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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate January 2004 |
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WEB FED NEWS YEARBOOKS Earthdate January 2004 |
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OFFICIAL
NEWS |
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What was in January 2004's Official News:
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2004 started with a bang in Federation. Bella had made astonishing progress on the rewrite of the game, opening it up to the public for the first time on Christmas Day 2003, and then continuing to add new features every day. Although the Federation Chronicle wasn't being published over the Christmas break, Hazed issued regular bulletins about all the new stuff appearing in the new game. And new features continued to appear regularly throughout January. Exciting times - and particularly enjoyable after the long period when it had been impossible to made any changes to the code of the old version! The news about Fed II wasn't all good: we started to see the first macro-haulers appear, who made vast sums of money in a ridiculously short space of time, thus threatening to introduce hyper-inflation when the universe had only just been born. To counter them, the taxman started confiscating all money above a certain threshold, a move which nobody liked at all. These macro-haulers were also sucking all the jobs off the board, leaving none for people attempting to haul at a more reasonable speed. To counter this, Bella allowed the stevedores to take their time about loading and unloading the cargo, thus slowing the macro-users down considerably. Ship upgrades were implemented, but you no longer had to sell your ship first before trading up to a larger, shinier model: Jarrow started to offer a trade-in price on the old model as part of the process of selling you a new one. This followed the merger between Woodspring Ship Auctions and Jarrow Shipyards, whereby the merged company took on the new name of Jarrow Shipyards, was consolidated into the facilities at Jarrow Shipyards, and any surplus employees were disposed of - most of whom, by complete coincidence, were from the Woodspring side of the new company. Yep, it was one of those mergers. It was decided that the new version of the game would be called Federation II, and the old version classic Fed. The first asteroid was added to Fed II DataSpace: Doris, the biological planet. A new area on Mars was also opened up, south of the landing pad, where visitors could marvel at the junkyard of probes, rovers and other spacecraft that had previously visited Mars. The very first wedding in Fed II was a great social event to start off the year - see the report in Inside Scoop. Halia was the first person to solve the very difficult New Year puzzle, designed by Art.
We decided to call the new version of the game Federation II. This is actually a return to the very early days of Fed... When Fed first appeared on Compunet, back in 1988, it was called Federation II. Why? That's what we asked Bella. All we got in reply was some mumble about the first Federation having been an exploration ship that had opened up the Galaxy. We all shrugged and put it down to Bella's well-known eccentricity. When Fed jumped the Atlantic and opened its doors on GEnie in the US, it still called itself Federation II. But this caused immense confusion, because there were other games on the system that used "II" to indicate a second version of something, and some of them still had version I available as well. "Where's version I of Fed?" everyone wanted to know. So as time went on, we quietly dropped the II from the name, and by the time we moved to AOL, the game was known as just Federation. Now we've regained the II, and this time it does mean something. Fed II sounds a bit more elegant that New Fed, Fed: The Next Generation or Son of Fed (although I do like one player's description of it as Fed Nouveaux). This just leaves us with one problem: what to call the old version of Fed. Old Fed is probably the simplest suggestion. It beats the alternatives of Geriatric Fed or Pensioner's Fed! Slightly less unpleasant names would be Vintage Fed, or Original Fed. Antique Fed sounds good, although I have visions of turning up at the Antiques Roadshow wanting to know how much this version of Fed was worth. Probably the best suggestion so far comes from Vlad: Classic Fed. Yes, that has a certain ring to it.
The Fed II Interstellar Revenue Service has started investigating people who seem to have two much money for their rank, on the suspicion that anyone with excess groatage must be a dodgy character. The IRS considers that Commanders who have in excess of a quarter of a million groats are prime candidates for investigation, and will be swooping on suspects and confiscating the extra money. Similar operations will be undertaken against other ranks, although the exact levels at which an investigation will be triggered is still being discussed by a committee of tax experts, financial planners, employment specialists and management consultants. Advance warning has also been given by the Galactic Administration's Chancellor of the Exchequer that he will be launching what he terms "a war on inflation". In order to keep tight control of the Galactic economy, if he sees earnings spiralling out of control, so that the money supply is too great, he will take steps to avoid inflation by devaluing the groat. The treasury will issue more details on this plan when it has been finalised.
Once the code for jobs was added to the game, it didn't take long for someone to write themselves a jobbing macro - and they proceeded to suck all of the jobs off the workboard, leaving none for other players to do. As well as the players being unhappy at this, the cargo stevedores were shocked at being asked to work so fast. Never known for their keenness, they put their collective feet (or equivalent appendages) down and instituted a work to rule. They now limit the speed with which they will move cargo in and out of ships, and if they are asked to work faster than they feel is acceptable, they will protest and start working at an even slower pace.
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