**>> SPYNET BULLETIN **>> EARTHDATE 93.02.14 **>> AN H-by-A SERVICE **>> Compiled by Hazed plus a team of specialist newsdroids **>> your news and gossip and get paid good groats! **>> HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY A great big smoochy sloppy kiss from Hazed and all the newdroids! **>> NEW STUFF FOR TOMORROW Bella has several new features ready which will be put into the game tomorrow (Monday). The command has been remodelled, to show economic details of the duchy: whether it has embargoed another duchy or an individual planet; whether it has granted favoured status to another planet; and the customs tax rate for general planets and the most favoured planet. Planet owners will not be able to set up milkrun slots, or write jobs directly to transportation, to send goods to a duchy which has embargoed their planet, or the duchy they are in. Later in the week, Adventurers and above will not be able to do simple milkrun jobs (the ones that you get directly by typing ). A suggestion was made quite some time ago that the promotion to Explorer should have another requirement, as well as the current stat increase. Another suggestion was that Rich People should be required to give a certain number of jobs to Poor People. Bella has combined these two suggestions. From tomorrow, there will be a new entry on the display for JPs and GMs that will keep track of the number of jobs they give to Poor People. There will be a delay of a few weeks before the number actually becomes relevant, but once it does, you will not be able to promote to Explorer until you have given 100 jobs. The jobs must be given to Commanders, Captains or Adventurers, and must be accepted by the hauler. You can offer the jobs at any time after your promotion to JP. The delay is so that people who are currently very close to promotion to Explorer will not be held back unfairly. Coming soon... Bella is currently working on the code to allow people to sell factories on planets that are not in the game. [Cheers are heard throughout Fed Data Space!] **>> BUGS AND FIXES A couple of little bugs turned up during the week, which kept Bella occupied. First, people were reporting that when they sold goods to an exchange in the Solar System, they were not getting the price that the exchange had told them they would get! Well, sometimes this can happen if you are unlucky in your timing. The exchange fluctuations, which happen frequently during an exchange cycle, could happen at just the wrong moment: you check a price, and the exchange changes the prices just before you sell. But in this case, it turned out to be a bug. For reasons best known to itself, the Solar System trading exchanges were all paying out using Titan's prices! Bella soon found out why, but when she attempted to explain the details to our newsdroid, it shrivelled up and moaned, being completely non-technical! Later in the week, a few planet owners noticed that although they had allocated all their production points, they had a new set to allocate! Fortunately, the people that spotted this were honest and reported it to Bella immediately, without exploiting it. If people had exploited the bug to excess, Bella would have had to take steps to remove their ill-gotten gains - and that would probably have meant backing out the persona file to the previous day, so everyone would have suffered from the greed of a few. As it is, all planet owners got a free set of production points to play with. A general note about bugs. If you do think you've found a bug, please save your log to disk, so it is available if Bella asks to see it. It can be much easier to track down a bug if she can see exactly what happened! **>> NO SCANDAL, NOT MUCH GOSSIP It's been a very quiet week. The only gossip we heard was that Jade was pregnant and that Destiny might not be the father, but she claims there's no truth to that at all. It's only two weeks until her marriage to Destiny is due to be annulled, unless she changes her mind, and she looks to be weakening under his seductive onslaught. **>> PLANETS AND DUCHIES Freya's planet, Vitro, is now a leisure planet and as she gears up to do the Duke puzzle, her exchange is going to turn into a bottomless pit, consuming all the commodities she needs to build first a teleporter and then a time machine. Keep an eye on the electronic bar boards where she will no doubt post her needs. Marcia has been remodelling her planet, Roissy. It now contains an Elven Haven hidden behind the Mists of Time. To find the Mists, go in any direction from the foot of the giant tree. With several deaths amongst the planet owners, and quite a few prolonged absences, the duchies are looking a little different. There are currently no Independent Worlds. Occy leads the field, as always, with 13 worlds in his Duchy of Zippy. It's interesting that over the last few months, all the new planet owners have chosen to join Zippy rather than one of the other duchies. Scratchwood is looking very diminished. Trista's death means that Tristesse has gone. On her promotion to Baroness, Freya decided to desert her Duchesse, who had done so much to guide her up through the ranks, and join another Duchy. Lured away by promises of production points and assistance with the Duke puzzle, the traitorous Baron joined Krell's Gotham. This leaves Hazed with just two planets: Rookery, owned by Condor, and Muse, not really owned by anyone at all since Mirth's death! (He must have come back as a Poor Person, which is why the planet hasn't evaporated completely.) Krell also has two: Crime, her original planet, and now Vitro. Haven has vanished because it's owner, Russ, rarely sets foot in Fed Data Space. Rezrov's duchy, Megalusa, also has two planets, and Oddball's Inversity has five. **>> SPYNET REVIEW Congratulations to everyone who was promoted during the week. The new Captains are Gort, Astrorambler, Josie, Flamin and Hikaru. Astrorambler became an Adventurer. Jackdeth made it to Merchant. Both Maxwell and Silk solved the awesome JP puzzle. Seramarias cracked the fiendish GM puzzle. Patch became an Explorer. Freya is now a Baroness (although the SpyNet Review seems to have its genders in a knot, it referred to her as a Baron! Maybe it knows something we don't?). There were two dead-dead deaths during the week. Trista committed suicide, presumably in grief at the previous loss of Mirth (we still don't know what happened to him!) Later, Akiko also died dead-dead - presumably this was self-inflicted too, but again we don't have any details. **>>CONTACTS The following information will appear at the end of every News Bulletin, so you don't have to read it if you already know it. In the event of a problem or question, you can: * talk to Hazed or Bella in the game * leave a message in the game log * a message to Hazed or Bella * send GEnie mail with the Federation Feedback option from the main menu FedTerm, the multimedia front-end program for the game, can be downloaded from the Federation library (option 6 on the main menu). You can order a copy of the unexpurgated printed Idiot's Guide to Federation by typing ORDER at any GEnie menu. Cost - a mere $12.95. (New edition will be available shortly!) Federation has several categories in the new MPGames RT. To get there, type M1045,1 from any menu prompt and SET category 13 (for information, instructions, questions and answers) or 14 (for general chat and discussions). The Federation Leader in the bulletin board is Krell (Mail ID: K.HILLYER). There are also private categories for Explorers, run by Krell, and for the Conclave run by Oddball (Mail ID: D.STALZLE). The MPGames RT also has a Federation library in the files area, Library 5. Library 18 holds the Federation News Archives. **>> BULLETIN ENDS