Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: November 25, 2012

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WHOOPS! FORCED PROMOS TO FINANCIER

by Hazed

A number of manufacturers got a shock when they logged into the game after last Sunday’s reset. They found they had mysteriously become Financiers – against their will!

This forced promotion was the bizarre and unexpected consequence of a problem with the reset. Here’s what happened.

When Alan links a new planet into the game he edits the data file that contains the details of all the star systems and their planets, adding the new world to the list. Then when the game fires up, it uses this data file to determine which planets to load into the game.

Unfortunately, when editing the file on Sunday morning, he inadvertently added a space to the beginning of the file. Perhaps he leant on the keyboard without realising it – he doesn’t have a cat he can blame for walking across the space bar!

The addition of that simple space broke the file, as far as the game was concerned – it couldn’t read it. So when it fired up after the reset it tried to do so with no planets at all.

No planets means no factories – after all, a factory needs a world to stand on.

The trigger for promotion to Financier is that the company must have run for four accounting cycles, and it must have no factories or depots. So the game noticed a whole bunch of Manufacturers whose companies were without any factories – and it promptly promoted them!

The game then carried on trying to fire itself up but the lack of any planets eventually became too much for it to cope with, so it gave up, which is why you couldn’t log on right after Sunday’s reset.

When I found I couldn’t get back into the game I alerted Alan, and he checked what had gone wrong, found the erroneous space in the data file, and fixed it, allowing the game to fire up. But we didn’t realise that Manufacturers had been promoted because their unexpected elevations had not been written into the game log. We only became aware of the problem when the players affected started to complain the next day!

If you have a Manufacturer character which was promoted because of this glitch, you can put yourself back to that rank by using the ‘DECLARE BANKRUPTCY’ command. This will leave you with no cash in your company, but you can then claim compensation to get you back where you were before. Email feedback@ibgames.com (don’t forget to put Fed2 in the subject line) and give the following info:

Your character’s name
Your company name
How many factories you owned
How many depots you owned
How much cash was in the company balance

I will then reimburse you for your losses.

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