**************************************** * * * FEDERATION DATA SPACE NEWS SERVICE * * * * from * * H-by-A * * * * September 16 1990 * * * **************************************** FACTORIES AND NETWORTHS ----------------------- In last week's News we were rather rude about Piemur. We believe we used the phrase "Idiot of the Week", which was a tad unkind. We apologise if we hurt his feelings, and to show that we have no hard feelings against him, this week we have to offer him our congratulations. He is now Head of the Conclave, due to an overnight leap of his networth by 25 meg. Surprised comments were heard all over Fed Data Space, and no-one was more amazed than Piemur himself. A disgruntled minority were heard muttering something about "cheating". The more charitable speculated on possible bugs. But we feel we must set the record straight. His meteoric rise is due not to a bug, nor to any illegimate behaviour on his part. It is caused by the way that companies affect networths. Let us explain. Now, this is going to get technical, so please put your thinking heads on. Up to the point where you embark on a new career as a Business Tycoon, your networth has been calculated according to what you owned - your bank balance, the value of your ship, the value of your warehouse, extra stats you have purchased, spybeams, and so on. But as soon as you purchase a company, the performance of the company will be taken into account. The networth calculations will include the value of the shares - and these can change from cycle to cycle, depending on how well (or how badly!) you have been running the company. Networth will no longer be an indicator of your past performance, shown in accumulated goods; it will show how successful you are on a day-to-day basis. It will cease to be a static figure and will become dynamic. The Galactic Stock Exchange works out the value of your shares solely on the profit the company made in the last cycle. Let's say your company made the nice round figure of 1 meg in its last cycle. This 1 meg is divided by the number of shares held in the company, and then multiplied by the number of shares that you personally own. Of course, at the moment you cannot sell shares to other players, so the figure remains at 1 meg. The result will then be multiplied by 10 - in this case giving 10 meg - and the final figure will be added to your networth. It doesn't matter how much money you have ploughed into the company, how many factories it owns, or how much is in the company bank account. The only thing that counts is how much profit it made during the last company cycle. In Piemur's case, his furs factory on Earth did very well, and the company made a profit of 2.5 meg during the cycle. So as soon as the accounting period ended and a new cycle begun, 25 meg was added to his networth - enough to catapult him to the top of the Conclave. The moral - the more efficiently you run your company, the higher your networth. Of course, the opposite is also true. If you cock things up and your company makes a loss, your networth will plummet. There's no guarantee Piemur will remain in his exalted position. That 25 meg will only count in his networth until the end of the current 10- day cycle, at which point a new figure will be added, which may be less. He may find his current of "Richest Person in the Universe" is not applicable for much longer! MEAN AND MOODY -------------- Speaking of , Our Illustrious Leader has assured me that the command will be implemented this week (Good lord, a rasher of bacon just floated past our window!) as will the ability to check your current mood. And we have heard rumours that a new command will allow you to describe your reputation. It will probably be the (yes, you guessed it) command! It won't be available straight away, because Bella hasn't yet decided exactly how it's going to work, but we'll keep you posted. ANOTHER PROSPECTIVE JP? ----------------------- We still don't have the exact details of Gonzul's tragic death, but rumour has it that he has decided to return to Federation Data Space. Meanwhile, we are told that Santiago is less than 10 stat points away from being able to attempt the fiendish JP puzzle himself. We do so much look forward to watching his progress! We'll try not to laugh too loudly. Some of you, we know, have got so wrapped up in the fun and games of running factories that you have decided to postpone going for JP. Let us just tell you two things that might make you change your mind... First, at JP level you are allowed to use remote trading, which makes running factories much less of a bother; you can happily sit in Chez Diesel and sip a pint of Old Peculiar managing your business with your feet up. And secondly, if you get the JP puzzle wrong, you blow up half of Mars - the entire Ruins are turned into a large smouldering crater! And furthermore, when you are going for GM (the next rank) you can actually blow up a whole planet! There can't be many multi-player games that let you be so wantonly destructive. BLOOD 'N' GUTS! --------------- Speaking of wanton destruction... (yes, it all flows together, doesn't it - we don't just fling this News bulletin together, it is lovingly crafted by a team of trained journalists (but we're not admitting what they have been trained to do!)) In the aftermath of last week's Hunt, in which lessons were given on the art of blowing each other into tiny little pieces, accolades have been flooding into the H-by-A offices praising us for our efforts in organising such an enjoyable event (modest? us?). And may we just extend our thanks to all those who allowed us to shoot them. Back in the days when we actually played the game, we were considered the most violent and dangerous players, with numerous kills under our collective belt. But now that we have been elevated to Officialdom, we labour under instructions NOT TO KILL THE PAYING CUSTOMERS! So it was sheer delight for us to be able to unleash all our pent up aggression and wallow in the blood, the gore, the bits of bent spaceship, the power, the... >The H-by-A team rushes off to take a cold shower Sorry about that! Anyway, for all of you who enjoyed the event, and for those who were unlucky enough to miss it, we shall be organising another Hunt in the next couple of months. A MISTAKE? SURELY NOT! ---------------------- There's some confusion about base prices. Three of the entries in the Idiot's Guide to Companies and Factories (topic 6 in the BBS) do not match up with the game itself. In particular, Livestock is shown as having a base price of 610 groats, making it one of the more valuable commodities, but the game only values it at 210 groats. Quite a difference! Our first reaction was that the game was wrong (after all, we couldn't possibly admit that our documentation was at fault!). We definitely remembered, from our own trading days, that Livestock was worth quite a bit. But we thought we'd better do a bit of checking before we started blaming Our Illustrious Leader. And we found, much to our surprise, that two other versions of the game also valued Livestock at 210 groats! At this point, we started to apologise to all and sundry for our appalling mistake, and slunk off into a corner hanging our heads (or equivalent) in shame. But we still couldn't help feeling that something was a little amiss. We were sure that Livestock was supposed to be a valuable commodity! Fortunes had been made on Livestock in the past! So we did some more checking. Rummaging through the H-by-A filing cabinets, we found the original notes we had made when trading was first implemented, back in the Summer of '88. And bingo! We noticed we had been selling Livestock for over 1K a ton. Which would definitely fit in with our figure of a 610 ton base price. We are now doing yet more research to try and find out just what has happened. (You see the lengths to which we are prepared to go to avoid admitting that we are wrong!) Archeologists have been called in to sift through the sedimented layers of our somewhat disorganised files, and we are sure they will be able to get to the bottom of this strange occurance. We will let you know what they discover. TOO MUCH LIKE HARD WORK ----------------------- There have been calls from a few players for jobs to be made even easier to come by. In particular, there's an idea floating around that the presence of all those factories on Earth should guarantee that certain commodities would always be needed to be shipped to Earth. Our Illustrious Leader thinks this is quite a neat idea. However, if jobs are made any easier than they are at present, the number that you require for promotion will have to be raised back to its original level, otherwise people will be able to make Trader in just a few days. We need to know your views on this. Would you rather that jobs were easy, but you had to do more of them - or that jobs were tricky, necessitating a bit of thought and competition, and the required trader ratings stayed as they are? Please let us know your views. Even if you have thankfully turned for good, let us know what you think. The discussion is in the Suggestion Box (Topic 9) of the BBS. Go and add your comments. DID YOU KNOW...? ---------------- That the easiest way to leave suggestions or bug reports for Our Illustrious Leader is to use the command. Just enter and your message will be stored in a file, which is checked every couple of days. That you can find out how well someone is doing in the game with - this will show you their networth. That costs just 25 groats, and once activated will inform you of every player that logs on or off the game until you log off yourself. That Our Illustrious Leader comes from Rigel. All Rigellians have a green skin pigmentation and abnormally large posteriors. However, it is not advisable to address her as "Green Bum", as we have found to our cost! AT LAST! SOME GOSSIP! --------------------- Finally, our plea for scurrilous rumours has paid off. One of our correspondants was cornered by a lovestick Commander (who shall remain nameless). It appears Commander X had been engaged in a fling with Occy, a young lady who certainly seems to be spreading her favours amongst the male population of Fed Data Space. Unfortunately for Commander X, while the two were engaged in a steamy session in Chez Diesel, a bright new Commander appeared and caught Occy's fancy - at which point she deserted poor X and left him with his trousers round his ankles! He was understandably upset. Frankly, we are not surprised to hear of Occy's behaviour. She has in the past seemed to be a slightly shady character - at one point, she even tried to blackmail Explorer Hazed over an alleged liaison with another player! ***LEGAL NOTE*** H-by-A take no responsibility for information contained in the Gossip section of this News Bulletin, nor do we guarantee its accuracy. We just print what people tell us! So don't sue us. Pay us enough to reveal our informants - and sue them!