Dear Loyal Users,

For almost two years now, I have been providing a free system for which the Trade Wars community could play. This started out as a hobby on my own personal Pentium II computer, but turned serious when I saw the amount of users who appreciated what I was doing. So over time, I have bought more and more powerful computers to make sure I had the resources to keep things quick and enjoyable. The first computer I bought, Premier, cost about $1500 dollars. The second, Retaliator, cost $2000. The BBS computer cost me $700.

Now, thanks to a power surge, I’m being asked to pony up another $700 to replace damaged parts? Wait, let me correct myself… I’m being expected to pony up $700 so my players can play again? To top it off, I’m getting the very sour impression that people are more worried about “losing time” in the USO, or how the incident will affect the USO? I’m getting emails and ICQ’s from people (not all) DEMANDING a definite time table of when they can get back to their games?!?! Excuse me? Imagine the anger I experienced when reading such things after I had just returned from Stockton (150 miles away) with what amounts to a whole new computer, and had managed to recover the user.dat file full of passwords (no easy feat for a linux newbie doing bit-by-bit recovery). Last night, I put Intergate’s website back online, but stopped short of restoring the BBS.

I do appreciate those who have shown some concern, but only two people have bothered to help out with the cost of getting the servers back online, and that is Bruce Davey and Soul. I can’t tell you how many times I get an ICQ saying, “Oh, I’d help with a donation, but…”! Supposedly, I’m supposed to believe that the vast majority of my 1,364 registered unique users are too poor to send even 5 dollars my way.

Of course, this is coming from the same community of people that believe that TW servers are SUPPOSED to be free, and lambast any person who dares try and charge their users a dime to help cover costs. I predict this attitude is going to backfire big-time in the near future if things don’t change.

Fact is, I’ve already done more than my share for all of you. Even those who do not use my server, do in fact benefit from the things I’ve done throughout the past four years. There’s no escaping that fact. I’ve had my hand in almost everything. I can walk away today and owe NOTHING to any of you.

Donations are being accepted via PayPal (prefered) at the address eleqtriq@eleqtriq.ws, and via snail mail (email me for an address, and don’t tell me the check’s in the mail unless it REALLY is…another peeve of mine). If I do not get enough donations, I will refund anyone who paid by Pay Pal that wants their money back. Snail mail will not be refunded.

Thank-you,
Agustin

Owner – The Stardock BBS, aka The Home Sector

p.s. – Those who have donated in the past, while you’re welcome to donate again, I would rather see someone else donate for once. I do not believe it is fair for a VERY small percentage of my users to do the vast majority of the donating.

It’s now my turn to leave town on a trip, only I don’t get any choice in this one. Beginning tomorrow I’ll be on a two week long field exercise, and won’t have any access to the servers whatsoever, even to log in and say hi. In addition, Icehawk will be leaving for Denver again on March 21st, and will be gone at least until March 28th. He will, as usual, be checking in from his laptop, and should be able to troubleshoot most minor problems, but if a machine fails, crashes or freezes up during this time… well, then we’ll be off the “air” so to speak until whenever one of us get home. Cross your fingers kerls and derns, and hope things go as well as we expect them to.

That’s one of the slogans of 100 Centre Street, the new Criminal Justice Drama airing on the A&E channel, and one of my favorite shows. Look at the history here. First Naz says before the USO starts that it’ll probably continue its curse of having problems, and sure enough, it opens, then closes and restarts the following day because the game files were corrupt. Eleq turns around and tells Naz that he’ll be watching the Canadian Open closely, sounding like he’ll be on the lookout for any bumps in the road up north. And sure enough, the BBS that was to host the Canadian Open is destroyed in a fire. Whoa… Then SilverWings goes down when the ISP its hosted on is affected by a lightning strike/power surge or some such thing, and though there’s no permanant damage resulting from it, when things settle down again, Mana Knight makes a post on his site about how another board needs to be hit by this curse that’s been being passed around… any except for The Stardock… and a couple days later… well, we all know the result of MK’s invitation for God to smite yet another game provider. Uh oh, does talking about it mean that The Void is next? Could very well, considering the next bit of news.

You’ve probably read the announcement already. Home Sector aka TheStardock’s server blew and needs a replacement. Fact: few have contributed any money to Home Sector and a large majority have complained. Instead of yelling at people, let’s try to figure today why people don’t donate in the first place.

This type of human behavior has been extensively studied before in Psychology and is called diffusion of responsibility. It’s when responsibility is spread among many diffrent people. (In Home Sector’s case, among 1300+ users) If you can’t understand what I just said, let me give you an example with characters you can relate to: Pokemon.

All 150 Pokemon are on a streetcorner watching Team Rocket beating the crap out of Ash. Since there are 150 onlookers, chances are low that someone will call the cops. If there were 300 pokemon, the chances would be even less. Now let’s say that just 1 pokemon saw this happening, let’s say it’s Flareon. Chances are he/she/it would run and call the cops as soon as the beatdown occured.

You can also see this in some online games. In Tribes, if the generators go down and need to be repaired in a public game, the more people you have equals the less chance they get repaired quickly unless you do it yourself. This is all part of diffusion of responsibility, the “Someone else will do it” attitude. I think the fact that Home Sector has 1,300+ members and very few contributors out of that points to this.

Actually, I’m just back from my latest trip to Denver. I’ll be home for two days at the most, then its back to the Mile High City I go. While I was gone on this last trip I took several e-mail messages and more recently, read a post in one of the forums urging us to add some non-TW MBBS modules to the board. This is something that we intended to do from the very beginning. Many of the games that have been suggested, such as MMUD and Global Destruction I still have from my MBBS system from years ago. Others I’ll have to look around to see if registration is still possible. The biggest problem right now is adding the necessary hardware to the network–at least one computer for the newest TWGS server and one computer to handle the MBBS game modules. Look for some of these expansions in the next couple weeks.

At 8:30 AM Pacific, The Stardock BBS was victim of a power surge that has corrupted partitions on the hard drive. Backups were also destroyed along with the hard drive they resided on.Thankfully, the TWGS and Website were unharmed due to it having it’s own heavy-duty Surge Protector seperate from the other two machines.

Restoration of the BBS is anywhere from 2 days to never. Please keep checking back for details.

I added a new option to the site this morning. You will find it on the top navigation bar listed as “Site Updates” replacing the “Bookmark” option which only worked for Internet Explorer only.This section lists any changes that are made to the web site, that way you don’t have to constantly check all of the pages on the site to see if they have been updated recently. Putting these things on their own page helps to reduce clutter here in the “universal” TW news section and helps me keep more organized. I hope you find it helpful.

“Corporation Power” is now officially over. Corps 4/22 have won, hands down. This game needs some reworking done on the settings and edits and will probably rebang again in the near future.Apocalypse has been won by Night Hawk! Congrats! Look for a replacement game soon!

I will be editing colonists on Terra for the Lil’Funky game…it can only hold 300k at a time. Whenever Terra is drained, please drop me an e-mail and I will refill it.

Whenever games are winding down and/or if they are finished off, please let me know as well. I’m in and out of the games throughout the day to check up on them.

Mana Knight stated it well, “Will someone’s house burn down please?”There’s been a horrid lack of news as of late and that could be both good and bad.

A lot of things are being posted over at the EIS Forums as of late, it’s quite the happenin’ place right now.

We’ve seen the reappearance of the infamous “Word of the Day” over at Tradewars.org.

Prestone was eliminated from USO last night, taking a partial load off of my mind for that game…and the night before saw the majority of “Half-Baked” removed from the game as well. It’s been a great game so far.

And in an off-topic occurrence, I saw Pantera, Soulfly, Morbid Angel, and Nothingface in concert last night (four of my favorite bands). Got my left arm trampled and can barely use it right now, but other than that it was a good time.

Look for the nomination process of the 4th Annual TW Awards to begin by early next week at the latest!I know a lot of people have been waiting for this and the time is drawing near! The awards committee needs to do some finalization on the categories and once that is complete I will create the site and set it up for the nomination process. I don’t have specifics on how long the nominations will last, but as soon as I do, the dates will be posted!