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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate September 1998 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate September 1998 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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September was a very quiet month with not a lot going on and not a lot of news to report. The most significant non-event was the continued absence of the Duke Puzzle. The last week of the month saw a little movement, with a new version of the Fed code going in to fix some bugs, including a strange teleporter bug that sent people to the wrong planet and sometimes crashed the game. A Carpenter Award was given to Singapore for his military planet, Kingsway. The planet Scratchwood opened for business, owned by Birdseye. Ordinary planets wouldn't normally get a mention in a Yearbook but this one was significant... Birdseye is an alt of the demi-Goddess Hazed and Scratchwood was written by her. Scratchwood is a service station for travellers who wish to pause in their hectic journeys through the spaceways, reached via the Scratchwood Orbital Bypass. The spacelanes are patrolled by a giant albatross, a relatively harmless bird unless provoked. The service station is quite safe, which no death locations. There's a puzzle to solve and lots of hidden locations to find. The Federation Archives stretched further back in time as the news bulletins from Compunet were added - the very first version of Fed. Alan Lenton gave a talk at the C and C++ European Developers Conference in Oxford, England, on Design Considerations in Massively Multi-player Games. He covered a whole range of design issues that have to be considered and you can read the first few parts of his talk on his web site at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/mpgames.html.
Late summer is traditionally a tough time for journalists. Everyone is holiday; Government's take a break; there's not a great deal of real news to report. So we have to scrape the bottom of the barrel in order to find something to fill out papers. The alternative is to use much larger type, and we think people might notice that and feel cheated! So, looking in the barrel, we find at the bottom of it some truly trivial stories of absolutely no interest to anyone. For example:
Since we just cannot bring ourselves to actually print any of these appalling stories, you will forgive us if this week's news seems a little skimpy. Since we expect all our readers are on holiday too, perhaps nobody will notice!
SCARAMOUCHE: MISSING IN ACTION There's no planet round-up this week because Scaramouche has gone AWOL. Speculation is rife about where he is, what's happened to him, and why he hasn't sent in his article for the news. The rumor mill has come up with a number of reasons, one of which might even be true:
Whatever the reason, we will have a round-up of new planets in next week's news.
Rumors of my deaths have been greatly under-exagerated... I'm back! And just where have I been? I think the question should actually be where "haven't" I been. I categorically admit to everything. The games of strip Jenga, the skinny dipping, the carousing in the ruins with the coed naked rugby team, the bar crawl that spanned the galaxy and back, the party on the grassy knoll (sorry about the sidearm thing, I could have sworn the safety was on), even the Grizzle Cave incident. I deny nothing, unlike that Old Earth King named William Nixon. Only a few people got hurt, and it was for the best anyway, right?
FROM THE POSTBAG: THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS Last week's letter and comment about the inadvisability of helping new players to rise through the ranks too fast prompted some reactions from readers of this organ. First, Magesmiley writes:
While we don't have any plans to ban gifts of groats to any ranks higher than Commanders, Magesmiley is quite right that players who don't spend the rank of Trader learning how the exchanges work and how Fed's economy runs will not have the necessary basis of knowledge to run factories successfully, and thereafter to manage a whole planet's economy. A dissenting view comes from someone who didn't give their character name:
There is a big difference between a PO starting an alt and zooming them through the ranks as fast as possible, and a genuine brand-new Groundhog being artificially boosted. It is to be assumed that the alt will already know how to trade, having done it once before, so they do not need to spend the time learning the ropes. However, we don't think it's necessary to give players a way to speed up their alt-promoting any more - it's already possible to get from GroundHog to PO in just a few days!
FROM THE POSTBAG: LIVESTOCK AND HEALTH The following correspondence has been sizzling across the ether the last couple of days:
I have a question. I was recently hauling the commods for a health build when I noticed something. I was wondering about the logic of one of the inputs. Pharms and RNA are both medical so I understand them. I don't know what hypnotapes are so I'll accept them as well. Pajamian suggested furs were used to keep people warm and that seems like a good idea so I'll accept that. Now here is the question. What in the world could one possibly use 1630 tons of livestock for in the building of a health facility???? An answer would be greatly appreciated.
Livestock have several uses in a health facility - not so much in the building stages but in the running of the facility once it has been completed. The commodities, however, are taken at the start of the building process and stockpiled until needed once the health center, hospital, lab or whatever is up and running. An important use of livestock in some health facilities is for research and testing of drugs. Some livestock are destined for a happier outcome, being sent to children's hospitals where they help keep the little patients happy and thus facilitating healing. But most of the animals end up in the kitchen. Doctors, nurses and patients all have to eat!
You make some good points about the livestock, but I'd like a chance to respond. First, research is generally done on rats, mice, hamsters, and the beloved guinea pigs (I have one; they're cute as hell) not cows, sheep, chickens, and horses. Second, isn't it a little unsanitary for a children's hospital to have a livestock farm next to it? Those things get pretty messy. Third, yes the doctors and all do need to eat, but why would the doctors be sending the livestock through the stockyards when they could be eating the Meat, Soya, Fruit, and/or Spices that have already been produced?
You are very behind the times... research is currently done on all kinds of animals; rodents haven't been the scientists' choice since the early 21st Century. Surely you are aware of the physiological similarity between pigs and humans that allowed porcine organs to be transplanted into people. That lead to the discovery that drugs can be tested on pigs to much greater effect that rats, mice and so on. And the size of animals such as cows, horses and so on makes research a lot easier than fiddling around with tiny little mice. Petting zoos do not have to unsanitary places. Provided the animals are well maintained and kept clean, there is little danger to patients. Barring the appalling outbreaks of the so-called "mad cow disease" back in the late 20th century, there is little transfer of disease between animals and humans. Besides, general health these days means that most people have considerable resistance to germs that used to cause major health scares at that time. Finally, you are obviously not aware of the current trend of the anti-vegetarianists, who far from refusing to eat living creatures, embrace the idea of carnivorality to the extent of glorying in the slaughter of live animals for consumption. This cult is gaining popularity amongst young men, linked to the "back to nature" fanatics. Devotees of the fad attend special abattoir-restaurants where they slaughter and butcher the animal of their choice then cook and eat it. Doctors and other health care workers are not immune to the call of the beast within them and many have taken up this rather bloody gastronomic hobby; hence the need for livestock in the staff canteens.
Here the correspondence closes, as Danteaf is convinced by the stunning prose of the demi-Goddess (or maybe he just can't be bothered to argue any more).
FROM THE POSTBAG: HAND TO HAND COMBAT A player who was trawling through the Fed Archives writes: "I found the GEnie Fed news bulletins, and read the September 3rd, 1990 article. It said that Our Illustrious Leader was planning on putting in hand-to-hand combat (mainly with mobiles). It also said that because she is so lazy it probably wouldn't get done until 1997. This article was in 1990. It is 1998. What happened to this?" The short answer is that Alan decided not to put hand to hand combat into the game. But since we are a bit short of news this week, I will give you the long answer, and explain why that decision was taken.
When the news stated that something would not happen until seven years later, this was not a prophecy, or a serious estimate of the time we thought it would take. It was a sarcastic comment on the fact that a whole lot of things that had been planned for Fed seemed to take far, far longer than promised to actually materialize in the game - not because of laziness, just because that's the way things happen. Yes, you may think the problem with the Duke puzzle has taken far too long to be sorted out, but badly under-estimated times for new features is nothing new to Fed and in fact goes right back to the very early days, which you will see from reading about Fed's First Year, also in the Archives at http://www.ibgames.net/federation/archives/.
You need to understand that the ideas about what Fed should be change and evolve over time, as the players' wants and needs change. When Alan first designed Fed, he started out with a plan of how he wanted the game to be. But that plan started to mutate almost from the first moment. First, when he came to code the basic structure of the game, he saw how things could be done better than his original design. He also had to change some of the design as he taught himself to code in the C programming language in order to write the game, and found limitations on what could be done. Once the game went live and had real players running around in it, it was obvious that some of his design ideas that sounded fine in theory didn't actually work in practice, and had to be changed. Inevitably, enthusiastic players came up with ideas of their own, some of which were incorporated into the game.
Alan likes to talk, and players' like to hear what he is thinking about doing in the future, so he frequently used to drop hints about what he planned to add to the game later. Sometimes the "later" was intended to be only a few months away, sometimes several years. Sometimes the ideas he would talk about would be fully worked out in his mind, other times just the vaguest sketches. But often before the "later" arrived, he would change his mind. His idea about what the game should be like would move in a different direction and something he had previously told the players that he would be adding later, would get dropped. Hand to hand combat is one of those, and I'll tell you why in a moment. Or perhaps the idea wouldn't get dropped, but it would get postponed... it would still be in The Plan but there would be lots of more important things to do first. A good example of this is the Martian Invasion; it's still on the list of things to do, but there are a lot of more important things to do first.
Sometimes a feature gets coded into the game and is fully functional before it becomes obvious that from a design point of view it doesn't work, and it's taken out again, just junked. Seems like a waste of all the hard work, but there are very few rules about how to design a good multi-player game so Alan had to make things up as he went along, and often that meant going down blind alleys. With hindsight it's easy to see why something didn't work, but at the time it made sense. Here's an example. Back in the days of GEnie Fed, a lot of work went into allowing players to smuggle goods into duchies, avoiding paying the customs duty and dodging embargoes. But in the event players hardly ever used it, and it just didn't add anything to the game (except a lot of complex code), so it was dumped.
Perhaps the largest ever upheaval caused by the junking of old plans was to do with the Emperor. Alan's original ideas were for the top-ranking players to vote for who should be Emperor of the Galaxy. The rank of Senator was at that time a player rank, and one of the Senators would become Emperor. The problem was that ONLY one of the Senators could become Emperor. At all the other ranks, there was no direct, head-to-head competition between players. Fed DataSpace was a universe of infinite resources and, technical issues aside, could support any number of Captains, or Merchants, or Explorers, or Barons. So players had existed in cooperation, friendly rivalry, with the occasional dispute being settled in a fairly civilized manner. Alan had in mind that the Senators would campaign for the election to Emperor in a jokey, role-playing, fun manner. Boy, did he get a surprise! The high-ranking players decided to play the election for real, and long before the code was in to actually let anyone vote, the campaigning degenerated into vicious personal attacks, mud-slinging, vitriol... just like a real life election, in fact! All thought of keeping things in character went out the window, as the front-runners dragged the debate down into gutter. For a time, the atmosphere in Fed got very unpleasant. The friendly rivalry had been lost. Alan couldn't see how to bring the election back into some semblance of civility, so he changed track completely, dumped the idea of a player being Emperor (which left the door open for Ming the Merciless to take over) and made Duke the highest player rank. A very radical change indeed!
The point is that Fed is a constantly evolving game. As the number of players, the type of players, the gaming culture generally on the Internet and the Fed culture specifically changes, so the ideas about what Fed as a game should be change. The basics remain: it's a space trading game, it's not about violence but about cooperation, players run economies at various levels, players can be creative and build their own planets, and so on. But everything else is subject to change. Just because a feature is in the game right now, and you can do something at the moment, doesn't mean it will always be there. Just because we announced we would be doing something in the future, doesn't mean that things will happen that way. We may come up with a better idea. Ok, for all you hysterical conspiracy theorists, no this doesn't mean we're not bringing the Duke Puzzle back. Calm down!
So, coming back to where we started, after a very long digression - I did say this was the long answer, didn't I? - why did the idea of hand to hand fighting get dropped? A question that needs to be answered first is, why did the idea get brought up in the first place? When Alan first designed Fed, the only other multi-player games around were sword-and-sorcery, hack-and-slash, kill-the-orc-and-steal-his-treasure type games. The basic premise of the game was fighting - fighting the mobiles, fighting other players, just generally fighting. Alan wanted Fed to be different, but at the start he still thought fighting would be a part of the game. A small part, but still a part. When Fed first opened for business, there was no fighting at all. Ship fighting did eventually appear, but not for a long time. Industry pundits shook their heads and stated that a game with no fighting would never be a success, but they were wrong - Fed was a success long before ships could fire missiles at other ships. The first plan for Fed called for ground fighting to be added eventually. That's why when you write a ground mobile you have to specify its stats. But there were always more important things to code than hand to hand combat, and there were design issues to be thought about carefully to make sure adding ground fighting didn't turn Fed into a hack-and-slash game. The problem with a lot of hack-and-slash games was that new players got slaughtered very quickly, which discouraged them from continuing with the game. Something similar happened on AOL Fed, where experienced players would sit just outside Earth orbit, and blow away any new player that took off. Killing off newbods is not good for the continuation of any game, and that's why we banned players fighting players in Sol space. Once we were on AOL, and particularly after the flat-rate was introduced, we had a steady stream of requests for hand to hand combat to be added but they were always from young kids who wanted the game to turn into something more like Star Wars, or Doom in Space. The request that players be given hand to hand combat so they could deal with snerts overlooked the fact that the snerts would use it to make a bigger nuisance of themselves. So it was clear that hand-to-hand fighting would need to be carefully designed and have a lot of restrictions hedged about it to prevent those were weren't interested in fighting from becoming victims. Putting in a complicated system that meant only those who wanted to would be in danger would probably have resulted in something hardly anyone used. But if it hadn't, and if combat had become an important part of the game, it would have changed the very nature of the game itself. Fed is a game where violence is side-lined, which makes it very attractive to a lot of players who don't want to play a hack-and-slash game. If violence had become a greater part of the game, those players would have been alienated. So, in the end, the idea was dropped completely. It went from something that was "definitely going to happen", to a "maybe sometime in the future if we can figure out how to do it right", to "not going to happen". The evolution of the game made the idea extinct.
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