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.

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.

Eleq and Fuseblown have put together a page on the Home Sector website that contains a list of people who have made contributions to the game of Trade Wars. They include beta testers, sysops, game ops, website owners, and most importantly of all, they also mentioned Team EIS. Because without EIS, Trade Wars would have been dead long ago.

I was mentioned both as a beta tester and web site owner, though not as a game op because I op at serveral servers at one time or another. You can also see my name for beta testers if you own a TWGS and click “Help > About” and a list appears of beta testers for the TWGS.

I want to thank the Home Sector for putting up the page to recognize many individuals in the TW community that were at least partly responsible for the progress of Trade Wars. See the page right here.

[UPDATE]
The following information is from Nazwes via ICQ:”A two week old backup of the core BBS software is intact, to get the system back up, hardware, a place to plug it in, and a few days of work are needed.”

This news was originally taken from the Boo! inc. web site, posted by Space Ghost.

The ICQ received from Nazwes Chaiwind:
“**ATTENTION**
Mission: Night Hawk BBS will be down until further notice due to a fire that destroyed the BBS computer, the rest of the network it was on, but worst of all, it destroyed my friend’s home. I am going to do what I can to get the BBS back online as soon as possible, but I am not sure how long that will take.

Herman Hanschke
Mission: Night Hawk BBS

Good luck to you on getting the BBS back up and also to your friend for losing his home.

Mission: Night Hawk BBS is to host “Trade Wars Survivor: The Canadian Wasteland” tournament beginning April 1, 2001.

The Mission: Nighthawk BBS was recently destroyed (along with the house that it was at) in a fire that was “Caused by God” as one person put it. Mission: Nighthawk was planning to host the tournament called Tradewars Survivor: Canadian Wasteland. 1 hour after the fire, God issued a press release concerning his recent smiting of Canada.

You heard it here first.

That’s right! One of the major corporations playing Trade Wars today has expanded its ranks! Boo! inc. has added the well-known and highly-skilled Zoobar to their list of permanent members!Boo! inc. is currently putting on a good performance in the USO 2001! I can guarantee that you will be seeing Boo! inc. at the top of many games in the future!

It’s rare that a revolution comes along in the video game industry, let alone the game of TradeWars 2002 itself. So blessed are we today that such a revolution should happen while all of us are still living.

But I digress, I actually like Princess Maker 2.

Guardian had this to say in egroups:

At the end of today ( 2/28/01 ) at midnight … I will no longer be a member of the board for the league …. I appreciate all the people that voted for me ….  As time passed , I realized , I was the wrong person for the job . I hope the league has great success in the future . Stonewall please remove my moderation powers on egroup …

This is a great loss but Moldar suggested Space Ghost as a replacement and Hekate and I already agreed. Seems Siver Wings dont agree. They posted this on their website:

By the way, whoever it was thinking of starting a new league? I’ll back it completely if Space Ghost gets on the current league as a board member.

Man..how petty they are. If Moldar didnt think SG was capable of being on the board, he would not have brought up his name in the first place. I support SG every step of the way. Sure, SG and I dont always see eye to eye, but I feel he can do a good job for the board.

Andrew “Linux Guy” Wyatt over at Intergate Technologies, has announced the latest version of his Fusion BBS system which is used by many sysops.

Download it. Intergate Technologies is currently traded under Nasdaq and is “The worlds leading Linux BBS developer.” That should be refined to say “The worlds only Linux BBS developer.”