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Saturday, September 14, 2002
TDZK UPDATE: Here's the latest announcement from TDZK: The new TDZK server is at 216.128.73.12. Please go there to access the game. Hopefully, this means that the TDZK Crisis is now over with & the game can now get back to the business of becoming the single most popular space strategy BBG there is. THE LATEST NEWS ON THE TDZK SITUATION: The following was posted on the game's front page: TDZK is currently offline. The new TDZK servers are running, and the admin team is busy configuring them. As soon as they are ready, we will transfer the game data over. This should be done by 16:00 Server Time (US Mountain Time) Saturday. *This is a revised time, we ran into a few minor problems so it'll take a bit longer* Friday, September 13, 2002
Space Merchant Realms Update: THE DEATH OF THE FORSAKEN The players community of Space Merchant Realms are rejoicing over what appears to be the death of the The Forsaken alliance, an outfit that has long represented the worst attributes of team behavior in online gaming. TF members have been known to engage in bragadoccio and sending messages to those who they've killed with rub it in taunts. TF members are also generally very vulgar and do what they can to ruin the game for others. Words like "chump" and "lamer" do not begin to describe what The Forsaken are like. Following is a summary of their downfall: 1st, they lost 5 planets in 1 day. 2nd, Their leader,Warlock, went on a spree making wild accusations about spies and traitors and whatnot. 3rd, this led to defections. 4th, the remaining members of the old Horsemen of the Apocalypse or HoA, who had long chafed at being uder the command of the guy who ran their recruitment & training alliance in the old Space Merchant, rebelled and refounded the HoA in the SMR Vets Game taking the TF's last few remaining planets with them. 5th, this leaves the TF with only about a dozen or so members, many of whom are inactive & zero planets. Its widely expected that either Warlock will retire from SMR or will disband the TF and simply join another alliance. Who says that there isn't any justice in this world? PRESS RELEASE: Press: GameRifts Investigates Ubi Marketing Allegations From an email from press@gamerifts.com : GameRifts Investigates Ubi Marketing Allegations! Recent allegations concerning a secretive Ubi Soft marketing campaign from Unknown Player.com casts a frightening shadow about possible aggressive tactics getting out of hand with Shadowbane. After careful and deliberate investigations, GameRifts.com discovered many more troubling facts about this incident. The most troubling of all, is that we found little evidence of wrong doing by Ubi Soft, but discovered some disturbing reports of possible black mail and PR intimidation. Not by Ubi Soft, but by Unknown Player.com The Full Story can be found on GameRifts.com ---- If you could, please include the above item in your next news update, it would be appreciated! Thanks, Chris "Div Devlin" Musial div@gamerifts.com GameRifts.com www.gamerifts.com Thursday, September 12, 2002
Swirve News : There is a new development regarding Swirve, the free games company: MAJOR SWIRVE.COM EMAIL CHANGES Swirve.com, in partnership with Mail.com, is proud to have offered free @swirve.com email for nearly two years. However, due to a change in our relationship with Mail.com, there are some important changes that will affect your email account. Over the coming week, your email address will change from @swirve.com to @swirvemail.com. You will still be able to access your account from our site as always, and the look and feel of the site will remain the same. Mail sent to @swirve.com addresses will still work for a few months to allow you a smooth transition. You should begin letting your friends and family know about the new email address when convenient. For Swirve.com email users, as the transition takes place, we will go ahead and change all @swirve.com references within game and mail accounts here at Swirve to the new address. Service Level & Paypal bonuses will automatically be changed to support the new @swirvemail.com address as well. Any new signups should be made using @swirvemail.com. We thank you for your support of Swirve.com and hope this change, which gives Mail.com full control of the email site, will allow Mail.com to provide you with even higher quality email services as we move forward. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and will do our best to make this transition as easy as possible. Earth: 2025 Update: The following was posted on the Earth: 2025 Talk Forum by Mehul Patel: Swirve Administrator Aug 10th 10:10 PM There may be some substantial changes taking place over the next several months here at Swirve.com -- this message is just to provide a basic outline of the reasoning and possible changes. As many of you may know, Swirve.com is currently run by two people - myself and one other employee. Beginning this fall, I will likely be returning to graduate school - while the decision won't be formalized for another few weeks, its more than likely that this will happen. What exactly that means for Swirve.com is still a bit up in the air. What we do know is that Swirve.com will continue to run as it always has - we have no plans to shut down the site or anything like that. However, my time for development will clearly be more limited - by how much, I won't really know until I have a feel for how I will split school and work. This will not really affect day-to-day activities such as customer service, cheat detection, etc as most of that is not handled by me as-is. Our primary plan for Swirve Games earlier this year was to rewrite Earth: 2025 entirely from scratch (it would be a vastly different game). Our goal remains to do that, although the time frame is now a bit up in the air. For Utopia, this likely means fewer changes over the coming rounds - at least until I get a grasp on what kind of time commitments I will have & need. The Earth: Free For All game may have to be reevaluated, as it was originally intended to be a maintenance-free game on our end, but due to the amount of attempted cheating, that has not been the case. Outside of that, we don't expect any significant changes in terms of the services offered at Swirve Games. Ideally, our Fantasy Sports site will also remain unchanged, but we may cut other portions of the site down the road if necessary. Between now and October, there will also be some changes coming to the Email System as we give full ownership of the site to the company that manages and hosts the site (it was previously co-owned). Swirve Email users will be notified of those changes as they are defined. Our Utopia and Sports users have already seen a change in the advertising strategy used within those games - new banners that are incorporated more directly into the content of the pages. This is a trend that will likely continue and be expanded into Earth: 2025 as we work to ensure consistent funding for the site. If all goes as hoped, this will provide some more stability for the company and will also result in the elimination of all popup advertising throughout the Swirve site in September. The details of what's going to happen and how things may (or may not) change are still up-in-the-air. School would start towards late August and it will take a while to settle in and see how things go and where we stand. As we get a clearer picture of this and develop details, I'll post more on our future direction. Mehul Patel Swirve.com Games Yet Another Development in the TDZK saga: TDZK is currently offline, and will remain so until the server move. This is sos we don't go over our low bandwidth. We have enough left for forum use, but nothing more. We should hopefully be moved by Friday, depending on when the new equipment arrives. We'll post the new IP address as soon as it becomes available. Dominion Update: Posted at: 9/9/2002 10:40:00 AM There were some technical problems starting at about 2:20AM last night that lasted until I noticed the problem this morning. This prevented people from playing the game or posting to the messageboards. The problem has been fixed and everything appears to be working ok now. -Ross Wednesday, September 11, 2002
The Following Announcement Was Posted On the It's Your Turn News: Topic: ItsYourTurn.com News From: §Patrick Chu (pat1) Date: 09/11/02, 09:07 Subject: remembering players lost on 9-11-01 Message: As the nation remembers those who lost their lives in the 9-11 tragedy, in addition we'd like to remember specifically the players on ItsYourTurn.com who lost their lives on that day. These were friends of ours who we shared games and conversation with, and we miss their companionship. Rest in peace. And Now, a Special Announcement From tha Admins of Space Merchant Realms : ANNOUNCEMENTS Time Message 9/11/2002 10:10:36 AM In honor and in memory of the thousands that lost their lives on 9-11-01, I ask that there be no fighting, no podding, for one day. Instead, remember the friendships that have been formed here, spend one day in peace, strengthening those friendships. Cherish life. 9/11/2002 4:19:08 PM In honor and in memory of the thousands that lost their lives on 9-11-01, I ask that there be no fighting, no podding, for one day. Instead, remember the friendships that have been formed here, spend one day in peace, strengthening those friendships. Cherish life. At 8pm server time today, all of you that are able, please come into #smr for a time of rememberance. We will be observing a two minute silent in memory of those lost, as well as a mass ceasefire meeting in a sector to be announced in both Amity and NG3. Tuesday, September 10, 2002
NEWS: Majorem Announces Development of OPIUM Massively Multiplayer Technology The following is an email from Mike Fisher, mfisher@fishermarketing.com : For Immediate Release: Bney-Brak, Israel, September 10, 2002 - Majorem Ltd., a developer of massively multiplayer games and technology, is pleased to officially announce the development of a software development kit to provide solutions for both server-side and client-side needs in facilitating the creation and running of massively multiplayer worlds. Majorem's 'OPIUM' - (Online Persistent Infrastructure for Unlimited Multiplay) employs a proprietary communications protocol to reduce lag, and advanced data compression and filtering technologies in order to save on bandwidth expenses while enabling a new game genre: MMPORTS. OPIUM will also support a dynamic server clustering technology that will benefit the game by improving its uptime-reliability and maintaining a seamless world environment. Other technologies to be included in the SDK are: independent process technology and process-filtering, hierarchical object infrastructure, smart server resources allocation, dynamic world backup and central content-history management. About Majorem Ltd. Based in Bney-Brak, Israel, Majorem Ltd. approaches the games market from its technological aspect, developing technology for massively multiplayer persistent games. Majorem's server technology will support MMP games for the Internet, DTV and cellular, and is being used in the development of their upcoming online strategy game 'Ballerium'. For more information with regards to Majorem Ltd. or Ballerium, please see the respective websites at www.majorem.com and www.ballerium.com. For more information on the OPIUM SDK, please contact Mr. Lior Fridman, CTO of Majorem Ltd., at lior@majorem.com. Good News/Bad News: Here's the latest on TDZK from the game's front page: TDZK is currently offline. As we are sure you have noticed, TDZK has been running into some difficulty lately. Our current hosting service is refusing to work with us, and is charging us for bandwidth we aren't using. We've tried and tried to work things out, but it hasn't been successful. However, we are please to announce that TDZK has reached an agreement with a new provider. EarthStats, which currently does alliance hosting for the popular Earth 2025 game, has agreed to host TDZK.This arrangement should be mutually beneficial. TDZK will have full, unlimited access to the ES T3 line, so we will never have to worry about bandwidth again. Also, TDZK will be running on it's own servers for the first time in it's history, instead of renting them.TDZK will now be operating off a pair of machines equiped with Dual P4 Xeon 1.8Gz processors, and 1 GB of ram. These machines are going to cost a fair bit, but he hope that through our advertising and the help of our players we will be able to meet the costs. Currently, we need to raise $1500 over the next 5 months.TDZK will be able to earn a large part of that on it's own, but we'll be posting a running total soon so players are aware how close we are to meeting out goals. We plan to move TDZK to it's new home on Thursday or Friday, as soon as possible. We are NOT resetting the database, all your information will be kept intact. However, to conserve bandwidth while we are still at our current provider, there will be several restrictions on TDZK for a few days.The site may shut down for periods during the next few days, the turn rate is currently at half of normal, and we've disabled some of the places where personal banners are shown. We encourage you to help us save bandwidth by not making heavy use of the forums, and keeping your in-game actions to a minimum.Once the move to the new servers is complete, TDZK will be running at full strength again, with NO LAG. We thank the players for all the support they've given so far, and hope that with the new arrangement we will be able to have a great game for a long time to come. Long live TDZK! ~TDZK Admin Team. THE RETURN OF DIASPORA II: In addtion to the "Xiaspora" game previously reported on, there is another fan-run version of the classic space trading game Diaspora. Its called Rillaspora . The following News items were cut & pasted from the game's front page: Update New Forum Moderators have Been assigned. 25,000 Hits for the site So Far this month, wanna try and hit 40,000 So get your friends here. :) Last Poll Results : New Ship Classes 25.57% New Ships 23.16% New Bots 22.56% New Maps 11.82% New Layout 7.36% New Planets 5.55% New Guns 3.98% Total Votes : 829 By : Wuked at Monday, June 17, 2002 LAck of Updates Sorry about the current lack of updates to both the Game and the Site. Both Rilla and myself have been extremly busy over the last few weeks, and will continue to be for another few weeks to come. Just to remind You ; this game is run for free, and we do our best to bring you a game, some people obviously don't understand this, and theier characters have been frozen for cheating and no co-operating. If you Do find a bug / Cheat , you will not be frozen, as long as you help us fix the bug. This game is meant for fun - for one and all, please try to keep it that way , I know we are. Thanks.... By : Wuked at Friday, May 3, 2002 Votes... What is your Favourite Ship Class ? Endymion Won with over 33% of the votes By : Wuked at Sunday, March 17, 2002 Funk Says : Ello all, just cast a glance across the forums ( managed to get myself a web enabled account at the uni here, so i can finnaly get online an check me mail and this ear forum like.. and, ohh my ohh my, havent u lot been busy whilst ive been moving house, theres gonna be some SERIOUS re-educating to do once the games back up,. i look forward to it [ adds several names to the big book of grudges]) But , what im postign to say is... the new server should arrive this coming monday, hopefully, and, all things being equal, ntl should finally have finished breeding the giant moles which there aparently going to use to lay cable to my new house ( fucking idiots, they disconnected me on the 19th of feb, and they still haveny got there shit together tp plug the funking cable in yet.. arsing bastid munkies) but i see some interestignt hings have happened in the last 2-3 weeks I havent been able to get hold of rila yet, but i do know he had some comp problems, just defore i unplugged the old server an moved it out of my old place, that was on the 22st feb.. soo.. corrupted database ? dunno, maby, personaly, i dont mind the idea of a reset to much, just gives another chance to whip everyones arse again, and gives al of you a chance to carry on bitatching about how unfair it all is By : Wuked at Sunday, March 10, 2002 Webserver and website Sorry About the web-server going down for a while ,was completly outta my hands . Its up now, and for the forseable future. Tthe game server will be up soon, Having some problems with a corrupted database or similiar . Sorry for the wait, We are trying our best. By : Wuked at Wednesday, March 6, 2002 Website Back up and Running The Website Back up and Running , now working on the forum. Sorry for this in-convenience to everyone, I am still looking into what happened and why. Thanks for your patience. By : Wuked at Thursday, February 21, 2002 Monday, September 09, 2002
Space Merchant Realms Update: The game is suffering from lag, but the admins promise that there will be an update soon that will correct much of the lag problem. THE RETURN OF DIASPORA: Well, not quite. However, there is a fan-run version of the late and highly lamented space trading game, Diaspora, called Xiaspora that looks interesting. The following News items were cut & pasted from that game's front page: New Bot Class Friday, September 06 2002 @ 11:42 PM EDT Contributed by: FreakNigh Views: 92 The Engineers have been placed above Dysilica. They have a 50% chance of awarding an andros ship. 3 comments Most Recent Post: 09/09 09:00AM by M@nga -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Erinyes Plans Thursday, September 05 2002 @ 09:18 PM EDT Contributed by: FreakNigh Views: 6 Seams i had a bug that caused everyone to loose their erinyes plans. This has nothing todo with gate keepers or andros. I am extremely sorry but becuase of the high ammount of people that lost their plans, it is imposible for me to refund everyone. For the next 24 hours erinyes plans will be free to purchase (sorry to everyone who repurchased). 1 comments Most Recent Post: 09/09 09:46AM by Anonymous -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- New Ship Class Monday, September 02 2002 @ 11:03 PM EDT Contributed by: FreakNigh Views: 213 A new ship class has been added to the game. You must kill Gate Keepers to earn the ships (you cannot purchase them). Please download the latest client and the new ship grafics (brought to us by Stripe). Hopefully soon i will create another bot class that is stronger then gate keepers, and will have a higher chance of collecting one of the new ships. 9 comments Most Recent Post: 09/05 09:38PM by Ryun_99 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, September 08, 2002
THE TDZK CRISIS RESOLVED: The following was just placed on the game's front page: TDZK is online again. TDZK has reached an agreement with a new provider, and we will be providing more detailed information on that soon. However, it will take until the end of the week before we can make the switch.During that time, we may have to knock down one or two things to preserve bandwith (such as custom banners), and the turn rate will be cut in half.We know that it's annoying, but as soon as we move to the new servers TDZK should be lag-free (the new servers are 4x as powerful as the current ones), and running at full power once again. Long live TDZK! ~TDZK Admin Team. EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH TDZK Admin Jerle: Interview Conducted on ICQ September 8, 2002: Jerle: (9:17 PM) I'll be ready to fill you in on the new arrangement in just a minute. Chuck: (9:18 PM) ok...thanks. Chuck: (9:43 PM) What's the new arrangement? Jerle: (9:46 PM) K. I actually just got finished finalizing the details. Jerle: (9:53 PM) Here's what happening. Have you heard of Earth 2025? Chuck: (9:53 PM) most certainly Jerle: (9:55 PM) Well, we got contacted by the guy who hosts them today. He's willing to host TDZK is we provide him with the servers, and give him a cut of ad advertising revenue. Jerle: (9:55 PM) So it's a big upfront cost, but then we'll own the servers and we should be set for quite a while.. Jerle: (9:57 PM) Anyway. So we've got an arrangement worked out with the owner, Comwood. Jerle: (9:58 PM) He'll buy the parts and build the servers to our specs... Jerle: (9:58 PM) And we repay him over the next few months. Chuck: (9:58 PM) How much is the upfront cost? Jerle: (9:58 PM) It'll be around $2000 Jerle: (9:58 PM) We have about a fourth of that coming, and about $1000 of known income due to us within the next few months. Jerle: (9:59 PM) So we'll probably have to rely on donations to help kick us over the last little bit, but after that we'll be set for good. Chuck: (10:00 PM) Are you going to bring this info to the players and ask for the increased donations? Jerle: (10:01 PM) We'll make it known what our status is towards reaching the goal. Jerle: (10:02 PM) I might bring back the little info box in the the corner, or make a thermometer type thing to show our status. UniBall Update: The following was posted to the game's front page: Updates and a public Goodbye. Thursday, September 5, 2002 @ 3:42 EDT, Posted by Line I did a big update today/this past weekend. All the player pictures people submitted were posted. Two new rants are up, check ‘em out. Now on to what I’m doing now/have been doing. I’ve recently finished writing a program that restarts the Uniball server automatically when it goes down. It had a few bugs, but everything seems to be fixed now. Next, we’re working on a new set of rules, code of conduct, etc to better define the rules of BRChat/Uniball/Forums etc. This will hopefully eliminate the vagueness we have in our current rules/code of conduct that was recently addressed/discussed on the forums by a group of players. Lastly, NickW and the rest of the admin team are working on major code revisions. We’re designing/implementing a new registration system and ban system that will hopefully aid in keeping our growing community happy. The actual client and server software are being rewritten and many of the suggestions we’ve received are being implemented - Spectator mode and Ladder Integration just to name a few. The patch client and server are complete, which will allow updates to happen instantly as they are released. On a more personal note (to me and some other ub’ers). One of my favorite people in the community is leaving this week for an extended stay with Uncle Sam during Boot Camp. I’d like to wish Tripp/Ruebenb good luck and a quick return to the wonderful addiction that is Uniball. I’ve known you for a good two years, and you are without a doubt one of reasons I’ve stuck around as long as I have. I’d just like to thank you for all the hours you’ve spent talking with me, listening when I felt there was no one else, and of course “your” song you sung to me ;o I’m going to miss you so much =( *hugs* hr> Everyone be sure to say goodbye and wish him luck TDZK Update : The following notice was just added to the game's front page: We have a possible solution to the problem, look for TDZK to come online around 10:00 PM MST this evening if all goes well. The M.A.R.S. Project Update: The following news was posted on the game's front page: 2002-09-02 21:41:12 • Shayne • Well, its been productive... THe forums are near 100% completed. Ithink the only thing that remains is the user suggested "Edit" and the Delete functions. 2002-08-29 11:36:31 • Shayne • Okay, my bad... My bad, the forums will get done today. My girlfriend was rather ill over the last two days so I kept her company and you know all that comfort stuff. Today they will get done. Then you can harp on Jerry to get the damn admin done for them. TDZK IN CRISIS : The following dire news was just posted on the game's front page: Relations with our hosting company have taken a turn for the worse, and TDZK is once again faced with serious financial problems due to our large use of bandwidth.We will be posting more extensive information on this soon, but it is very clear that TDZK will have to change it's current circumstance to survive. As such, we are issuing a call for help.Any players who know of a good hosting company (which allows for monthly bandwidth usage over 400 GB), or possible other things that might help TDZK out are encouraged to send an email to jerle@tdzk.net We are also looking for better advertising services which might allow us to generate more money, or possibly even a corporate sponsor. Any any all help or information you can provide will be of great assistance.TDZK will most likely be down a large portion of Sunday, possibly longer while we figure out what to do. Please keep use of the web board to a minimum as well, so we don't have to turn it off.It's a rather dark day for TDZK, but we are hoping to find a satisfactory solution soon. ~TDZK Staff. |