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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 27, 2013

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FED2 TEST VERSION OPENS UP ON SUNDAY

by Hazed

As I write this on Saturday afternoon, Alan assures me that he’ll have the new test version of the game up and running sometime on Sunday afternoon. He’ll post a message on the noticeboard in the game to let you know when you can access it.

In case you missed the announcement in last week’s Star, we plan to allow all of you to play in Test Fed, not just staff. This is so you can help generate data that will lead Alan to the cause of the ‘new player’ crashes.

Warning: in order to get this running he will hold the live game down for a little while longer than usual at Sunday's reset, in order to take a backup of all the data files. These will then be used in Test Fed.

How to Access Test Fed

To log onto Test Fed, use your front-end as normal, with the same system name - fed2.ibgames.net - but change the port number to 30007.

You will know that you’ve ended up in the right place because when you log on you will see a large notice informing you that you’ve made it to Test Fed!

Test Fed Characters

When Test Fed goes live tomorrow it’ll have a copy of the data files from live Fed - so all your characters, along with their planets, will be there.

While you can log on with your usual characters, and do whatever you want with them, we ask that you also set up a couple of new characters. After all, the whole point of this is to get data about what’s happening when the game crashes! So we need lots of new accounts, which will - we hope - make the game crash. A lot.

What Else You Can Do in Test Fed

While you can also play with your usual characters, it’s not worth you spending any time actually developing them - since we expect the game to crash a lot, any gains you make are likely to be wiped out. In addition, we may also have to back out the persona file to a previous version from time to time, or update Test Fed’s files so it matches the live game. You can assume, therefore, that nothing you do in there will be permanent.

One thing you can do is experiment. If you’re not sure whether a particular economic strategy will work, try it out in Test Fed before committing your character in Live Fed to something that may lose groats.

You can also live dangerously by visiting all the places you’ve always been too scared to go - the Martian ruins, the Wilderness on Earth, those radiation rooms on Titan, or the heart of the sun.

In the future, if you plan to design a complicated planet and maybe want to try your hand with events, you can ask us to link the files into Test Fed so you can check it out before it goes into the live game.

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