LINE NOISE News from Chez Diesel 11 September, 1988 Welcome back to the Sexiest Merchant, Pugwash! Fed Data Space was shocked by her recent tragic demise and no-one knew for certain if she would play again. But return she did, taking only 4 days to climb the ranks to Trader, shattering the previous record (one month) into tiny little pieces! Commanders and Captains were certainly pleased to see her become a Trader so quickly, as they found it impossible to compete with a player who was so skilled in grabbing all the jobs. They nick-named her Quickdraw and breathed a huge sigh of relief when reached the magic 2000 and was visited by the Messenger. . Pugwash followed this meteoric rise with another shattered record... 5 days to increase her stats enough to make Merchant! 9 days from GroundHog to Merchant is certainly impressive, but it is clear that she had help. She was able to trade on her past favours, and all those she had helped out in her previous incarnation were only to willing to help her (once they'd stopped laughing) which enabled her to pay off her loan and buy a class F ship straight away. It just goes to show that it pays to be nice! But there are also rumours that she borrowed a substantial sum from Pegasus in order to buy her extra stats. If the rumours are true, it would account for Pegasus' sudden disappearance from the Conclave - but it must have been the loan to end all loans, putting B&Z's operations to shame. As well as the reincarnted Pugwash (who has the dubious distinction of having done it twice, and is currently suffering from a bad case of Deja Vu) Omi and Zugger have joined the ranks of the Merchants, making 7 so far. To replace them there's now a glut of new Traders - Maniac (more on him later), Snoopy and Hawk. While looking for the Guildmaster, Hawk was assassinated by the power of suggestion. He is yet ANOTHER of those players without a complete set of maps, and was bumbling about in the Martian Ruins. Pegasus told him that it would serve him right if he fell down a pit. And sure enough... you can guess the rest! Fed has been suffering a few problems recently. Our Illustrious Leader was completely baffled by these mysterious crashes until she noticed that a new Commander called Burt was always logged-on when it happened. On checking Burt's record Bella found that the idiot had bought a ship so over-loaded with shields, armour and weapons that he had left NO cargo space! This was upsetting the game when it calculated what jobs to offer - it tried to divide by zero, had a nervous breakdown and promptly fell over. Quite how Burt thought he was ever goinng to pay off his loan if he couldn't carry cargo I'm not sure... On the subject of crashes, if you are on Fed when it goes down, please mbx Bella (ID: YETI) and tell her what your last few commands were. This makes tracking the problem down much easier. The power of popular suggestion... You may have come across a Commander going by the name of Tc. Tc, apparently, stood for Total Control, but everyone called him Top- cat despite his protests. Now he has given in and changed his Cnet ID to... TOP-CAT! We told him that's what it stood for! There was consternation last week when several people tried to buy Spybeams and were told they couldn't because they had some missiles in their hold. And of course they couldn't launch the missiles to get rid of them! Zugger thought that if he died he would lose them, so he suicided - only to find that they remained in his ship. The only thing to do was to sell the ship and buy a new one... installing the spybeam BEFORE buying any missiles! But because everyone was complaining about this Bella very kindly removed the missiles from all ships. This is in line with the Galactic Administrations' current amnesty on firearms. That embarassing bug in the tight beam message routine has been fixed. You're now able to talk about someone without them receiving your tell-messages by mistake! That bug certainly caused a few red faces in the past - and upset some plotting and scheming. Bella has been reorganising the Fed area. Gone is Fedders Anon, and instead there are several new directories. The Players Directory is where you can upload information about your persona. There's an art and music directory, a hints and tips section, and a News directory (GOTO 666) where Our Illustrious Leader will upload information about changes to the game, and where Line Noise is now located. Also in the News directory is Spynet Review, bringing you regular bulletins uploaded by Pegasus (and if Pegasus uploads them, they MUST be true!) Spynet Rumour reports that soon there will be a mailbox facility within Fed, so you can contact players even if you don't know their Cnet IDs. Another rumour is that all rewards will be zeroed soon, before fighting is fully implemented. This will please Zugger and others like him whose rewards run to several thousand groats! Finally, don't forget the Fed Meet next weekend at the PC Show. Our Illustrious Leader, Pegasus, Pugwash and of course myself will be found in the Bar on Saturday and then after we get thrown out of there we'll be moving on to Pizza Express, 35 Earls Court Road (just up the road from where the Show is being held). I hope you will all be able to join us for garlic bread and chocolate fudge cake (not to mention large quantities of Chianti!).