Fed II Star newsletter - masthead The weekly newsletter for the Fed II game by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 12, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
Page 5

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THE MOST COMMON SUGGESTION

Continuing with my series of articles about player ideas for Fed II, I want to talk about a suggestion that comes up over and over again. In fact, it's probably the most common suggestion we get. If you are thinking that it's "I want to be able to buy a laser handgun so I can walk into a bar and shoot everybody dead," then you're wrong - there is a sensible idea that comes up much more frequently.

The request is for some kind of in-game mail system that lets players leave messages for each other.

This sounds like a great idea, that would fulfil a real need - that's why it gets suggested so often. After all, it is a problem when you want to talk to another player but they live in a different time zone so you are seldom in the game at the same time. Unless you know the player's email address, how can you contact them with requests?

So if it's such a great idea, why hasn't it been implemented into Fed? What could possibly be the problem with this request?

Unfortunately, there are a number of issues - some of them technical and some of them social - that having such a system would bring up. On the technical side, it would massively increase the storage requirements for each player's Fed character. Messages would have to be saved for a reasonably length of time so that players who don't log on every day would get a chance to read them. I won't go into all the technical reasons why this wouldn't be a good thing - Bella is the technical one, not me - but they are there.

Of course most of the technical problems could probably be overcome with a bit of work, but more important that the technical problems are the social ones.

I'm talking about spam. Once we have a mail system in the game it is going to be abused. There will be players who come in and fire off a message to every Fed player they have ever talked to. Someone might set up a macro to save all the Fed character names they see, and then send mail. It would only take one person doing this to cause a massive amount of nuisance. Look how spam has messed up email on the internet - it's getting harder and harder to spot the real, genuine messages amongst the deluge of spam.

Having said that, we do have plans to add limited facilities that will allow planet-owners to send messages to the CEOs who build factories on their planets. This is on the list of stuff to do and should make an appearance soon. Similarly, when we get whatever the Fed II equivalent of duchies is, the duchy owner will be able to send mail to all the POs in the duchy. But we will never provide a full game-wide mail system that lets any player send mail to any other player - it's just too open to abuse.

Meanwhile, if you want to leave messages on financial matters, you can use the Fed II Labor Union message board. Go to http://www.ibgames.net/board and click on the link.


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