Official News - page 4

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

by Hazed

Every couple of years there's a story in the British press about a businessman with more money than sense who goes to a bar and spends an enormous amount of money on very expensive alcohol. A few weeks back, all records were broken when an unnamed big spender and around 18 friends worked their way through £105,805 worth of booze in a nightclub one Saturday night in July. The bar bill included £80,000 spent on champagne, as well as vast quantities of vodka and red bull. Over £10,000 of the total bill was the service charge - I hope the waitdroids got a good cut of that!

I can only sigh with envy and wish that instead of blowing all that money on drink, he'd spent it on slithy toves. That would pay the Fed2 bills for years to come! Sadly, we have to continue to issue begging letters every month, to ask that players buy some slithies in order to keep the game going.

For new players who don't know about slithy toves, or understand how Fed2 is funded, here's an explanation. A slithy tove is an alien creature, possession of which is considered quite a status symbol amongst the rich and famous of the Galaxy - so much so that certificates of ownership are traded as if they are money. The slithy toves certificates thus become tokens which can be exchanged for goods and services, sometimes legitimately and more often as a bribe to the right person. The Encyclopedia Galactica has an entry on bribery, corruption, and ownership of these alien beings.

In real life, you use your dollars to buy slithy toves, which you can then use in the game for all kinds of things. Some of them are very useful, such as the navcomp upgrade which lets you move between Sol planets instantly or the various remote price checking facilities that Merchants and above find so valuable. Some are social, such as the ability to get married or divorced. Some are purely decorative, such as the trading cards sold by Clive's Collectibles on Titan.

Whatever you choose to use slithy toves for, purchasing them gives us the dollars we need to pay Fed's bills. If the players don't buy enough, then we won't be able to keep the game going. So that's why I am holding out the begging bowl: we need you to buy slithies so Fed can survive. And to keep Bella in green Rigellian gin!

You can make a one-off purchase of between two and ten slithy toves, at a cost of $5 each, through Amazon.com.

Alternatively, you can take out a subscription to buy four slithies each month, at a discount price of 15 UK pounds - depending on exchange rates it works out at about $15 which means you get four for the price of three.

Whichever method you choose, point your browser here to make a purchase.

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page