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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 24, 2013

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FED’S VERSION OF “HAVE YOU CHECKED THAT IT’S PLUGGED IN?”

by Hazed

One day last week I received this comm message:

Your comm unit crackles with a message from Clueless, “I think I’ve found a problem in the code for depots.”

Ok, Clueless is not the player’s real name, but as you read this story you will understand why I have changed it to spare his blushes.

I asked him what the problem was. He started to relay his input to me so I could see what was happening. He showed me the contents of his depot on the planet... well, let’s call it Cantaloupe. It was a well-stocked facility, stuffed full of valuable commodities.

Then he showed me what happened when he tried to retrieve one of the bays from the warehouse. “You don’t have a warehouse on this planet”, he was told.

Oh dear. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Anyone who has ever done any customer support knows that sometimes when people complain that something isn’t working, it’s not because there is an actual hardware or software failure - it’s because they are doing something incorrectly. A failure in the wetware. A problem with the nut behind the keyboard.

For example - the gadget in question is not plugged in!

Now, I didn’t want to assume that Clueless was being... you know, clueless... but it pays to go through all the easy stuff when diagnosing a possible bug, so I checked what command he was using. To be honest, I couldn’t see how he could have got it wrong: ‘FETCH bay#’ is not exactly a complex command.

So the next thing I tried was a SpyNet Report to see if Clueless was on the planet Cantaloupe. And guess what. He wasn’t. He was on Watermelon (not its real name) where he didn’t have a depot.

Whoops!

When I pointed this out, there was a long pause. An embarrassed silence. Then a stammered apology.

If only all problems were this simple to solve!

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