I read my email (which has the yahoo groups filtered in) this morning and saw a screen full of
IM’s from people that aren’t even on my IM lists complaining and accusing and claiming unfair
results… The last thing I want to do is make the awards some sort of joke, it’s meant as a way
for people to get some recognition for work they do concerning the game, be it web work,
running a server or just a dedicated player.

After taking the awards down, it’s nice to see that so many people are genuinely interested in
the Awards finishing. And it is not fair that a few would ruin it for the many that deserve to have
this kind of extra stuff done. So that being said the awards are going to continue, because I am
not going to punish the majority for the rudeness and immaturity of the minority that I feel is
uncalled for, I will just have to ignore it and move on…

The common misconception about the awards is that they determine who the best is. I think
everyone who is apart of the game should be intelligent enough to know that this isn’t (nor has
it ever been the case). Like anything else that is voted on its simply a popularity contest. Does
anyone really think for example that Xide is any better of a player then prestone, or hELLCAT,
or Naz, or any of 100 players? All these so called “best of the world” have gone into major
tournaments and regular games and gotten their asses kicked. If we are to believe that
because the awards say that prestone is the best CEO or that Xide is the Best overall player
then these players should be apart of teams that are always 1, 2 in tourneys… I mean that’s
the logic right? Seems silly doesn’t it.

To say that someone doesn’t have the right to vote for someone else because they aren’t
qualified is just plain moronic. No voting system in history has ever accomplished that. People
who campaign win voting contests, be it by speaking or by actions…

For anyone to say that we have to limit the awards to only those players with “Big Names”
goes against completely what they are suppose to accomplish… which is further promoting the
game.

The Awards will go back up and the votes as they are will stand… I am turning off automatic
account creation because Xide did make a good point, that the awards should be voted on by
members of the Trade Wars Community, not by someone’s lab partner in science class.
Details can be found here:

https://www.eisonline.com/twforum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=2183

So the forum will now allow people to register and will place them in a queue and I will
personally verify them by voice or IM and determine if they have any TW knowledge. This will of
course present a speed bump to honest people but I have said all along it is my intention to
make the awards as fair and honest as possible for everyone.

Anyone can see from the nominations list that a lot of people sent in nominations, not even
half of which have voted yet, 10 or 12 votes is not going to swing the outcome of the election
process, but I also don’t want to go through this same stuff when the goosemoose people start
to vote and all the sudden we see a ton of votes for their nominees.

The reason I got so upset is simple, I really hate when people make accusation (be it implied
or just flat out) that someone is cheating without having the common decency to at least
attempt to gather some sort of information or evidence which backs the claim. This I suppose
goes back to early telnet days when you would show up at a smaller (25 to 50 player) game on
the internet and use some technique that maybe the locals hadn’t learned yet (like for
instance SDT) and you have millions of credits and loaded ships on the 3rd or 4th day of the
game and the locals scream “CHEAT” and of course the Sysop deletes your account cause
he has no idea how to play TW and it is his locals after all, and all your work for the past week
is out the window… That sucks and I am sure many of you have experienced it.

Notifications about the awards were sent to every member of the EIS forums (a month before
the awards started) of which there were like 983 people 38 emails were returned from bad
email addresses and those accounts were deleted bring the total down to like 945 there are a
total of 962 now that means that since the awards opened 17 people have created accounts…
now stop and think how many just from the egroups made new accounts…

I have the luxury of not having to rely solely on the TW websites and TW forums to promote
TW events, naturally because of the data at my disposal from working with JP and from years
of being apart of this game I have a broader range of people that I can contact then most
anyone else in the community (actually anyone that I can think of period)

The second TW awards received like 300 unique votes in different categories because of the
original war room I had a list of over 550 MBBS systems that ran TW and they were all either
notified by email or I physically went and posted in their forums (sometimes telnet sometimes
dialup) and still the people that should have won did. And no one except Nik (who was caught
cheating) bitched about the system (which was WAY more simplistic then the current system)
or about the outcome.

But I guess it was a different time then, there was only 1 forum to read for MBBS players
(MajorNET) and there was the fido echo which never received a whole lot of traffic after 1994 for
TW (the TW tradewars newsgroup was all but dead by 1994) so maybe everyone knew
everyone else a little better, there really were no surprise entrants, the people that were
nominated proved what the could do in major games and the tales were told mostly not by
them but by the people they defeated in games…

Losing didn’t use to be such a travesty, what was important was that you played your best
against the best you could find. Now all that seems to matter is if you are in 1st place or not at
all costs..

I blame it on RAP MUSIC.