WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS
Earthdate November 1997


INSIDE SCOOP


FED FUNNIES


OFFICIAL NEWS
by Hazed


What was in November 1997's Official News:

THE MONTH IN BRIEF
THE FIRST SILLY DEATH
FROM THE POSTBAG: STICKS OF JOY
THE CORRECT ORDER OF PLANETS


THE MONTH IN BRIEF

The Explorers Workbench was opened up again, allowing POs who had been hit by the overly-picky planet checker to amend their data and get their planets online. It was a bit flaky to start with, so players were recommended only to use it for small amendments and not attempt major overhauls of their planets.

Commanders were prevented from receiving groat-gifts from benefactors, and had to start working for a living. Such a chore!

Selena of the Spaceways actually appeared in Federation to chat to players. We also saw Thunderess for the first time, emerging from the black ether to create the planet Battle. She was seen in Fedruckers, slapping Galinfenner, biting Uniquette's knees and kicking Hazed in the shins. Hazed admonished the little ball of fight and told her she'd better behave or she'd be sent back to groundhogdom.

The Christmas planet, Tinseltown, opened at the end of November, with a prize puzzle worth 50 free hours, and Santa Claus also showed up briefly in preparation for the Christmas festivities.

Somebody mailed out a program which purported to be a new version of FedTerm; in fact, it was a password sniffer designed to mail out ibgames account details so someone else could hack players' accounts. In fact there was quite an epidemic of people trying to steal passwords, helped by players' sloppiness in not taking security seriously.

Multiple alts and 24/7 sleeper macros started to become a problem, using up resources and maxing out the game at peak times. Staff started being tough and booting out those they suspected of using up more than their fair share of resources.

Players discovered the fun they could have with triggers - and the chaos they could cause by deliberately triggering other people's triggers. Hackers also discovered they could trigger the log-on sequence from within the game, to get hold of account details.

The move to the web saw the return to Fed of a lot of old friends who had been unable, or unwilling, to play on AOL. We welcomed back players from GEnie/Aries Fed, Online Fed, and even some from the very first version, Compunet Fed.

Carpenter Awards were given to two excellently designed planets, with Albansire's Alba and Poco's Weasel walking off with the prizes.

The first rumblings of the long drawn out war between the UDF and the Onyxians were heard. No-one really knew what they were fighting about, except that there were ideological disputes about when, how often, and against whom it was permissible to use dumping macros.

THE FIRST SILLY DEATH

Well, this may not actually be the first silly death of Web Fed, but it's certainly the first silly death where the corpse has asked to have their character reinstated!

The victim writes thus:

"I was in a fight at ARENA, and i didnt want to fight so i tuped suicide, but before the game put in my suicide, it put in that he killed me, and now my caracter was deleted!! PLEASE HELP..."

As always, there are no prizes for stupidity in Fed, so the unfortunate dead person was sympathetically told that no, they couldn't have their character back.

FROM THE POSTBAG: STICKS OF JOY

"Is there a way I can use my joystick with Federation?" asks a player?

This is a difficult question for droids - news, mail, cleaning or any kind of droid. The reason is that we have all been programmed with a keen sense appreciation of double entendres, smutty jokes and low puns.

Oooo errr missus!

So a question like this brings out the worst in it. We try really hard to take the question at face value - to assume that the questioner wants to know if, technically, they can move their Fed character by using the controlling device they use for arcade games - but no matter how many cold showers we take, we just start sniggering in a really juvenile way.

Fnarr fnarr.

So although we'd love to give the answer the letter-writer wanted to hear - that we suppose it is possible they could write a program that will take the input from their joystick, and translate it into the Fed command N, S, E, or W and send the command over the Internet to the game but we wouldn't know where to start - all we can come out with is puerile comments about sticks of joy and thrustmasters.

Pathetic, isn't it?

THE CORRECT ORDER OF PLANETS

There is a lot of concern at the moment about the order of the planets. Apart from prestige reasons of people wanting to feel that their world come before that of their enemies, there is the wholly practical reason that when the game fires up and loads the planets, it does so in the order the planets are in.

So to clear up any confusion, here is the explanation of how the planet order is determined.

It's really quite simple: the planet order is worked out from the position of the PO in the persona file, and that simply reflects the length of time the persona has been in the file, since new characters that are created are added at the end.

If a very old character dies DD and starts again, it is added to the end of the file.

And before anybody thinks to ask, there is no way we can manipulate the file to change the order of the personas. And there's no reason we would want to, anyway!


INSIDE SCOOP


FED FUNNIES


HOME

INFORMATION

HELP

FEDERATION

AGE OF
ADVENTURE

BARBAROSSA

ODDS &
ENDS

SEND
EMAIL