the evidence of their crime spree to the law. Both are now in a place where satnav isn't of much use - jail.
The other dumb criminal actually rejoices in the nickname of Mr Stupid - that's what all his friends call him after his attempt to make off with a laptop was filmed on CCTV. On eight different cameras, actually. And no wonder, because the shop he pinched the computer from was a store selling CCTVs and other security equipment! He made it as far as the bus stop before being nicked and hauled off to the police station, and is now serving community service, as well as having to put up with the jeers and insults of his friends.
Meanwhile, the CCTV shop in Manchester is delighted by the publicity and has seen a huge increase in sales.
REAL LIFE NEWS: PUTTING YOUR HAMSTER TO WORK
Pet hamsters seem to spend all their waking hours scuttling around in their little wheels, endlessly running and getting nowhere at all. It must be a depressing life, but perhaps they are too stupid to realize. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Peter Ash, of Somerset in England, decided that all that manic energy ought to be good for something. So he connected the hamster's wheel to a system of gears and a turbine, patched the output to his mobile phone charger, and invented the hamster-powered phone. Every two minutes of hamster activity gave him around thirty minutes' talktime.
Peter then submitted the project as a contribution to his GSCE science course. We assume that he won't have to share the resulting qualification with the hamster!
REAL LIFE NEWS: STATIC JACKET ATTACK
An Australian man who was wearing a synthetic nylon jacket and a woollen shirt built up so much static electricity in his clothes, that he burned carpets and melted plastic!
Frank Clewer went for a job interview, but when he entered the building, the carpet ignited into flames from the 40,000 volts of static electricity that had he built up in his clothes when they rubbed together.
Firemen were called and at first they thought the burning carpet was due to a power surge. They evacuated the building and cut off the electricity supply. But then after Mr Clewer left the building, he scorched a piece of plastic in his car. Firemen checked his clothes out and measured the charge they were carrying at 40,000 volts - close to high enough to cause the items to spontaneously combust.
Well, we always knew there were style reasons to avoid nylon clothes, but now it seems there are health and safety reasons, too!
REAL LIFE NEWS: WARCRAFT GAME INFECTED BY RAMPANT PLAGUE
Here's a really odd story about what can happen in a multi-player game when the programmers/designers don't think through the implications of new features.
Blizzard, the company that created the World of Warcraft game, introduced a new dungeon scenario called Zul'Gurub, containing a mega-bad-guy, Hakkar, the God of Blood. He's a nasty opponent, and anyone who kills him gets attacked by a magic spell called Corrupted Blood, which Hakkar casts as he dies. The resulting infection was intended to affect all those in the immediate vicinity of his corpse, and kills weaker characters - generally that includes his killer. A pretty potent revenge!
But some players found a way to transfer the infection to other areas of the game, by infecting an in-game virtual pet and then taking it back to the game's cities. There, the plague has spread from player to player, with computer controlled characters acting as carriers, and as a result many players' characters have died. Now, this isn't as serious as it would be in real life, since dead characters can be resurrected. But it's certainly not what the programmers intended!
Blizzard has tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of the infected servers, and applying quick fixes, but apparently this hasn't entirely solved the problem and isolated pockets of the plague are breaking out again.
Now, clearly, the clever players found a way to use the new feature in a way Blizzard had never thought of. Players generally are very inventive! That's why in Fed we have a test team, who not only test that things work the way Bella thinks they ought to, but also experiment with things Bella would never have dreamed were possible, just to see what happens.
What I can't understand is why Blizzard can't just tamper with the player database and magically give everyone immunity to this plague. Sure, that wouldn't be possible in the real world, but in the virtual world that kind of thing is all too easy. Maybe they need to call up the WHO - the Warcraft Health Organisation!
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