THE
MONTH IN BRIEFThe
Explorers Workbench was opened up again, allowing POs who
had been hit by the overly-picky planet checker to amend
their data and get their planets online. It was a bit
flaky to start with, so players were recommended only to
use it for small amendments and not attempt major
overhauls of their planets.
Commanders were prevented from
receiving groat-gifts from benefactors, and had to start
working for a living. Such a chore!
Selena of the Spaceways actually
appeared in Federation to chat to players. We also saw
Thunderess for the first time, emerging from the black
ether to create the planet Battle. She was seen in
Fedruckers, slapping Galinfenner, biting Uniquette's
knees and kicking Hazed in the shins. Hazed admonished
the little ball of fight and told her she'd better behave
or she'd be sent back to groundhogdom.
The Christmas planet, Tinseltown,
opened at the end of November, with a prize puzzle worth
50 free hours, and Santa Claus also showed up briefly in
preparation for the Christmas festivities.
Somebody mailed out a program which
purported to be a new version of FedTerm; in fact, it was
a password sniffer designed to mail out ibgames account
details so someone else could hack players' accounts. In
fact there was quite an epidemic of people trying to
steal passwords, helped by players' sloppiness in not
taking security seriously.
Multiple alts and 24/7 sleeper
macros started to become a problem, using up resources
and maxing out the game at peak times. Staff started
being tough and booting out those they suspected of using
up more than their fair share of resources.
Players discovered the fun they
could have with triggers - and the chaos they could cause
by deliberately triggering other people's triggers.
Hackers also discovered they could trigger the log-on
sequence from within the game, to get hold of account
details.
The move to the web saw the return
to Fed of a lot of old friends who had been unable, or
unwilling, to play on AOL. We welcomed back players from
GEnie/Aries Fed, Online Fed, and even some from the very
first version, Compunet Fed.
Carpenter Awards were given to two
excellently designed planets, with Albansire's Alba and
Poco's Weasel walking off with the prizes.
The first rumblings of the long
drawn out war between the UDF and the Onyxians were
heard. No-one really knew what they were fighting about,
except that there were ideological disputes about when,
how often, and against whom it was permissible to use
dumping macros.
THE
FIRST SILLY DEATH
Well, this may not actually be the
first silly death of Web Fed, but it's certainly the
first silly death where the corpse has asked to have
their character reinstated!
The victim writes thus:
"I was in a fight at ARENA,
and i didnt want to fight so i tuped suicide, but before
the game put in my suicide, it put in that he killed me,
and now my caracter was deleted!! PLEASE HELP..."
As always, there are no prizes for
stupidity in Fed, so the unfortunate dead person was
sympathetically told that no, they couldn't have their
character back.
FROM
THE POSTBAG: STICKS OF JOY
"Is there a way I can use my
joystick with Federation?" asks a player?
This is a difficult question for
droids - news, mail, cleaning or any kind of droid. The
reason is that we have all been programmed with a keen
sense appreciation of double entendres, smutty jokes and
low puns.
Oooo errr missus!
So a question like this brings out
the worst in it. We try really hard to take the question
at face value - to assume that the questioner wants to
know if, technically, they can move their Fed character
by using the controlling device they use for arcade games
- but no matter how many cold showers we take, we just
start sniggering in a really juvenile way.
Fnarr fnarr.
So although we'd love to give the
answer the letter-writer wanted to hear - that we suppose
it is possible they could write a program that will take
the input from their joystick, and translate it into the
Fed command N, S, E, or W and send the command over the
Internet to the game but we wouldn't know where to start
- all we can come out with is puerile comments about
sticks of joy and thrustmasters.
Pathetic, isn't it?
THE
CORRECT ORDER OF PLANETS
There is a lot of concern at the
moment about the order of the planets. Apart from
prestige reasons of people wanting to feel that their
world come before that of their enemies, there is the
wholly practical reason that when the game fires up and
loads the planets, it does so in the order the planets
are in.
So to clear up any confusion, here
is the explanation of how the planet order is determined.
It's really quite simple: the
planet order is worked out from the position of the PO in
the persona file, and that simply reflects the length of
time the persona has been in the file, since new
characters that are created are added at the end.
If a very old character dies DD and
starts again, it is added to the end of the file.
And before anybody thinks to ask,
there is no way we can manipulate the file to change the
order of the personas. And there's no reason we would
want to, anyway!
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