 THE MONTH IN BRIEF
The big Good News of the month was
the return of the Duke Puzzle. Hooray! But the big Bad
News of the month was that it was taken out again after
less than a week because of some bugs which players were
exploiting to crash the game, thereby messing up other
Duke's puzzle attempts. It was expected that the puzzle
would be back after again after a few weeks, but it was
not to be...
The other bad news of the month was
that Barb, IB's Administrator, was rushed to hospital for
emergency surgery. But she got better.
The other Good News was that IB's
programmer, Nick (Cryptosporidium) was married to Asti
(Selena of the Spaceways) in a ceremony on the Statten
Island Ferry.
The other, other Good News was that
the Snark puzzle was fixed and several players
successfully saved the Solar System from the depredations
of the evil drug-running pirates.
IB went to Worldcon, the annual
world science fiction convention, and you can read the
report below.
Icedrake, the Devourer of Worlds,
considered two planets were worthy of the Carpenter
Award: Hovertonia, owned by Hover and Mtnbrook, owned by
Heatherjn.
The IB web site was completely
redesigned, giving it a brand-new look which ditched the
graphic buttons and thus speeded up the time taken to
download each page. Pages were shuffled round into new
sections which made the division of material more
logical, and a new site map made it a piece of cake to
find anything on the site. The Fed News was also revamped
and renamed the Federation Chronicles, with very spiffy
new graphics. The reaction was mostly positive, although
one person did not like the new logo at the top of the
page: he described it as "that reject from the set
of event horizon - the single blotch on the great work
that is your website."
The Terms and Conditions were
rewritten to make them comprehensible to ordinary human
beings, taking out all the legal jargon. Three new
supplements to the House Rules were released which gave
extra details of acceptable language, privacy and
harassment.
The Federation Archives were
expanded to include the old news bulletins from
GEnie/Aries Fed - the version of Fed before we came to
AOL.
FUNNY
STUFF
As always, there were a few
unexpected side-effects to the new code...
People could pick up the mobiles on
Horsell and walk around with them in their inventories.
Of course this caused problems; if the mobile was truly
mobile, when it was due to move it couldn't get out of
the pocket of the person carrying it, so the game
crashed!
When asked why they had even tried
to pick up mobiles, players came up with various lame
excuses about thinking that as part of the puzzle they
had to take a certain mobile to a certain location... NO!
If the mobile needs to go to a certain location it will
go there on its own two feet (or equivalent) without your
help!
Last weekend we had the new version
running on another machine, in parallel to the live
version, and in that version Ming nationalized the
shipyards - you could install extra stuff in your ships
anywhere EXCEPT in a shipyard!
WORLDCON
REPORT
I had expected to have little real
news to tell you about this week, so I was going to write
up a report on WorldCon and leave it at that. But with
the sudden reappearance of the Duke puzzle, I have had
plenty of meaty information to give you. So the WorldCon
report is going to be fairly skimpy.
Bella, Barb and I arrived in
Baltimore on Wednesday for the first day of the
convention. Our first job was to visit the art show,
where we were displaying a selection of pictures by Robin
Evans - he's the artist who drew the pictures for Fed we
use on our web site, including Selena of the Spaceways.
We also had a number of the pictures he has painted for
us which will be used in our new game, Age of Adventure,
coming out later this year. (We will put up a Gallery
section on the web site soon to give you a chance to see
some of Robin's work.)
On Wednesday evening Alan was part
of the panel at a discussion on designing computer games.
Despite being in a hotel rather than in the main
convention center, and despite being in a room at the end
of a maze of twisty little corridors, all alike, with no
signs, such that it took us a while to find it, the room
was packed with people standing at the back, sitting on
the floors, and lurking in the hall outside poking their
heads through the door. Alan and three others discussed
various issues of game design, including the difference
between designing single-player boxed games, and
multi-player Internet games.
Selena of the Spaceways herself,
together with Cryptosporidium, arrived on Friday, as did
Icedrake. We assembled in the hotel bar and were joined
by a small select group of players.
Saturday was the day of the
masquerade, where Con attendees parade in their costumes.
Selena did not enter but she won a prize for for
"hall costume" and handed out leaflets
publicizing Fed.
ABUSE
PART 1: BUDDY SCHEME
Some players seem to think they are
getting away with something; pulling the wool over our
eyes, or cheating us. Why? Because they are setting up
new accounts in order to bring alts into the game, and
putting their main character down as their Buddy - and
therefore getting the free hours themselves.
Ooooh, naughty!
Well sorry, it might make you feel
very daring, but we don't consider this abuse. We don't
mind at all.
In order for you to get free hours
from the buddy scheme, the new account must buy some time
credits. You don't get any free hours until they have
given us some money. Ok, when you add the two accounts
together it means you get 50 hours for the price of 30
(if you pay by credit card), but if we did not have the
buddy scheme, you probably wouldn't have set the alt up
at all, and we wouldn't have got that payment anyway. So
you may have gained, but so have we.
Chances are that having started
your alt, you will keep on using it, and buy some more
time credits for it, which is a gain for us.
So don't worry about abusing the
Buddy Scheme - you can't!
ABUSE
PART 2: FREE HOURS FOR NEW PLAYERS
Now we come to the various worries
players have about possible abuse of our two free hours
for new accounts.
First, it allows people to set up
alts who come in and haul, when they have no intention of
advancing the character - throw-away Poor People, if you
like.
Well, yes it does, but what's the
biggest moan been over the last few months (apart from
the missing Duke puzzle, that is)? Not enough haulers! We
need Poor People, and so even if they never advance
further than Captain, and never pay us a cent, they do
still benefit the game. Poor People get the economy
ticking over nicely, and they make the game look busy and
buzzing when genuine newbods come in.
Now we come to players who set up
new accounts so they can sit in Fed and chat to their
friends for free. Not so useful, but even the presence of
low ranking players has a beneficial effect on the
economy, producing more jobs on the workboard. We don't
gain a whole lot from this practice, but we don't lose
anything either.
But what about alts who hoover up
all the jobs, not letting genuine new players get a look
in? Well yes, that is a problem. If real newbods can't
get enough jobs, they will give up in disgust. At this
stage it's not a serious enough problem for us to have to
do anything, but we are monitoring the situation and if
we think it's necessary we'll put a stop to it.
And finally, there are those who
genuinely do abuse our system of giving two free hours to
new players. Those who come into the game simply to cause
trouble. That's definitely abuse, and something that we
need to deal with. But it's really no more of a problem
than it was back on flat-rate AOL, when a locked-out
player could immediately set up a new screen name and
return. We survived it then, and we will survive it now.
Of course, we could protect
ourselves from all of this potential abuse. We could do
it by programming; putting restrictions on what
GroundHogs and Commanders can do, such stopping them from
using any channel except 1, maybe stop them sending or
receiving tight beams. It is possible that we will have
to do something like this in the long run, but certainly
now the situation isn't serious enough to warrant it.
The only other alternative is NOT
to give new players any free time. That's what we used to
do. And not surprisingly, we got hardly any genuine
newbods at all.
ABUSE
PART 3: NAVIGATORS AND THE DUKE PUZZLE
I need to make something quite
clear. Navigators, when off-duty, are players just like
you. They don't have any special powers or privileges.
They get charged for their time in Fed just like you do.
They are ordinary POs. That's all.
Some of them are Barons. And they
were just as excited as you were about the Duke puzzle
coming back, and are just as eager as you to see it put
in again this week when Crypto gets back from his
honeymoon. They have been waiting as long as you have to
become Dukes.
And they have just as much right as
any other players to have a go at the puzzle. Being a
Navigator doesn't give them any advantage over
non-Navigators. They haven't got any arcane knowledge,
they don't know the solution to the puzzle, they have to
solve it just like you do.
So they are not abusing their staff
positions simply by having a go at the puzzle.
HOW TO
SOLVE PUZZLES
With the return (albeit briefly) of
the Duke puzzle, it became quite clear that many people
don't have a clue where to start to solve a complex
puzzle such as this. Let me give you some hints.
To start with, throw away that
Duke-puzzle-solving macro that someone gave you. And the
capture showing someone doing the puzzle and being
promoted to Duke. And the cheat-sheet entitled "Ten
Easy Steps to Becoming a Duke". And anything else
that purports to give you the solution to the puzzle.
Also, throw away any preconceptions
you have about what the puzzle involves. If you jump to
conclusions you'll just end up in a mess.
Start from the beginning of the
puzzle by getting your assignment from the DNI computer.
If you don't know where the DNI is, or you can't access
it, then you need to do the first bit of the Snark
puzzle. No, you don't need to do the whole puzzle. Just
enough of it to get you to the DNI computer.
Once you have your assignment, use
your eyes and your brain. Read all the information you
are given carefully. Think about what you are told.
Again, don't jump to conclusions, don't skip any stages
because you think you know what to do.
The puzzle is designed so that if
you think about it, you should be able to work out what
to try next. Each stage builds on the one that goes
before. Use deduction, not brute force - if you try
things at random or by trial and error you will be at it
for years. It's all logical, so use logic.
These hints apply equally to any
puzzle - Snark, or puzzles on promotional planets such as
Grease, or player planets. I hope you find them useful.
PUTTING
THE RECORD STRAIGHT
A couple of weeks ago, Scaramouche
had this to say in his Travel Advisory article:
And finally, Algo is no longer a DD
planet. The DD of Holidaydoe may have been tragic to
some, but it's done with. Please leave poor
Maxdestruction alone people. I'll say this once for the
record, you cannot DD in Fed except through carelessness
once you know how to play the game. Holidaydoe was an old
player, her death is her own fault.
The Fed News HQ was inundated with
a flood of letters in response... well, alright, two
letters: one from Holidaydoe herself and one from
Maxdestruction, the owner of the planet that did her in.
Both wanted the record to be put straight, and the real
story told. So here it is.
According to Maxdestruction, he
deliberately made his planet into a deathtrap several
months ago, in order to kill off another player who had
insulted a ladyfriend. In his words:
I had reacted to his offences in a
manner making him angry enough to wish to fight me at any
location and anytime. Hence, the DD planet as a plan to
rid Fed of a vile and immature snert.
Having done this, Max had a change
of heart and decided not to be a vigilante, but to pursue
justice for his wronged friend in a legitimate fashion;
he reported his adversary to Rules, and subsequently that
player was locked out of the game for various
misdemeanors.
Result!
And that should have been the end
of the story, except that Max suffered an unfortunate
memory lapse. He forgot that he had turned his planet
into a death trap.
Time passed... and one of Max's
factory owners, by name of Rubal, brought Holidaydoe to
Algo for a visit. The two were exploring and having fun,
and Holidaydoe started to chase Rubal around, tickling
him. Rubal ran away and Doe chased after him, tickling
him whenever she caught up with him; they gamboled and
frolicked around the planet, frisking like two newborn
colts in a sun-drenched field [That's enough picturesque
imagery: ED].
So intent on the fun they were
having was Doe that she didn't notice an enormous crater
right in front of her, and she fell right in. And didn't
realize she'd been shipped off to the hospital, and
carried on laughing and running and tickling... and fell
in the crater again.
Oh dear.
Bye-bye Holidaydoe.
Max has this to say:
I need everyone to know that I
never intended to kill anyone innocent and that I am
doing everything I can to make it up to Doe. I'm not a
snert, I was just extremely irresponsible by leaving the
planet that way for so long. BTW, it is perfectly 100%
safe now.
I guess the moral of the story is:
if you're going to make a deathtrap to catch a specific
person, you should expect to catch innocents as well!
ANOTHER
MYTH EXPLODES
A member of my staff, who shall
remain nameless to spare his blushes, wrote an article
for last week's news about fighting events which
contained the following statement about ordering a power
plant for your ship:
Order at least 20 points more than
the minimum requirement otherwise you could find yourself
stranded in space somewhere at the mercy of your opponent
because your engines have been damaged to the point where
they can no longer move your ship!
As I read this I snorted with
derision and drew my blue pencil across it savagely,
ripping a hole in the paper as I did so, because of
course it's not true. But I discovered later that the
unnamed kilt-wearer was not alone in this belief; several
people I spoke to assured me with the greatest of
sincerity that damaged engines mean your ship won't move.
I asked them all: how many times
had they seen this happen? They all assured me they had
seen it, so I pressed them for details. They became vague
and hesitant, and changed their stories, telling me that
someone else had told them it happened to them.
So I asked them to experiment. Go
into space, I said, and shoot at each other until your
engines get damaged. Then see if your ships will move or
not. Righty-ho, they said, and off they went to commit
mutual mayhem in Arena Space, all in the name of
scientific research.
The spaceways were full of Maydays,
spaceship debris and old missile casings littered the
emptiness of space, and many screams were heard over the
comms as the experimenters pounded away at each other.
Finally, they limped back to Chez
Diesel where I was sitting sipping on my pink frothy
cocktail, staring into space and thinking deep
demi-Goddess-like thoughts. I asked them for the results
of their experiments:
Participants: 5
Total deaths: 23
Lowest engine: 15
Immobile ships: 0
I asked them for their conclusions.
They looked at each other. They looked at me. They looked
at the floor. Maybe, one of them hesitantly offered, if
the engines were down to, like 5 or something...
Some people are obviously never
convinced. I feel sure that this is going to turn into a
Fed urban legend; one of those things that everyone knows
is true, although they have never seen it happen
themselves, it's always a friend of a friend of a friend
it happened to. The vision of thousands of immobilized
ships, adrift in the Interplanetary Wastes as the owners
wait despairingly for the emergency ship mechanic to
arrive and service them is obviously too attractive to be
let go, even in the face of the facts.
For the record, let me stop mucking
around and lay out those facts. If you managed to get
shot up enough times to reduce your engines to 1, you
would still be able to move your ship. Ships don't get
immobilised. Ever. Unless you run out of fuel, or course.
However, if your engines are not strong enough you won't
be able to fire your lasers, which brings your shooting
days to a rapid close!
FROM
THE POSTBAG: KILLING BY KINDNESS
Feedback received this letter a few
days ago:
I've noticed the increase in poor
people throughout fed which is great, but they all are
promoting much too quickly. POs will pretty much just
give them what they need to rush through the rank for
whatever reason there might be. It's sort of like the not
giving away the duke puzzle secrets. If you give it all
out, you won't enjoy it, and you don't recognize the true
meaning of the puzzle or rank. I may sound like i'm just
putting value in things that are meaningless, but i think
fed would be appreciated much more if it you move up the
ranks on your own... I think you should put a small
article in the fed news about this. Just ask the POs to
let them do their own work. Offer them jobs if they wish,
but don't just give them the money. Maybe even put in a
code that only players of the same rank or two ranks
ahead or back can give each other money.
We couldn't agree more - the writer
is absolute spot on. Fed isn't a race, and it doesn't
matter how fast you move through the ranks. What matters
is that you have fun. And you can have more fun at the
higher ranks if you "pay your dues" on the way
up - learning how the game works, earning promotion by
your own merits, and actually achieving something solid
of which you can be proud.
That's why we recently changed the
rules so that groats cannot be given to Commanders.
So, Rich People, please think twice
before giving Poor People hand-outs. Don't just give them
groats so they can promote in record-quick time. Instead,
take them under your wing and show them how things work;
teach them how to make their own groats, and ensure they
learn all the ins and outs of the Fed economy. You'll be
giving them a much bigger gift in the long run.
FORCING
SOMEONE TO DROP AN OBJECT
Two weeks ago I promised you I'd
give some help on forcing someone to drop an object, so
they couldn't hold onto objects and stop other people
from doing your puzzles.
To do this, you need to use an
event which checks if someone is carrying an object.
Traditionally, this kind of event is the one that causes
players the most confusion, and the Explorer's Workbench
doesn't help because the language it uses when you write
or list one of these events has a very tortuous logic.
Fortunately, with Genesis you don't have to write events
in the Workbench any more, so things are much, much
easier. Genesis' graphic interface makes it simple to
provide the right information, and it tells you the
result of the event you have written in plain English.
The concept behind an object
checking event isn't all that tricky. You have to make a
number of decisions. First, you need to decide how the
event will be triggered, and that rather depends on the
reason for having the event:
- It could be to keep someone
out of a room unless they are carrying the right
object - in effect, the object is a key which
lets them through a locked door.
- It could be to stop them
entering a room if they ARE carrying a certain
object - no mobile phones allowed in the concert
hall, perhaps?
- It could be to stop them
leaving a room if they are carrying a certain
object - you can't squeeze out the small door if
you are carrying the wardrobe.
- It could be to prevent them
picking up one object unless they are already
carrying another - can't get a picture down from
the wall unless they are carrying a stool to
stand on.
- Or It could be to STOP them
picking up one object is they are already
carrying another - if they are carrying the
elephant, they cannot pick up the grand piano as
well.
What you actually want the event to
do is going to determine the other things you have to
decide; the decisions about what will make the event
happen:
- Which object do you want the
event to check for?
- Do you want the event to
happen if the player IS carrying the object, or
IS NOT carrying it?
Finally you need to decide what the
event should do:
- Should it change any of the
player's stats, and if so, by how much?
- Should it move the player to a
new location?
- What text should it send to
the player?
Let's look at some of those
possible uses for object checking events in detail.
Object as key to locked room
Using the object as a key to stop
players walking into a location unless they are carrying
it is probably the easiest use of an object-checking
event. Let's say you have a room where an exclusive party
is being held - The Party Room - and players can only
enter if they have an invitation - an object called
Invite.
This part of the map looks
something like this:
----- -----
| 30 | | 31 |
|Lobby|---|Party|
| | |Room |
----- -----
(Aren't ASCII graphics wonderful?)
The event trigger is the IN event
on The Party Room, location 31. This means that the event
happens as the player walks into location 31, but before
any of the text for the room is displayed.
The event checks for the presence
of the Invite, and if the player is NOT carrying the
Invite, the event is triggered. The event then moves the
player back to location 30, and sends them a message
saying something like "The bouncer won't let you in
if you don't have an invite". You could have the
bouncer rough the player up a bit so they lose some
stamina.
An event that stops someone from
entering a location if they ARE carrying an object - for
example, dangerous explosives are not allowed on a
spaceship - works in the same way, except when you
specify which object should be checked for, make it so
the event is triggered if the player IS carrying it. It's
easy to set this in Genesis, it's a simple toggle.
Stopping the player leaving a room while carrying
something
Here we are at the point of this
whole article; how to force someone to drop an object
before they leave a room. There are two different ways to
do this, so I will explain them both. One is simpler than
the other but the other gives you more flexibility.
Let's set the scene for our
example. The player is in a room surrounded by
forcefields. They came in through an entrance, using a
special device that allowed them to pass through. But you
don't want them to leave without dropping the object, so
let's say that the forcefield is directional (sounds
vaguely plausible!).
The first way uses a map which
looks something like this:
----- -----
| 45 | | 46 |
|Force|---|Next |
|Field| |Room |
----- -----
They walked into the room by going
West from location 46 to location 45. To leave,
logically, they should go East from 45 to 46. But if you
don't put an eastward movement on location 45, and
instead have the location with no exits at all, so the
map looks like this...
----- -----
| 45 | | 46 |
|Force|-<-|Next |
|Field| |Room |
----- -----
...then you can put an event on the
NO EXIT (or OUT) trigger for the room. When they try to
leave the room, no matter what direction they type, the
event will get triggered.
The event has to check for the
presence of the Device, with the event happening if they
ARE NOT carrying it. All the event needs to do is move
them to room 46, with some suitable message. So, if they
ARE carrying the Device, whichever way they try to move
they are told they cannot move in that direction; if they
ARE NOT carrying the Device, they get out safely.
That's certainly the easiest way to
set up this kind of event, but it's not necessarily the
best, because it doesn't tell the player what the problem
is. It would be much better to give them some clue as to
what they need to do to leave - that is, drop the Device.
You can easily do that by putting
an In event on room 46 which stops them entering the room
if they are carrying the object. But that's no good
because it means they can't enter it from any direction
at all, so they'd never be able to get through room 46 to
move into room 45.
So the best solution is to use an
extra location to handle the event checking. The map
would look something like the one in the previous
example, and again the movement between the two rooms
would be a one-way movement - it would allow the player
to move west into the room but not east back again.
Instead, moving east from room 45
would move the player to a completely different room -
let's say, room 99. Since you can't draw this on the map
with Genesis, you draw room 99 somewhere else on the map,
and then set a special movement east from location 45 to
location 99.
Now you put an IN event on location
99 which checks for the object. The event should be
triggered if they ARE carrying the object, and all it
does is move the player to room 46 with a suitable
message. But if they ARE NOT carrying the object, the
event does not happen and they walk into location 99. The
description of 99 should tell them there is a problem,
something like this:
You step into the forcefield,
but as you enter your movements slow down until you
come to a dead stop. No matter how you strain and
struggle, you can't move forward. The Device that
allowed you to walk through the forcefield into the
room has no effect when you try to leave - the only
thing you can do is go back into the room.
So there are just a few examples of
how to use object-checking events, and in particular how
to force a player to drop an object before they can leave
a room. Don't forget to set the A flag (lockable) on the
room so that when they drop the object it gets recycled.
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