THE
MONTH IN BRIEFUnadopted
Fed characters were deleted, it being three months since
the move to the web, which put an immediate stop to the
trading in adoption passwords, bogus attempts to claim
characters, and disputes where three separate people
claimed to be the Duke of something-or-other.
FedTerm Loaded was released, with
extra features for advanced players. It also had the
advantage of working in the Explorers Workbench, which
FedTerm Lite did not.
Fed came out of beta-test, which
didn't mean very much except that journalists stopped
considering the game to be vapor-ware. We also started to
accept checks from those who wanted to get their payments
in early.
Christmas in Fed saw the puzzle on
Tinseltown solved by Belleinva. Throughout the month
there were lots of events including a ship-painting
contest, a "Come as your favorite elf"
barcrawl, a location designing contest, and Santa Claus.
Some players also organized events
to celebrate Hanukah.
Icedrake awarded a bunch of
Carpenter Awards to planets whose design impressed him;
the talented recipients were Streak's Tzone, Timoteus'
Roma, Cressida's Stage and Wogg's Gettysburg.
FROM
THE POSTBAG: A FED MAIL SYSTEM
A player writes: "I have a new
idea for Federation. I think a valuable addition to the
game would be a mail system. Not really email but just
something that would let you send a message to someone
who wasn't online and they could check their messages at
any time they wanted."
This is an idea that crops up from
time to time, and there's no doubt that many players
would find it very useful. However, there are two good
reasons why it isn't practical.
The Technical Reason
A message system of this kind would take up a lot of
resources, and a lot of hard disk space.
The Social Reason
Not everyone wants to receive messages from other
players - at least, not from players they don't know. It
wouldn't take long for people to figure out a way to use
macros to send a large number of messages easily and this
would soon result in the Fed equivalent of junk mail.
Very irritating, and also very resource-intensive.
So if you want to send messages to
players, you'll have to find them in the game and ask
them for their email addresses.
HOW TO
BROWSE OUR WEB SITE
Leaving aside the problems that
some players have using the AOL browser to get to our web
site, there's the problem of whether it's best to use
Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Which one should you choose? Well,
we think it should really depend on how you read the
information on the web page. You see, according to the
little logos at the bottom of our front page, our site is
best experienced with Microsoft Internet Explorer,
but best viewed with Netscape Navigator. (Those
are the words the companies insist on if you want to use
their logos.)
It would seem that those who like
to take a step backwards, and watch from a distance,
those who don't like to get too involved in what they are
reading, who don't want to invest a great deal of
emotional or intellectual energy in the
information-gathering process, in short, those who prefer
to view, should use Netscape.
But those who throw themselves
whole-heartedly into any endeavor, who immerse themselves
in the process, submerging their own personality in order
to identify with the writer, forgetting about their real
lives as they virtually live out someone else's, in other
words, those who prefer to experience, should
obviously choose Microsoft.
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