AOL NEWS YEARBOOK Earthdate May 1997 |
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THE MONTH IN BRIEF May started with a massive new code release which fixed a lot of problems, added some new features, changed the way things worked... and introduced a whole new set of problems! Several things broke and had to be fixed over the next few weeks. The good news was that some of the long-standing serious problems, such as limbo planets, were fixed with this code release, and that the new code also reduced the demon lag considerably. The bad news was that nobody could link new planets into the game for the whole month... why do temporary things always have a habit of lasting longer than you ever expected? Duchies were expanded thanks to an Imperial Edict from our beloved Emperor. On the player front, the main event of the month was Guild Mania, a challenge to find out just which Guild really was the best. There were three parts to the challenge: a Fedpardy contest, the Magellan Cup race, and the Fighting Cup. And the winning Guild, who took home a large number of groats and a shiny name on their guild folder, was The Interstellar Alliance of Mr. T. comprising Meethoss, WannabeU2, BrookeRF, Anakin1980, RacerX7784 and DHyslop. Economic warfare came to Fed, as OnyxGod and his duchymates reintroduced the old Fed tradition of dumping.
His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor Ming, was obviously in a good mood last week. We don't know why, maybe he had just finished a particularly enjoyable session of breaking marsrats in two and decapitating under-performing civil servants. Whatever...he issued an Imperial Edict which was confirmed by the following Galactic Administration announcement:
For those of you not fluent in bureaucratese, we shall translate. The number of planets allowed in a duchy is increasing to 20. That means there will be room for another 5 planets in each duchy, so with the current 50-ish duchies Sol could lose 250 planets.
Those availing themselves of the cloning service offered by the Galaxy's hospitals have been horrified to find that due to budget restraints, the service no longer includes replacing the patient's clothes with an identical set of garments. Instead, the newly revived are sent on their way wearing one of those hospital gowns made out of paper, that tears easily, dissolves in rain and is hardly a fashion statement. A spokesdroid for the Galactic Health Service Bean-Counters Department mumbled on at length about cost-effective solutions and offering the service the customer really needs and targeting funds to the correct areas and responsibility to the shareholders and other such pish and tosh, but quite frankly it was so boring that we didn't bother to listen.
A very spooky query:
A very good question. We sent out two of our reporters, BurkDroid and HareDroid, to find out. They started their investigation by following people who looked as if they were at risk, hoping to observe the death - and more importantly, what happened afterwards. This proved to be more difficult that they expected. Nothing hazardous happened to anyone they were shadowing, presumably for the same reason that a watched pot never boils. So they switched to different tactics - murder. They stalked an innocent young Commander, followed him into a dark alley, and set upon him. Bashing him over the head with a large blunt instrument, they left him close to death and hid inside two conveniently-placed trash cans to see what happened. But unfortunately the trash cans they chose to hide in were inhabited by feral Venusian sharkcats, who were not too happy to have their naps disturbed, and clawed our fearless droids quite badly. In the kerfuffle, the droids stopped watching the almost-dead Commander for a few moments; when they looked back again, the body was gone. They reported back to the news office and started to plan a different way to track the course of the corpse. Next week, we'll report on what they find!
You may remember that last week we set two of our investigative reporters, BurkDroid and HareDroid, the task of finding out what happens to a player's old body when he dies. So far their attempts to watch a death, or even to kill someone themselves, have failed pitifully. So this week they tried to trace things from the other end. They infiltrated St. Virginia's Memorial Hospital on Earth, disguised as a couple of medical waste disposal units, to see what happens when a cloning takes place. They were astonished by the high-tech equipment they found. They were ever more astonished to find that the computer terminal that controlled all the equipment has a help mode, which explained how it all works. They hurriedly made a back-up and left, to study the information at their leisure. They compiled a report summarizing how the whole insurance/resurrection process works, and dropped it off to the news office. They discovered that every person who purchases insurance has a micro-chip implanted in them which records the fact that they are insured. This micro-chip contains a sensor which detects when the heart stops beating, and a radio transmitter which is in constant contact with the insurance office that issued the policy. If the person's vital signs cease, the signal changes so the insurance office knows the policy-holder has snuffed it; if the signal stops it is assumed that the body has been destroyed and the micro-chip along with it. The insurance office is able to locate the source of the signal, or the last known position, and contacts the hospital on the planet where the death has taken place, and they swing into action. They utilize a locator-transporter - a sort of remote teleporter - to bring the remains (if there are any) to the hospital for disposal. That's why bodies seem to disappear instantly on death. The hospital also sends a signal to the nearest ship repair yard who will tow the victim's ship back to the planet and patch up the hull (although they don't fix any other damage). If the planet where the death happens doesn't have a hospital then Earth gets to deal with the problem - it has powerful equipment that can transport a body from the other end of the Galaxy. So, the body is back at the hospital, but actually it's not needed because when you get insured a few cells are taken from you and stored in a central depository somewhere - nobody knows the location of the vault, not even which duchy it is in. The transporter plucks the cells out of storage and brings them to the cloning lab in the hospital, where they are subjected to some very advanced and patented medical techniques which produce an instant clone of the dead person. The memories of the dead person are somehow stuffed into the brain of the new clone - that micro-chip wasn't just signaling, it was constantly transmitting memory data as well. So, the clone wakes up in bed surrounded by flowers and get-well-soon cards, and sets off to take up life where the dead person left off. Still wearing a hospital gown! But this doesn't solve the original question: what happens to the discarded body, assuming it wasn't vaporized completely by whatever killed the person in the first place? BurkDroid and HareDroid are hot on the trail and will report back next week.
Last week, we reported how our intrepid reporters BurkDroid and HareDroid had found out how insurance and cloning works - and very clever it all it, too! But one remaining mystery remains - what happens to the dead bodies after the clone has been activated? After their success in grabbing a copy of the cloning machines's help files, our two metal detectives decided to infiltrate a smaller hospital. They sneaked into St. Dobson's Clinic on FrankWorld, a little known, but somewhat dangerous world, out near Cygnus. Using their favorite disguise - trashcans - they settled down in a corner of the cloning lab and waited for someone to die. It wasn't long before alarms sounded and technicians rushed into the room. The translocator machine was used to beam a rather charred corpse into the lab. The body was placed on a trolley and left to one side, while the new clone was subjected to the secret process that grew it to maturity in a matter of hours, and the memories of the victim were forced into the newly grown brain. Once this was complete the clone was dressed in one of those uncomfortable gowns that never do up properly, and wheeled to a recovery ward where it was brought to consciousness and released back into the community to resume the life of its progenitor. Meanwhile, the technicians went back to reading their newspapers, playing cards, or sleeping to pass the time until another death happened, and cleaning droids were summoned to tidy up the lab. This was what our intrepid reporters had been waiting for! They watched to see just what was done with the charred corpse, which had been left on a trolley. The saw the cleaning droids push the trolley out of a service entrance, and they followed. The trolley was wheeled into a packing facility and the corpse was flash-frozen and then transferred into a crate. The crate was loaded onto a conveyor belt which took it to a loading bay, where it was placed on the back of a truck along with many similar crates. Our droids were worried they would not be able to follow the truck, so they showed amazing initiative (pushing their programming to its limits) and placed a transponder device onto the packing crate containing that charred corpse. They could now return to the news office and use their sophisticated bugging equipment to track the crate wherever it went in the Galaxy. This they did, and huddled over their monitors they watched the route the crate took, narrowing down its final destination: Sol duchy: Solar System: Mars: Warehouse area. They hot-footed (or equivalent) it to the warehouses on Mars and used narrow-range sensors to locate the exact position of the crate. They found it in one of the warehouses (a small one, in case you are interested) and noticed that it had not yet been opened. They were well on their way to solving the mystery, as they felt sure the corpse had almost reached its ultimate destination. After several days, they heard voices approaching the small warehouse, and watched with interest as stevedores used a forkgravlift truck to move the crates about. When a truck took away the crate they now considered to be "their" crate, they followed. The truck drove west down the road until it came to a crossroads, then it went north a short way before stopping outside a service entrance. A droid which looked somehow familiar to our two investigators handed some groats to the stevedores, broke open the crate, and took the frozen corpsicle out of its box. It trundled back inside the service entrance carrying the stiff. Our droids followed discreetly and peered through the door to see what the place was, and where the corpse would end up. They were puzzled to see more of the familiar droids and this time they were able to identify them as standard WaitDroid units, busily moving around in a room which appeared to be a large kitchen. They stared, puzzled, as the corpse was taken into a freezer and hung on a large hook, but before they could see any more the door was closed and they had to leave. It seemed they had reached the end of the trail. They knew where the corpse had been delivered, but not what would happen to it. Resigned to never fully solving the mystery, they walked up some iron steps to a local bar and ordered themselves something to eat - a quite delicious pizza with an unusual meat topping which the WaitDroid told them was called Soylent. Yum!
You can't declare war by fighting in Fed. Well, you can, but you won't be very successful. It's very hard to do any damage at all, let alone kill someone, unless your victim hangs around in space waiting for you. So those with a grudge, and those who just want to cause trouble, have to find other ways to affect their enemies. They have to use economic means. Many duchies are suddenly suffering from the blistering attacks of OnyxGod and his duchymates, who have revived an old Fed tradition that goes back many years (long before Fed was on AOL) - a practice called Dumping. Dumping is selling goods to an exchange that really needs the goods and is paying out good prices, up to the point where the price starts to go down - and then stopping. For anyone trading goods, dumping is the best way to make money because you ensure you always get the best prices for your commodities. But for planet-owners, it means they are always paying out top prices for the goods they buy in. Not so nice. Still, all's fair when it comes to making money, and Fed is after all a game about making as many groats as you can. There are several things POs can do to defend themselves against dumping. The obvious one is for Dukes to embargo the duchy the dumpers come from; that stops them trading at all. But this only works while the dumping originates from one duchy. So the other way is quite simple. If you don't want people to sell goods to your exchange, lower your stockpiles. That's all there is to it. If you don't need the goods, your exchange will pay terrible prices for it.
Some players are very brave... or very stupid. Here's an inquiry we received today:
Ming is the Emperor of the Galaxy. He's a ruthless killer and a homicidal maniac. And he is very jealous of his privacy; he's been known to have people flogged just for looking at him when he wasn't in a good mood (which is most of the time). Of course he isn't going to let the great unwashed paw through his private details. When you're the Top Man, you can make sure the rules that apply to the little people don't apply to you. So keep your spying eyes off the Emperor - and anyone thinking of peeking through the palace curtains had better be prepared to be beheaded!
A distressed child needs information. This is the letter we received:
We often talk about the Game Logs, which save important information about what happens during a game session. But the logs do not save everything that players do, everything they say, every act command. With over 500 players in the game in peak time, we would need a hard disk the size of a planet to save all that information! And it would be impossible to search all that data to find what we wanted to know. No, if you want to know what a certain player was up to, you need to resort to more mundane methods: spybeams, bribery, hire a private detective perhaps...
What a heart-rending story this is:
How sad, that one can't even trust ones own brother not to waste ones groats on the roulette wheel. Sadly, there are no refunds for filial impropriety!
This query came from someone who obviously wishes to know who the best person is to hit up for a loan:
An interesting question! But actually not one that can easily be answered, because there is a cap on the amount of wealth a player can own. 2.1 gigagroats in the planet, 2.1 gig in the personal account, a huge ship, maxed out stats... that's about the limit of a player's wealth, and there are a whole lot of people who have achieved that exalted state. No, we're not going to list them, for fear of causing a deluge of begging letters to land on their doormats!
We've had several complaints about people being killed dead-dead unfairly. Here's a sample:
Sadly there are always nasty people about who want to try and kill others. But really it is impossible to kill anyone in Fed unless the victim cooperates or does something really stupid. What's the common factor in most of the dead-deaths we hear about? The victim forgot to insure. And a Squire got caught by this! POs ought to know better than to wander out of a hospital without insuring first. There are two rules to remember: 1) Never, ever, ever, ever, ever go anywhere if you don't have insurance. Never. Not ever. If you don't know where the insurance office is on a planet then sell your ship and use the TRAVEL command to move yourself to safety, to a planet where you do know you can insure. 2) Don't trust people. If someone does something that kills you, it probably wasn't an accident, no matter what they say. Get insurance before you go anywhere else with them. Don't be gullible. If an offer seems too good to be true - it probably is! On a related note, a player wanted to know:
Well thankfully, you can't DD a Host. They are immortal and cannot die. And if somehow you did manage to DD a Host, what would happen is that Hazed would come after you demanding to know why you did it! And you wouldn't want that.
Through the worlds and ranks we
marched But today I just sat here and
stared at the stars And your name when I search for buddies on line.
Well, I'm really angry at AOL! For some reason that I cannot fathom, (Hey, there's a good vocabulary word!) my account has been screwed up for the past few weeks. Go ahead and read the title again. That "Kintaro 79" wasn't a typo. I had to give up my own screen name! Life just isn't fair! This, by the way, is why you'll see me as a captain for the next few weeks. Next on the agenda: I would like to apologize to EatSpam07, the PO of Monopoly. If you remember, in my predecessor's last article, he made a complaint that there was no planet Monopoly. To quote him: "1. No planet named Monopoly Sure, planets are a lot of fun, but we're missing board game planets! Who wouldn't want a planet Battleship, or a planet Yahtzee? Of course, the king of them all would be Monopoly. The PO would be able to auction off parts of the planet and collect a portion of the planet's profits! What a great idea! Too bad RichMonopolyGuy is too long for a screen name..." Let's face it folks, the Kintaro who came before me was an idiot. The planet Monopoly does, in fact, exist. Unless it was caught in limbo, or someone tried to kill it's SPAM-loving owner, the planet Monopoly will not go away. I would like for Mr. Spam07 to change his planet to fit my wishes, but you all know how stubborn PO's can be. Next problem that involves Kintaro 78: I have heard rumors that several cults, including the Mars cult "Hazed's Gate" which committed mass suicide and left 14 Fedders DDed, were worshipping my predecessor, Kintaro 78. Now, let's get this straight. My former incarnation was a madman, and anyone worshipping him is out of his/her/its mind. Nevertheless, a few cults actually did base a religion based around him, but not Hazed's Gate. The religion that Hazed's Gate was based around had nothing to do with Kintaro 78. The real reason that they committed mass suicide was that they found out that something or other wasn't compatable with JAVA. Well, that concludes the list of misprints, contradictions, and rumors that Kintaro 78 left me to sort out. I would like to take a few short minutes to commemorate the life of the not-quite-great man that has passed into the great beyond (cue "Fanfare for the Common Man"). He started out as a simple hauler who had a quick wit and not nearly enough trader credits. All that changed when he uploaded the almost-classic story "The Ghastly Secret of Fed", which is still available in the player file library. Go download it! Now! What are you doing still reading this? Since you've gone on to this paragraph, I'll assume that you completed the download. Anyway, after he wrote GSOF, he was invited to write for the news. He did so. You know the rest of the story. And that's pretty much it. We'll be holding a funeral on Weasel at 7:30 on Wednesday, the fourteenth. Finally, I'd like you to know that Kintaro 78's only regret was that he didn't get enough letters. Ya know, If an infinite number of monkeys pounded on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time, then there STILL wouldn't be a single one who would send what it typed to him. Don't make me go through the same thing. Send me letters, lots of letters! See you next... err... whenever I get an article in...
Well, I have something to say. If you think it's hard trying to get a date in real life, you should try it in Fed. There are several possible reasons why this is: pheromones can't go through phone lines, too much lag for love, not enough romantic restaurants to, uh, romanticize in, stuff like that. I've come up with my own theory, however. Even though many of us deny it, all of us have the seeds of snert-dom inside us. Maybe you've had an urge to cheat someone out of money, or maybe you once wanted to turn on the caps lock and say obscenities that I dare not mention here. It's happened to us all. It is these seeds of snert-dom that make it difficult to find a partner. I, for instance, know several people looking for lovers who couldn't find a needle in a stack of needles. So, in order to create more happy couples, I've compiled this list of things you can do to be more attractive to members of the opposite gender. I'd like to get mail and stuff for writing this, so send comments at Kintaro79@aol.com. By the way, whatever you do, resist the urge to drool on your potential mate. Let's begin... For the males: Do... Don't... For the females: Do... Don't...
10. You use XT more often than
SIGN, LOAD and UNLOAD combined while working.
10. The lag suddenly disappears.
BByro: <-- IB Tea Girl. FedSys doesn't tell me how to make tea. I don't tell him how to program Your comm unit relays a message
from CptSkntASG, "LOOK flying Pigs!!!!!". Your comm unit relays a message from Pessemist, "Running a company in Fed is like opening a new shirt. Whenever you think you've found all the pins there is always one left to stick you..". Your comm unit relays a message
from RHadley136, "is it me or did fed just speed up
a lot." Your comm unit relays a message
from Gull3483, "Scores, yes then you will witness
the awesome knowledge of GULL3483!!" Your comm unit relays a message from Jasana, "The kind PO's have all moved to channel 11...only mean and nasty PO's are on this channel. Please tune 11 before we eat you." Your comm unit relays a message from TheReidt1, "happi it sayes i'm in orbit around earth...what side of earth am i on?"..
210491:002 - Warloche: Fed doesn't run anymore... it sort of staggers drunkenly into walls. :P ;) :)
IKSPEC has appeared with a shimmer of punt effect.
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