The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 8, 2009

Official News page 2


TELEPORTER SUBSCRIPTIONS AND CRASHES

by Hazed

There was panic at Federation Towers last week when we overheard a conversation that indicated people were not bothering to renew their teleporter subscriptions because of game crashes. Every time the game crashed, they said, the subscription lost a day - so with three crashes in the last ten days or so, they had lost three days of teleporter use. No wonder they were grumbling.

Well, we took this very seriously. We always go out of our way to compensate players for losses caused by crashes, and losing something that you paid for with a slithy is even more devastating than losing groats. After all slithies are bought with real life dollars! And it's the sale of slithies that brings in the money that pays the Fed bills, so anything that stops people buying more slithies is a really bad thing.

So we swung into action, and Bella ensured that everybody who had a teleporter had 5 extra days added to their subscription - 1 for each of the crashes, plus a couple extra as a courtesy gesture. We also promised that if anybody's subscription had run out and they hadn't yet renewed, they should tell us when they did renew and we'd give them the extra days then.

Crisis averted!

Then, a few days later, Bella happened to look at the game code that dealt with teleporter subscriptions, and guess what she found? I'll let her explain in her own words:

"We don't store the number of days of teleporter rental left, we store the date and time at which you rented it. When the game tells you how many days are left, it compares the current date and time with the date and time of rental and figures out how many days have elapsed, and therefore how many days remain.

"This means that there is no loss in the event of a crash, because the date you rented it is stored on disk."

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Don't panic without checking the facts, maybe? Take grumbling with a pinch of sodium chloride?


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