The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 14, 2009

Official News page 2


CHANGES TO FED2'S TOP END

by Hazed

"That's odd," said Danny Droid. "Something's changed, but we weren't notified about it by Bella." I looked over to see what it was talking about, and it showed me the 'RANKS' command. "Look, it's no longer lopsided. There are now an even number of ranks in the game, when there used to be an odd number of ranks."

"Hooray for symmetry!" cried a junior droid who hasn't been in the office long enough to be given a name yet. "Bella must've decided to tidy the display up and make the columns even. Let's applaud her tidiness." Hmm... with journalistic instincts like that, I can't see this droid lasting long enough to ever get a name of its own!

Since Danny Droid had been the one to notice this change, I dispatched it to ask Bella what was going on. A few days later, it came back, looking disheveled and with a startled look in its sensors.

"Is it always that hard to get any information out of Bella?" it asked plaintively. "I had to stalk her for days before I got anything other than the most vague platitudes. It was like getting plasma out of a meteorite. Still, I got the story eventually - here it is." It chucked a data crystal onto the desk in front of me, then went and propped itself up in a corner where it could recharge.

On the data crystal were hours of ramblings and mutterings from Our Illustrious Leader, Bella. From within I managed to distil the crucial facts. Here's what she said:

"I decided to remove the projected rank of Syndicrat from the ranks list." Yes, that would explain the new symmetry to the display. But since she hasn't been known to care out such things as column balance in the past, what was her reason for dropping this rank?

"There are several reasons... the overwhelming one is that, at the moment, I'm unable to think of anything that is both new and fits in with the game."

A historical recap might be useful at this point: back in classic Fed, the top rank was Duke (the equivalent of Plutocrat) but players who reached that rank didn't want to stop there. They wanted there to be something more after Duke, so they kept on nagging Bella to add in a new rank, Archduke. They didn't know what the rank would do, they just knew they didn't want to run out of gameplay!

So when Bella started work on the rewrite of the code and produced Fed2, a new rank was added to the top of the game - Syndicrat, which was going to be the equivalent of the much-wished-for Archduke.

But now, Bella says, "I see no reason to add stuff just for the sake of having an extra rank. It may be that some time in the future I will come up with a suitable idea. At that time we can add the extra code, but at the moment it would just be a pot-boiler."

At this point I had visions of Bella cooking up the code for Fed2 in a variety of pots over huge fires... some form of alchemy, perhaps.

There was one other significant statement on the data crystal: "So the next rank, Plutocrat, will be the last for the foreseeable future. All games, including multi-player ones, I've discovered over the years, eventually reach a stage where there is nothing more to do, and you have reached the end. When I was young and impetuous and wrote the first version of Fed, I had visions of it out-lasting me (a la Ender's Game and sequels) but experience indicates otherwise."

She's right, everything has an end to it, even Fed2, and there will come a time in every player's life when she has reached the top and can't advance any further. Adding a new rank would postpone that time for a while but then players would play through it and start asking for another new rank on top of that...

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