WarBirds: A hacker has been recorded
Daniel Drumm
Marko Milisavljevic (mi...@cris.com) wrote:
: Fellow WarBird Pilots:
:
: A hacker has been recorded.
:
: His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
:
: This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at ICI
: will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
: a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
: comment in that case.
: Mili
: mi...@cris.com
If this is the case, ICI should respond my making fields uncapturable
again, as they once were. This won't prevent vulching, but it may make the
use of the AAA-B17 less prevalent.
I assume no Golds at any time SAW a green on the field, so we must assume
that this player has invisibilty mastered as well.
Seemed inevitable in retrospect, really.
-XX-
--
--
Daniel G. Drumm
dr...@tezcat.com - PGP Key via WWW
http://www.tezcat.com/~drmm
fats
Marko Milisavljevic <mi...@cris.com> wrote:
>Fellow WarBird Pilots:
>A hacker has been recorded.
>His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
>closed, one green
WOOHOOAAAA!!!! Don't start the Official Hunt just yet, gotta get my WB
account back...
<g>
>Mili
Hptmn. Fats, 2./JG 53 "Pik As"
***Choose life -run now!***
Sean Long
jon tisor wrote:
> >This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at
> ICI
> >will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
> >a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused
> to
> >comment in that case.
> >
> >Mili
> >
> >mi...@cris.com
>
> KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIS FAMILY KILL HIS DOG.... well mabye not
> the dog!
> later ;)
> GTOJON VF-17
Er... Easy guys ;) I have one possible explanation that maybe should be
looked into before getting the noose ready ;)
If nrul landed at f9, then got a red beacon just before he exited, then
he went and hit .e a gazillion times, it's conceivable that the host and
FE were confused enough to cause this. If he did have a bad connect and
typed in .exit at any time, it would also explain his silence on the
issue.
On the other hand, an unnamed red recently accused a friend of cheating
while stealing a base from them (landed just before it re-opened), so
maybe that person knew of a way to cheat to take a field and assumed
that everyone was doing it? In any case, lets not hunt anyone until we
get the whole story ;)
eagl
David Staines
Sean Long wrote:
> Er... Easy guys ;) I have one possible explanation that maybe should be
> looked into before getting the noose ready ;)
>
> If nrul landed at f9, then got a red beacon just before he exited, then
> he went and hit .e a gazillion times, it's conceivable that the host and
> FE were confused enough to cause this. If he did have a bad connect and
> typed in .exit at any time, it would also explain his silence on the
> issue.
Hitting .e many times does not really explain this one eagl. It doesn't
explain why it would happen everytime a different gold landed the base.
It had to be that his fe was allowing him to take off from a base that
was closed.. then he just had to exit. I wouldn't go as far as to
scream cheat, but it is at best a manipulation of the system to continue
using that little bug in such a flagrant manner.
> On the other hand, an unnamed red recently accused a friend of cheating
> while stealing a base from them (landed just before it re-opened), so
> maybe that person knew of a way to cheat to take a field and assumed
> that everyone was doing it? In any case, lets not hunt anyone until we
> get the whole story ;)
Heh, the landing of fields right befor their opening is a precise art.
It really pisses of those that don't understand it, but it is very
possible to do. Landing the same base in 1 or 2 minute intervals is
very difficult to do, especially undetected. This isn't a disappearing
airplane, it is more obvious. I don't think it unreasonable to scream
cheat in this case... Though killing the family may be a bit excessive.
-Thunder, out
Jim De Vico
Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
>
> Fellow WarBird Pilots:
>
> A hacker has been recorded.
>
> His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
> closed, one green
> field, but
> I know that there were plenty of golds there to prevent landers. Then I
> got
> the system message that nrul exited and Green captured F9. Some golds
> expressed
> surprise at how the hell could that green land unnoticed. Another gold
> landed
> and we recaptured the field.
>
> And then the imossible happened: nrul exited the plane again recaptured
> 9?!
> A gold landed. nrul did it again. another gold landed. nrul recaptured
> again.
> We got the field finally and it reopened after a gold landed. All these
> events took place in about 2-3 minutes. nrul kept exiting about 10 more
> times,
> but the field was Gold and open at this time, so him exiting had no
> effect.
>
> nrul would not respond to public and private radio messages asking him
> to
> explain these events and he logged off within a minute.
>
> This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at ICI
> will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
> a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
> comment in that case.
>
> Mili
>
already. :)
Crazy
Jeff Walkup
Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
> A hacker has been recorded.
You know, I hope this was just a fluke... I can't believe some people
would be such losers that they spend the time to hack and cheat at this
game. Like the jerks with their warp buttons. Pathetic! This game is
really going downhill IMO because of a few cheating idiots.
Last nite I watched a purple FW chasing a fellow red for 30-45 seconds.
He was solid as he closed in and lined up his shot on the red, but then
as soon as I got within guns range and opened fire - *blink* and he's
gone, reappearing at D18 off my 3-oclock about 10 seconds later. I
watched this happen about 3-4 times too, and others reported seeing the
same thing. This *cannot* be a coincidence. I logged off in disgust...
Folks, we are not playing for money or stakes here, just for FUN. Why
do you need to cheat? Does it get you off? Are you so incredibly BAD
that it's the only way you can survive? Is your mama... (oops better
stop here).. hehe.
-- Walk <have gun, will travel>
Marko Milisavljevic
Fellow WarBird Pilots:
A hacker has been recorded.
His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
jon tisor
KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIS FAMILY KILL HIS DOG.... well mabye not
punkz
I'd like to correct my previous article. It was "niek" that I was forced
to pose as. They both have the letter n, so it was an easy mistake to
make ;)
I guess it no longer has any relevance to this thread, but it was still
the oddest thing I've seen in WB thus far :) Sorry for any confusion
Lokz
In article <4sk2qm$r...@news.nstn.ca>, pu...@fox.nstn.ca says...
>
>nrul you say?
> Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent
me
>to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
>chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
>this?". It came out as:
>
>nrul: what squad is this?
>The FE thought I was nrul!
>The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
>
> I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
>Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
>radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was
normal
>except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
>back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
>little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
>
>Lokz
>Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
> Flyin' Flie <DoD>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>In article <31EC9A...@cris.com>, mi...@cris.com says...
--
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Scott McKay Thomson
In article <4sk2qm$r...@news.nstn.ca>, pu...@fox.nstn.ca wrote:
>nrul you say?
> Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
>to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
>chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
>this?". It came out as:
>
>nrul: what squad is this?
>The FE thought I was nrul!
>The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
>
> I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
>Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
>radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
>except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
>back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
>little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
>
>Lokz
>Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
> Flyin' Flie <DoD>
>
Wow, that's pretty strange Lokz. I think there has been a lot weird stuff
going on lately. I personally will refrain from judgement on this whole Nrul
thing until we see another "incident". I am not perpared to fry anyone based
on any single incident that happens in the arena, because let's fact it
sometimes "shit happens".
We have definetly seen the planes doing some strange things lately, and
everyone seems to have a "variable" connect these days. I have been dumped
more in the last 2 weeks than at *any* time in the past.
BTW Lokz, I hope you were not scarred for life by what you heard on the 501st
squad channel, and we request that you please refrain from any public comment
as to the content. Because then we would have to kill you, and we really don't
want to have to do that (except when your flying that damn FW). <BFG>
- SMT1 <501 FF XO>
punkz
nrul you say?
Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
this?". It came out as:
nrul: what squad is this?
The FE thought I was nrul!
The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
Lokz
Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
Flyin' Flie <DoD>
In article <31EC9A...@cris.com>, mi...@cris.com says...
David Staines
Daniel Drumm wrote:
> Marko Milisavljevic (mi...@cris.com) wrote:
> : Fellow WarBird Pilots:
> :
> : A hacker has been recorded.
> :
> : His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
> : This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at ICI
> : will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
> : a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
> : comment in that case.
> If this is the case, ICI should respond my making fields uncapturable
> again, as they once were. This won't prevent vulching, but it may make the
> use of the AAA-B17 less prevalent.
This is an interesting jump in logic. How does rendering base capture
imposible mean that ab-17's will be less prevalent? If you cannot
capture a base by bombing it then landing, what do you use the b-17
for? About the only thing left to do is "gee whiz" bombing or as
mobile-ack. I know of pilots that use it as ack already... they don't
land bases with it at all, just fly around hoping for one or two kills
befor they go down.
-Thunder, out
py...@cris.com
CJ Martin wrote:
>
> In article <31EE51...@ix.netcom.com>,
> Jim De Vico <jde...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> >This happened to me once as well. I logged in and was set up as jonb.
> >I didn't know this as I sent a private message to pops only and when he
> >didn't respond, I typed it publicly. Shockingly, I saw MY message assigned
> >to jonb. I logged out and when I relogged all was normal.
> >
> >Weird stuff.
> >
> >Crazy
>
> A question comes to mind...who's account was billed for your brief online time
> as someone else, you or Jonb? Think about that...
>
> How the hell is this possible?
>
> ICI?
>
> Smut
Your game ID is not related to your billing. The only way you can be
billed for someone else is if they login using your login id and password.
-Pyro
CJ Martin
Jim De Vico
punkz wrote:
>
> nrul you say?
> Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
> to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
> chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
> this?". It came out as:
>
> nrul: what squad is this?
> The FE thought I was nrul!
> The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
>
> I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
> Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
> radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
> except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
> back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
> little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
>
> Lokz
> Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
> Flyin' Flie <DoD>
Stephen St.Clair
tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) wrote:
>In article <31EE51...@ix.netcom.com>,
> Jim De Vico <jde...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>>This happened to me once as well. I logged in and was set up as jonb.
>>I didn't know this as I sent a private message to pops only and when he
>>didn't respond, I typed it publicly. Shockingly, I saw MY message assigned
>>to jonb. I logged out and when I relogged all was normal.
>>
>>Weird stuff.
>>
>>Crazy
>A question comes to mind...who's account was billed for your brief online time
>as someone else, you or Jonb? Think about that...
>How the hell is this possible?
>ICI?
>Smut
All of which makes in inadvisable to publically denounce someone was a
hacker without proof positive. Would've been better to communicate
with ICI first.
spinny
eti...@hiwaay.net
In article <4sk2qm$r...@news.nstn.ca>, pu...@fox.nstn.ca wrote:
>
>nrul you say?
> Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
>to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
>chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
>this?". It came out as:
>
>nrul: what squad is this?
>The FE thought I was nrul!
>The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
>
> I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
>Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
>radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
>except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
>back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
>little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
>
>Lokz
>Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
> Flyin' Flie <DoD>
Heya Lokz,
This may not have anything to do with these problems you guys are reporting,
but it's a wierd one that I may have an answer to.
I had trouble getting back into the arena after having to punch out. The
system kept putting me on someone else's aircraft carrier and the ack was
tearing me up everytime I hit fly. I found out that I could not pick a new
country, plane or field and ".exit" didn't work. I hit "alt-e" and got out.
When I tried to get back in, the system kept telling me I was already in and
to hit enter to remove "my other self". Repeated attempts finally got this to
work.
The next day I logged on and "thnx" (I think I remember his ID as thnx,
anyway) said he was somehow logged on as me the day before. I asked him if he
got his money's worth. :)
Anyhow, when I finaly logged off, I realized I had two copies of WB running in
Win95. I thought I had originally started WB for Win95 normally, but I guess
not -- too many mouse clicks or something. If it's so easy to get two copies
going unexpectedly (for some of us doddering fools, that is) and it does this
kind of deed to the system, this could possibly explain some of the problems
we're seeing.
Regards,
Ernie
Daniel Drumm
David Staines (dsta...@concentric.net) wrote:
: Daniel Drumm wrote:
: This is an interesting jump in logic. How does rendering base capture
: imposible mean that ab-17's will be less prevalent? If you cannot
: capture a base by bombing it then landing, what do you use the b-17
: for? About the only thing left to do is "gee whiz" bombing or as
: mobile-ack. I know of pilots that use it as ack already... they don't
: land bases with it at all, just fly around hoping for one or two kills
: befor they go down.
:
: -Thunder, out
You're right. I just assumed (wrongly) that there would be no need to fly
the B17 around the nme base at 2k with the trigger held down while your
buddies bombed it.
This neglects the fact people may just do it because they want to.
In any case, if somebody can enter a closed field and exit again,
continously recapturing it for his own side, then perhaps removing base
capture AND the B-17 altogether would help.
I guess I was just projecting my wish that the B17 be removed for
scenarios only, with offline practice facilitated by a bombing range on
the map.
As for the FE hack, it seems Reds have truly mastered the "warp at will"
trick.
bullseye
On 18 Jul 1996 16:11:39 GMT, dr...@tezcat.com (Daniel Drumm) wrote:
>
>As for the FE hack, it seems Reds have truly mastered the "warp at will"
>trick.
>
Oh come on, Daniel......I thought that by now, ALL the colors were
using the WARP@ WILL code. At least it looks that way from my cockpit.
A select few pilots from EVERY color seem to display that type of
capability, GREENS, GOLDS, PURPLES, and REDS!
Don't just pick on us Reds,
Bullseye
beye<ELITE CORP>
py...@cris.com
Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
>
> Fellow WarBird Pilots:
>
> A hacker has been recorded.
>
> will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
> a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
> comment in that case.
We are looking into it and HT thinks he found the problem that caused that.
It appears that a bug crept into the host code that would be responsible
for a number of weirdnesses that have been reported.
It's much better to report these problems directly and confidentially to us
if you think that somebody is using a hacked FE.
All it takes is an accusation to get the mob stirred up and they really
don't care about finding out the facts. It's just too easy to damage someone's
online reputation and enjoyment by jumping to conclusions publicly. It's also
much easier for us to investigate if suspicions are kept private.
Anyone caught using a hacked FE will be banned from the system. That is
our policy and we are very serious about it.
-Pyro
Mike Marini
Sean Long <sl...@mail.gld.com> wrote:
>jon tisor wrote:
>
>> >This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at
>> ICI
>> >will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
>> >a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused
>> to
>> >comment in that case.
>> >
>> >
>> >mi...@cris.com
>>
>> KILL HIM KILL HIM KILL HIS FAMILY KILL HIS DOG.... well mabye not
>> the dog!
>> later ;)
>> GTOJON VF-17
>
>looked into before getting the noose ready ;)
>
>If nrul landed at f9, then got a red beacon just before he exited, then
>he went and hit .e a gazillion times, it's conceivable that the host and
>FE were confused enough to cause this. If he did have a bad connect and
>typed in .exit at any time, it would also explain his silence on the
>issue.
>
>while stealing a base from them (landed just before it re-opened), so
>maybe that person knew of a way to cheat to take a field and assumed
>that everyone was doing it? In any case, lets not hunt anyone until we
>get the whole story ;)
>
>
That's probably good advice Eagl, even though when I see a report by
somebody like Mili, I HAVE to give it credence (or he'll kill me)
I had a weird experience similar to that of (? damn forgot to see who it
was two articles up...) where I got teleported to Greenlandia and was
getting all of their transmissions but still in my good old purp squad.
Its possible that there is a benign and accidental cause for this
phenonmenon. If not however, I vote to let GTOJON loose on his family!
(that would be a form of CAPITAL punishment... n'est pas?)
Chry
Jonathan Hoof
: I had a weird experience similar to that of (? damn forgot to see who it
: was two articles up...) where I got teleported to Greenlandia and was
: getting all of their transmissions but still in my good old purp squad.
I've had this happen too. Apparantly with v1.08, if you withdraw from a
squad, change colors, relog, you go back to being in that squad but are a
member of the new country. This has been a real convenience for me,
because I'm a real patriotic member of Purpleandia, but fly for a red
squadron during squad events (Animals). We used to have to rejoin me back
into the squad each event which was a real pain. Now all I do is withdraw
from my squad, switch to Red, relog, and I'm still an animal, and the
correct color for the event! No more having to find my CO and occupy the
same space (tower) as him, wait for him to issue the invite, and join.
I don't know why U got teleported to Greenlandia, since I haven't
experienced this teleport thing yet, but this is why U get your squad
transmissions.
Hope this helps!
-Jonathan Hoof
ho...@agora.rdrop.com
in WB: hoof
: Chry
CJ Martin
>Your game ID is not related to your billing. The only way you can be
>billed for someone else is if they login using your login id and password.
>
>-Pyro
Of course...I wasn't thinking it through.
Thanks for the quick reply.
Smut
Steven Nieker
Jim De Vico wrote:
>
> punkz wrote:
> >
> > nrul you say?
> > Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
> > to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
> > chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
> > this?". It came out as:
> >
> > nrul: what squad is this?
> > The FE thought I was nrul!
> > The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
> >
> > I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
> > Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
> > radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
> > except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
> > back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> > So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
> > little purple adventure as a 501st imposter?
> >
> > Lokz
> > Formerly the PunkSucka...now,
> > Flyin' Flie <DoD>
Actually, Lokz, that was me, Niek, and not Nrul. I got discoed, and when
I relogged, there were two of me on--me and you.
I can't tell you the confusion it caused me. And ever since that "what
squad is this" comment, no one else in the 501st will talk to me. <G>
niek
Marko Milisavljevic
bullseye wrote:
>
> On 18 Jul 1996 16:11:39 GMT, dr...@tezcat.com (Daniel Drumm) wrote:
>
> >
> >As for the FE hack, it seems Reds have truly mastered the "warp at will"
> >trick.
> >
>
> Oh come on, Daniel......I thought that by now, ALL the colors were
> using the WARP@ WILL code. At least it looks that way from my cockpit.
> A select few pilots from EVERY color seem to display that type of
> capability, GREENS, GOLDS, PURPLES, and REDS!
That is true indeed. I can't speak about golds, as I'm not usually
fighting
them, but all other colors do it. It is especially noticable when you
are
fighting someone and they are all nice and smooth, until they decide it
is
time to bug out, when they suddenly start making 1-200 feet jumps and
are
imposible to hit, even though you are chasing them from 200 yards
behind.
However, I've been told a number of times that I'm warping when I knew
for
sure that my connect is good. It seems that host/FE have a limited
ability
to convey quick changes in direction correctly. I would usually get
complaints
like these when attacked by multiple bandits, and would have to manuver
in unusual ways. I hope that this can be eliviated with some changes in
the host/FE code.
Mili
Greg Chamberlain
On Thu, 18 Jul 1996 12:33:21 -0600, "Py...@cris.com" <py...@cris.com>
wrote:
>We are looking into it and HT thinks he found the problem that caused that.
>It appears that a bug crept into the host code that would be responsible
>for a number of weirdnesses that have been reported.
>
>It's much better to report these problems directly and confidentially to us
>if you think that somebody is using a hacked FE.
>
>All it takes is an accusation to get the mob stirred up and they really
>don't care about finding out the facts. It's just too easy to damage someone's
>online reputation and enjoyment by jumping to conclusions publicly. It's also
>much easier for us to investigate if suspicions are kept private.
>
>Anyone caught using a hacked FE will be banned from the system. That is
>our policy and we are very serious about it.
>
>-Pyro
Agreed!!!.. There are much better ways it could have been handled!!!
Marko Milisavljevic
Greg Chamberlain wrote:
>
> On Wed, 17 Jul 1996 15:15:22 -0700, Jim De Vico
> <jde...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> >Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
> >>
> >> Fellow WarBird Pilots:
> >>
> >> A hacker has been recorded.
> >>
> >> exited, then a gold got it back. I was not in the vis range of the
> >> field, but
>
> it yet?
>
> There could be a reasonable explaination for what took place ya know!!
>
> Maaaaaaaaan, saying the guy is stealing airtime is kinda harsh
> IHMO....
"Stealing airtime"? Greg, I very much doubt you've read my post.
Reading comprehension problems, to quote Tark.
> Just report it, and let someone else decide.. Would have been easier
> to pose it as a question , instead of calling the guy a crook for
> sure!!!
A few people have expressed a similar oppinion as Greg's re. my post.
The main reason I posted it was because it was obvious that whatever
was going on was not happening by accident. It is possible that nrul
did not have a hacked FE, and I mentioned that in my post as well.
However, he kept exiting and misteriously recapturing the field every
time (3 or 4 times, not sure) a gold would exit, within 5 seconds.
He exited at no other times. It makes me wonder how that could be
a coincidence. And after the field re-opened and became gold (lucky for
us, right timing), he exited about 5-8 times in quick succession,
but to no effect.
So, a hacked FE or not, a dweeb has been recorded nonetheless. Maybe
that
is how I should have titled the original post.
Mili
Greg Chamberlain
>Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
>>
>> Fellow WarBird Pilots:
>>
>> A hacker has been recorded.
>>
>> His handle is nrul. Greens were trying to take F9 from Gold. It was
>> closed, one green
>> exited, then a gold got it back. I was not in the vis range of the
>> field, but
Geeeeeeeesh did you have to call the guy a thief with no way to prove
it yet?
There could be a reasonable explaination for what took place ya know!!
Maaaaaaaaan, saying the guy is stealing airtime is kinda harsh
IHMO....
Just report it, and let someone else decide.. Would have been easier
punkz
In article <31EFA7...@canyon.com>, sni...@canyon.com says...
>
>
>
>Actually, Lokz, that was me, Niek, and not Nrul. I got discoed, and when
>I relogged, there were two of me on--me and you.
>
>I can't tell you the confusion it caused me. And ever since that "what
>squad is this" comment, no one else in the 501st will talk to me. <G>
>
>niek
Guess you missed my reply to my reply where I corrected my
mistake :) I could have had alot of fun at the 501st's and your
expense...
niek: I'm 8 years old and like to fly jet planes. Mommy?
niek: Who's saying that!
smt1: niek?
Your just lucky I'm the nice guy I am. <G>
Lokz
punkz
>
>Wow, that's pretty strange Lokz. I think there has been a lot weird
stuff
>going on lately. I personally will refrain from judgement on this whole
Nrul
>thing until we see another "incident". I am not perpared to fry anyone
based
>on any single incident that happens in the arena, because let's fact it
>sometimes "shit happens".
>
>We have definetly seen the planes doing some strange things lately, and
>everyone seems to have a "variable" connect these days. I have been
dumped
>more in the last 2 weeks than at *any* time in the past.
>
>BTW Lokz, I hope you were not scarred for life by what you heard on the
501st
>squad channel, and we request that you please refrain from any public
comment
>as to the content. Because then we would have to kill you, and we really
don't
>want to have to do that (except when your flying that damn FW). <BFG>
>
>- SMT1 <501 FF XO>
Glad to see that I made an impression on somebody with my FW flying ;)
Lokz
David J Miller
In message <31EC9A...@cris.com> - 33 -0400 writes:
>
>Fellow WarBird Pilots:
>
>A hacker has been recorded.
>
I think you owe nrul a public apology. What you saw was obviously a FE bug.
>
>nrul would not respond to public and private radio messages asking him
>to
>explain these events and he logged off within a minute.
And this off course makes him guilty? Have you ever tried to enter a message
with a red beacon?
>This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at ICI
>will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
>a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
>comment in that case.
Great logic here. First you devote a long paragraph to knifing the guys
reputation, then you "apologize" with an insult.
The title of this message should have been: "Warbirds: An idiot has been
recorded. His handle is mili."
DJ "Majk" Miller
VMF-214 (Warbirds)
FYI, nrul is a Squad mate of mine. He is many things, but a hacker and a
cheat are not among them.
Marko Milisavljevic
David J Miller wrote:
>
> In message <31EC9A...@cris.com> - 33 -0400 writes:
> >
> >Fellow WarBird Pilots:
> >
> >A hacker has been recorded.
> >
>
> I think you owe nrul a public apology. What you saw was obviously a FE bug.
I don't think I owe him an apology. How was this "obviously a FE bug?"
> >nrul would not respond to public and private radio messages asking him
> >to
> >explain these events and he logged off within a minute.
>
> And this off course makes him guilty? Have you ever tried to enter a message
> with a red beacon?
>
> >This leads me to believe that he has a hacked FE. I hope someone at ICI
> >will look into this. Appologies to nrul if this was the consequence of
> >a bug in the host/FE software, but I assume he would not have refused to
> >comment in that case.
>
> Great logic here. First you devote a long paragraph to knifing the guys
> reputation, then you "apologize" with an insult.
Like I wrote in another post a couple of days ago, he was exiting every
time a gold would land, and at no other times. Coincidence? Think not.
He either hacked the FE to do it, or came across a bug and exploited it
to
his advantage. Same shit in my book, except hacking would have taken
more
work on his part.
> The title of this message should have been: "Warbirds: An idiot has been
> recorded. His handle is mili."
Bite me, dweeb.
> DJ "Majk" Miller
> VMF-214 (Warbirds)
>
> FYI, nrul is a Squad mate of mine. He is many things, but a hacker and a
> cheat are not among them.
Mili
Sean Long
Marko Milisavljevic wrote:
> Like I wrote in another post a couple of days ago, he was exiting every
> time a gold would land, and at no other times. Coincidence? Think not.
> He either hacked the FE to do it, or came across a bug and exploited it
> to
> his advantage. Same shit in my book, except hacking would have taken
> more
> work on his part.
The accidental exiting problems that might or might not be seen when
exiting with a red beacon would absolutely not manifest themselves in
the way Mili saw. A cause-effect relationship seems obvious. A gold
exits and captures the field, nrul exits and gets it back. If it had
been an innocent mistake caused by a FE bug or a bad connect, there is
no way in hell that this would have happened.
> > The title of this message should have been: "Warbirds: An idiot has been
> > recorded. His handle is mili."
You apparently haven't thought this out majk... Mili wouldn't have
posted it if it wasn't very out of the ordinary. I have never seen him
act out of meanness, and have not ever seen him go out of his way just
to "get someone" for acting like a dweeb.
One final editorial comment: The "other solution", complaining to ICI
about the problem, has not had the effect in the past that many would
hope for. Some of the CONFIRMED WARPING CHEATS, although recognized by
a few ICI employees, were repeatedly denied by other ICI employees until
proof was shoved in their face. This has happened a few times, and it
seems that some problems are more likely to be swept under the carpet
than dealt with. It took the hiring of new programmers before the stall
bug was found, even though several experienced pilots described nearly
exactly what the effects of the bug were. Apparently, ICI's code is
"bug free" by definition, until proven beyond all reasonable and
unreasonable doubt otherwise. Yea sure. I got a degree in comp sci,
and know how a programmer will stand by his code. I also know that even
code "set in stone" must never be assumed to be "correct". Egos seem to
abound not only on usenet and in the arena, but in the offices at ICI as
well. This is commercially dangerous and ICI better wake up and smell
the coffee.
I'm shooting myself in the foot posting this publicly, but i have to get
it off my chest. The code bugs, the warp cheats, even the ban on tone's
wildfire are results of people at ICI refusing to consider anything
other than what they see as a "correct" product growing along a
"correct" and "complete" vision. They created WB, and have the right to
develop it (or not) as they see fit. How flexible and open they are
about it may help determine their future.
Sean Long
WB: eagl
Scott Thomson
punkz (pu...@fox.nstn.ca) wrote:
: In article <31EFA7...@canyon.com>, sni...@canyon.com says...
: >
: Guess you missed my reply to my reply where I corrected my
: expense...
: niek: I'm 8 years old and like to fly jet planes. Mommy?
: niek: Who's saying that!
: smt1: niek?
:
: Your just lucky I'm the nice guy I am. <G>
: Lokz
LOL!
You are to be comended for your restraint. I think if I found myself in
the same situation I would be fighting the urge to do something a bit
mischevious. Here is my "hypothetical" version of this happening with
my messages being sent as pilot XXXX on the 100 channel.
(XXXX being the "wrong" ID of whoever the system thinks I am):
SYSTEM: smt1 has entered the room.
<some kind of strange host glitch occurs to transform SMT1's radio
messages into the that of player with id XXXX of another color.>
SYSTEM: smt1 has exited.
SYSTEM: XXXX has entered the room.
XXXX: hey, whats going on? my messages are coming out on XXXX id!!!
<people continue to fight ignoring SMT1 attempts to figure out whats
happening with the radios.>
XXXX: Well, damn, I might as well have some fun with this... <hehe>
XXXX: VETS SUX N NEWBES RUL!!!!!!
GLD1: hehe, sure XXXX :-)
XXXX: GOLDS SUX DONKEY DORX!!!!
GLD2: These newbies get more clueless everyday.
XXXX: GOLDS N PURPLS R COWRDS!!!!
PRP1: Why don't you just shut the hell up, dweeb!
XXXX: WHAAA!!!!!!!!!!
GRN1: hehe, the newbie thinks he's cool :)
XXXX: GRNS SUX 2!!!
GRN1: what a lamer :(
RED1: I am sorry guys, I don't know what this idiots problem
XXXX: U R A TRAYTOR RED1, WE REDS R BEST!!!!
RED2: Dude, chill out, you are acting _really_ stupid!
XXXX: MAKE ME!!!!
PRP2: Oh no, not this again, I am going to log...
XXXX: LOOK I MADE THE PURPL LOG!!!!
GRN2: Gentleman, I think it's time for a DWEEBHUNT. <G>
GLD1: YES! <SEG>
PRP1: This is going to be fun!!! :-)
RED1: Hell, I will even switch colors and help you guys!
XXXX: OH, MOM SEZ I GOTA DO MY HOMWRK, C YA LATR LOSRS!!!!!!
<I get bored playing XXXX and log off>
SYSTEM: XXXX has exited.
SYSTEM: smt1 has exited.
RED1: Hey what happened to XXXX???
RED2: NO!!!
GLD2: Gutless bastard logged. :-(
PRP1: S#&T!!!! Man, I wanted to kill that jerk!
<sometime later after host bug is fixed>
SYSTEM: smt1 has entered the room.
SMT1: Good to be myself again!
PRP1: ????
SMT1: disregard, just testing my radio. <G>
PRP1: CC
SMT1: Hey you guys know XXXX?
PRP2: Ya, what an idiot! Why you asking? You know him?
SMT1: uh...no, but I need to tell him something...
<the "real" XXXX logs on>
XXXX: Hi guys, whats up?
GLD2: Hey everybody it's XXXX!!!!
RED1: DWEEBHUNT!
XXXX: Huh??????
SYSTEM: kill of XXXX to RED1
SYSTEM: kill of XXXX to GLD1
XXXX: This game sux!!! Why are you picking on me!!!!!
SYSTEM: XXXX has exited.
Now that I think about it, it would *not* be so funny, since who ever got
"faked" would have a hell of a time clearing his name. Probably have to
cancel his account and get a new one. So I guess I would not do it, and
I hope my stupid little story explains why this is a serious bug that
ICI needs to look into.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Scott McKay Thomson - OAO Corporation - Second Shift VAX Operations |
| WarBirds: SMT1 <501 FF XO> Purplandia P-38J driver |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sager Moritzky
>One final editorial comment: The "other solution", complaining to ICI
>about the problem, has not had the effect in the past that many would
>hope for. Some of the CONFIRMED WARPING CHEATS, although recognized by
>a few ICI employees, were repeatedly denied by other ICI employees until
>proof was shoved in their face. This has happened a few times, and it
>seems that some problems are more likely to be swept under the carpet
>than dealt with. It took the hiring of new programmers before the stall
>bug was found, even though several experienced pilots described nearly
>exactly what the effects of the bug were. Apparently, ICI's code is
>"bug free" by definition, until proven beyond all reasonable and
>unreasonable doubt otherwise. Yea sure. I got a degree in comp sci,
>and know how a programmer will stand by his code. I also know that even
>code "set in stone" must never be assumed to be "correct". Egos seem to
>abound not only on usenet and in the arena, but in the offices at ICI as
>well. This is commercially dangerous and ICI better wake up and smell
>the coffee.
>
>I'm shooting myself in the foot posting this publicly, but i have to get
>it off my chest. The code bugs, the warp cheats, even the ban on tone's
you forgot the etc, etc, etc......
>wildfire are results of people at ICI refusing to consider anything
>other than what they see as a "correct" product growing along a
>"correct" and "complete" vision. They created WB, and have the right to
correct & complete,...... growing...??????? it kinda looks like the
beta to me except without the rolling .....(you know what)
>develop it (or not) as they see fit. How flexible and open they are
>about it may help determine their future.
>
>Sean Long
>WB: eagl
Well I couldn't have shot my own foot any better. You're right on the
money Sean and if ya need it I have an extra bandaid! :)
Viper 714th TFW
Bullseye
On 20 Jul 1996 00:40:41 GMT, djmi...@aimnet.com (David J Miller)
wrote:
>DJ "Majk" Miller
>VMF-214 (Warbirds)
>
>FYI, nrul is a Squad mate of mine. He is many things, but a hacker and a
>cheat are not among them.
So he's a Squadmate. Do you know him in person??
You would do well to remember that all is not as it appears online, he
could've been feeding you a BIG snowjob this whole time!
Knowing someone online does not mean you know the person inside.
Kev
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
djmi...@aimnet.com (David J Miller) wrote:
>I think you owe nrul a public apology. What you saw was obviously a FE bug.
What! It was obviously NOT an FE bug. An FE bug might have
conceivably done this once, even twice although the odds off this
happening would be rediculously low. The fact that nrul did this
repeatedly every few minutes, and only after the Golds took the feild
each time tells me that he did it at will. Thats the only obvious
thing here. Well that and the fact that you are either defending him
because you are ignorant of the facts or are part of the problem
yourself. I beleive you just don't have the facts.
>The title of this message should have been: "Warbirds: An idiot has been
>recorded. His handle is mili."
Ah, nope, his handle is Majk. Mili made a post about an event that
was quite obviously a hack, or at least the exploitation of a bug.
You have revealed yourself as the "idiot" here by defending nrul
without having the facts.
>DJ "Majk" Miller
>VMF-214 (Warbirds)
>FYI, nrul is a Squad mate of mine. He is many things, but a hacker and a
>cheat are not among them.
That's a piss poor defense. I find it interesting that it is the only
one that I've seen.
L8er,
Sean P. Conrad <Lephturn> http://fox.nstn.ca/~spconrad/lephturn.html
spco...@enviroclean.ca Leph in WB <F'ing Pigs>
"I'll do my best..." "Your best...it's the losers who are always whining
about`their best`." - Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery from "The Rock"
py...@cris.com
Sean Long wrote:
>
>
> The accidental exiting problems that might or might not be seen when
> exiting with a red beacon would absolutely not manifest themselves in
> the way Mili saw. A cause-effect relationship seems obvious. A gold
> exits and captures the field, nrul exits and gets it back. If it had
> been an innocent mistake caused by a FE bug or a bad connect, there is
> no way in hell that this would have happened.
Before you continue to roast nrul, think about the nature of the bug.
The host was occasionally assigning the same ID to two different people.
This not only caused two people to fly with the same id, but it allows
for a lot of other weird stuff too. Like the host being confused as to
what country you belong to. Phantom pings could also be caused by this
bug.
What happened may not have unwitting, but who did it? The good nrul or
his evil twin? Let's not hang the guy over speculation. I don't doubt
that someone may have been taking advantage of the situation and I know
that Mili wouldn't post this if he didn't feel sure about it. However, in
this case it's just not a clear cut thing. We found the bug and no harm
was done. Now let's go watch 12 Angry Men and not get worked up over it.
> One final editorial comment: The "other solution", complaining to ICI
> about the problem, has not had the effect in the past that many would
> hope for. Some of the CONFIRMED WARPING CHEATS, although recognized by
> a few ICI employees, were repeatedly denied by other ICI employees until
> proof was shoved in their face. This has happened a few times, and it
> seems that some problems are more likely to be swept under the carpet
> than dealt with. It took the hiring of new programmers before the stall
> bug was found, even though several experienced pilots described nearly
> exactly what the effects of the bug were. Apparently, ICI's code is
> "bug free" by definition, until proven beyond all reasonable and
> unreasonable doubt otherwise. Yea sure. I got a degree in comp sci,
> and know how a programmer will stand by his code. I also know that even
> code "set in stone" must never be assumed to be "correct". Egos seem to
> abound not only on usenet and in the arena, but in the offices at ICI as
> well. This is commercially dangerous and ICI better wake up and smell
> the coffee.
As far as I'm aware, reports of warp inducing bugs have never been denied.
In one case, neither Quiz nor myself were able to duplicate this on 2
different systems. I don't see how wanting to see this demonstrated
and finding out more details qualifies as denying it's existance. Bug
squashing takes a lot of programming resources that could otherwise be
spent on game development. The difference between just knowing about
the existance of a bug and being able to determine specific information
about the bug and the systems that it happens on is a lot of programming
time.
Let me give an analogy using your background. Suppose you came back from
a flight really tired and wrote up a squawk on your plane. The maintenance
crew runs it up and finds nothing wrong. Would you chastise them if they
came to you looking for more information?
Then there's the logistical side of it. Even when a bug does get squashed,
unless it's a host bug, the fix won't appear until the next version is
released. As the game gets larger(both in audience and file size), this
becomes more involved. We can't afford to pop a new update every couple
of weeks anymore.
WRT to the stall model, it's never been a secret that there's faults
in the post-departure and stability model. This is not a simple bug
squash. While bugs contributing to the problem were found, getting the
model to work the way it should involves a lot of reworking and not
just some bug fixing. This was a matter of knowing about a problem
but not having the resources to fix it right away. One of the reasons
that Quiz was brought on was to lend his expertise to this matter.
When you say that it took additional programmers to find these problems,
it sounds negative. Think about it for a second, there's a reason why
HT hired Quiz and stuck him on the flight model right away. It's not
because he or anyone else believed that there were no problems in the
model. It's just that prior to that, HT was the only programmer who
could do anything with it and he had a lot on his plate. Despite that,
some fixes were tried, but nothing that proved to be a big improvement
was achieved. Because this work did not manifest itself, you might
feel that this was ignored. It wasn't but there's only so much time
that could be invested in this. Sometimes it just takes another person
to look at a problem and that is what happened. I think that is a
positive thing.
-Pyro
Stephen W. Evans
>I'm shooting myself in the foot posting this publicly, but i have to get
>it off my chest. The code bugs, the warp cheats, even the ban on tone's
>wildfire are results of people at ICI refusing to consider anything
>other than what they see as a "correct" product growing along a
>"correct" and "complete" vision. They created WB, and have the right to
>develop it (or not) as they see fit. How flexible and open they are
>about it may help determine their future.
Well.... The flight model problem turned out not to be a bug in the
front end itself, but rather a bug in one of the data file builders
that got introduced god only knows when. The warping bugs we are
having problems with because, needless to say, those people who have
discovered "warp on demand" methods are NOT eager to share them with
us, thus we have a hard time stomping them out. If you can get the
people who have come up with clever cheats to contact us via EMail,
or have a list of clever cheats that people have come up with, please
let us know. Always trying to plug a few holes....
The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
of players (a squadron or your country), you send one message to the
host, it sends one message to each player. With WildFire you send one
message to the host, this goes to WildFire which then sends one message
per player contacted to the host that sends one message to each such player.
Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio. Even the
system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
the text buffer).
As far as vision goes, there is no "complete" vision. Moving CV task
groups were added not by "plan" but because someone thought it would be
cool, we thought up a way to do it, and it got done. There is no real
"correctness" about anything associated with WarBirds. If it enhances
the game for the players and we can do it we will. If it takes a long
time to do you might not be seeing it for awhile. If its something that
can be quickly added it might appear in a new release without any
pre-announcement at all. It's one of the reasons we don't answer when
questions. Sometimes not even WE know "when" something will happen.
--- Steve
Stephen W. Evans clgl - Caligula - WarBirds
ICI Host/Mac Programmer 4548 - Caligula - Air Warrior
cali...@cris.com Friends don't let friends do DOS.
PGP public key available by finger ev...@rex.pfc.mit.edu
My opinions are my own... etc ... etc ...
Petteri Kihlberg
> So, a hacked FE or not, a dweeb has been recorded nonetheless. Maybe
> that
> is how I should have titled the original post.
> Mili
Are you refering to n*** or yourself?
Zombie
--
Petteri Kihlberg, http://www.clinet.fi/~petsku/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give
it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement." -G.
Steve Anderson
I haven't even seen the article this follows up, and I normally
don't post but this posting has me SEEING RED. (offline, even!)
Two things.
First, I am sure ICI is aware of how the latest deliberate warp
scourge is accomplished. I haven't actually tried it, because I don't
care to cheat, but the method I imagine seems both simple and obvious.
Others have said they have tested it and notified ICI. We will see a
fix, I hope soon. It is becoming a real problem in the arena.
Second, the specious bandwidth argument against Tone's wildfire
message handler is completely offbase. I sat in the tower for the
Solomons show, and saw the endless streams of ch. 100 broadcasts.
Wildfire is designed to REDUCE COMMUNICATIONS TRAFFIC, like ch.100.
It most certainly does not increase it.
1) "wf, orders?" sends a trivial amount to the host, and a
one liner back to the person requesting. No load on the
CO. W/O wf, we have the SAME TRAFFIC, but the CO has to
type the response! What a waste of time.
2) "wf, tell group leaders to commit harakari. We have failed."
EXACTLY like existing squad channels, (except for the 1 extra
send to the wf port and back) but more flexible and powerful.
I thought a important part of this sim. was communications with
your mates - certainly vital in a scenario!
Yes, fine, I understand your "2n" argument. But Wildfire
would actually reduce comm. bandwidth demand by cutting out the broadcast
ch. 100 nonsense, and similarily refining what users get sent messages
in 1-many sends.
I think ICI should have seriously considered incorporating WF into
the game host, rather than squashing the innovation.
To say that *Wildfire* was actually RESPONSIBLE for cancelling
Solomons is both ludicrous and infuriating. Wildfire was squelched well
before the disastrous "dumpster" frame.
In article <Caligula-220...@news.cris.com>,
Stephen W. Evans <Cali...@cris.com> wrote:
>In article <31F183...@mail.gld.com>, sl...@mail.gld.com wrote:
>
>>I'm shooting myself in the foot posting this publicly, but i have to get
>>it off my chest. The code bugs, the warp cheats, even the ban on tone's
>>wildfire are results of people at ICI refusing to consider anything
>>other than what they see as a "correct" product growing along a
>>"correct" and "complete" vision. ...
>
>Well....
>...having problems with because, needless to say, those people who have
>discovered "warp on demand" methods are NOT eager to share them with
>us, thus we have a hard time stomping them out.
>
>...The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
>crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
>of players (a squadron or your country), you send one message to the
>host, it sends one message to each player. With WildFire you send one
>message to the host, this goes to WildFire which then sends one message
>per player contacted to the host that sends one message to each such player.
>Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
>Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
>wastes it. ...
George Whitten
In article <4t0e04$c...@news.nstn.ca>, spco...@enviroclean.ca says...
>
>djmi...@aimnet.com (David J Miller) wrote:
>
>>I think you owe nrul a public apology. What you saw was obviously a FE
bug.
>"I'll do my best..." "Your best...it's the losers who are always whining
> about`their best`." - Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery from "The Rock"
>
the only night that the host locked the purps out of their fields, assigned
people ot the wrong ID..and generally was screwed enough that killer had to
come to the office to fix it..unless nrul does this again and consistently, I
for one am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt..
hardcase
Stephen W. Evans
In article <4t0l3u$n...@epx.cis.umn.edu>, sea@bloodstone (Steve Anderson) wrote:
>First, I am sure ICI is aware of how the latest deliberate warp
>scourge is accomplished. I haven't actually tried it, because I don't
>care to cheat, but the method I imagine seems both simple and obvious.
>Others have said they have tested it and notified ICI. We will see a
>fix, I hope soon. It is becoming a real problem in the arena.
I haven't heard jack shit about it. Please, fill me in if you think
I know because I'd sure like to hear about it.
>Second, the specious bandwidth argument against Tone's wildfire
>message handler is completely offbase. I sat in the tower for the
>Solomons show, and saw the endless streams of ch. 100 broadcasts.
You're right, it's worse than I thought, I forgot about the radio
channel change messages that WildFire would have to send. Make that
a 3N+2 change from N+1.
By the way, if you are sitting in the tower, the endless streams of
radio 100 messages are either from people inflight or people in the
room with you, if no one was inflight it was "in your room only" traffic.
>Wildfire is designed to REDUCE COMMUNICATIONS TRAFFIC, like ch.100.
>It most certainly does not increase it.
It reduces traffic on 100, but not meany people are going to be transmitting
on channel 100 anyway during a scenario. They will either use their
country channel (so everyone can hear) or their squadron frequency (so
only their squaddies can hear).
> 1) "wf, orders?" sends a trivial amount to the host, and a
> one liner back to the person requesting. No load on the
> CO. W/O wf, we have the SAME TRAFFIC, but the CO has to
> type the response! What a waste of time.
THIS use of WildFire we had no problems with.
> 2) "wf, tell group leaders to commit harakari. We have failed."
> EXACTLY like existing squad channels, (except for the 1 extra
> send to the wf port and back) but more flexible and powerful.
> I thought a important part of this sim. was communications with
> your mates - certainly vital in a scenario!
NOT!!! It's one send to wildfire, then wildfire has to go down its list
sending private messages to each person by doing ".radio 1 xxxx" then
sending a radio message that is then echoed by the host back to the person.
Thats TWO host messages per receiver, a radio channel change, AND then
echoing back the text. 3N+2 instead of N+1. And if you only want the
thing to go to one person, then all WildFire is saving you is having to
do alittle typing. Obviously from your posts you seem able to type :-)
The frames I flew (IJA) section leaders and people reporting SBD's were
the only ones allowed to use the country channel. All the other groups
were organized into squadrons and used 110 for "normal" traffic. This
worked just fine without any message reflectors.
>Yes, fine, I understand your "2n" argument. But Wildfire
>would actually reduce comm. bandwidth demand by cutting out the broadcast
>ch. 100 nonsense, and similarily refining what users get sent messages
>in 1-many sends.
Again, in a scenario there is VERY little traffic on channel 100, perhaps
you mean the country channel? If you organize into squadrons you
wouldn't have that problem.
>I think ICI should have seriously considered incorporating WF into
>the game host, rather than squashing the innovation.
We like the orders part, and we are working on making radio channels
arbitrarily tuneable at some point in the future (thus eliminating
the trouble of either sending to one person, your country, or your
whole squadron). But I don't see much difference in functionality
between that and having squadron frequencies.
>To say that *Wildfire* was actually RESPONSIBLE for cancelling
>Solomons is both ludicrous and infuriating. Wildfire was squelched well
>before the disastrous "dumpster" frame.
Yepper that IS true.... Message traffic wasn't that BIG a factor, but it
IS still a factor. What hosed the Solomons scenario was the unfortunate
fact that the entire Internet barfed that day. At that point we decided
we needed alternate routes into our host to prevent something like that
from hosing us again. We now have another T1 in and are going to be getting
a VERY expensive adaptive routing system. Hopefully that will help.
Besides, I didn't say WildFire was responsible for cancelling Solomons,
I will leave the cite, which you left here but apparently didn't bother
to read, to give you another shot at it.
>In article <Caligula-220...@news.cris.com>,
>Stephen W. Evans <Cali...@cris.com> wrote:
>>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
>>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
ANYTHING that grossly increases bandwidth requirements on our Internet
connection will effect game play, to the point that during the Solomons
events we SHUT DOWN anonymous FTP to our host. WildFire was certainly
not helping at all, which was alone a good reason to request that it not
be used.
Zeno303
So I at least know who to root for here, what is "wildfire" and how could
it relate to WB?
Thanks,
zeno
Sean Long
Steve Anderson wrote:
> Second, the specious bandwidth argument against Tone's wildfire
> message handler is completely offbase. I sat in the tower for the
> Solomons show, and saw the endless streams of ch. 100 broadcasts.
>
> Wildfire is designed to REDUCE COMMUNICATIONS TRAFFIC, like ch.100.
> It most certainly does not increase it.
> Yes, fine, I understand your "2n" argument. But Wildfire
> would actually reduce comm. bandwidth demand by cutting out the broadcast
> ch. 100 nonsense, and similarily refining what users get sent messages
> in 1-many sends.
I agree 100% The bandwidth argument seems complete nonsense. A simple
example: A squad CO wants to send a message to everyone. He types in
the line, it goes to the host, and the host repeats it to everyone. The
CO wants to use wf to send the same message, he sends it to the host,
the host sends it to wf, wf sends one message to the host for each
REGISTERED RECIPIENT of the message, and the host then sends it. The
"monstrous bandwidth waste" is only wf sending a single private message
to each recipient. Bandwidth increase from n+1 to (2n+1)-(number of
people who shouldn't get the message) seems acceptable, especially as
only wf is making the broadcasts. Most communication through wf will be
as limited as possible, radio traffic reduction being one of the goals
behind of wf in the first place. The waste is offset by the fact that
the CO can limit the recipient list. This offsetting amount is one of
the things wf gives. People will simply see less crap scroll by on
their screens.
Plus, if ICI would incorporate commands for wf to use in the host, the
bandwidth issue would not even be a concern, real or otherwise. What if
wf could send a message header containing all the recepients first, then
a SINGLE COPY of the message? The host would do the "dirty work"
without "wasting bandwidth". Don't tell me that wf sending 20 messages
every 30 seconds is using the same bandwidth as even a single player in
flight... For any given time period, what percent of the bits across
the line are position and weapons-hits updates vs. text-only radio
traffic? If this is proprietary info, it should not have been brought
up in the first place...
> I think ICI should have seriously considered incorporating WF into
> the game host, rather than squashing the innovation.
>
> To say that *Wildfire* was actually RESPONSIBLE for cancelling
> Solomons is both ludicrous and infuriating. Wildfire was squelched well
> before the disastrous "dumpster" frame.
I agree completely. That statement was ridiculous. Ask the players who
were flying at that time, during the week prior and after the scenario.
Connects were horrible 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week for almost a month.
Blaming tone and wf for that seems mean spirited, aimed at stomping on a
novel idea. This is a HUGE example of where ICI "should" swallow it's
pride and work with what should have been a feature a long time ago.
Again, it is ICI's game, they can do (or not do) whatever they want with
it. If people didn't deeply care about the future of WB and ICI, they
wouldn't have bothered posting in the first place.
Sean Long
WB: eagl
Sean Long
Stephen W. Evans wrote:
> Someday
> though it could happen....
Next century maybe? Or after ICI finishes it's mech game?
Again, how does message traffic compare %wise to position updates? If
it's that huge, compress the text on the fly. But since the whole
shebang can be done over a 9600 baud modem, the ABSOLUTE WORST that wf
could EVER add is her bandwidth to the net! Limit wf to a 9600 baud
modem? I don't think you can convince anyone that slapping an
intermittant 9600 baud TEXT (ie compressable) flood over a T-1 would
impact your bandwidth significantly. I would like to hear how though...
Kind of like the argument, what good is a video card with 16 million
colors if your monitor can only display 1024 x 768 pixles? No matter
how hard wf grunts and shovels, the impact will never exceed the modem
speed... If one modem (even 28.8) is enough to saturate both your
internet connections, ICI is in sad shape and may never recover.
eagl
CJ Martin
In article <4sp9u9$4...@vnetnews.value.net>,
djmi...@aimnet.com (David J Miller) wrote:
[snip]
>The title of this message should have been: "Warbirds: An idiot has been
>recorded. His handle is mili."
My, my...having a problem with reading comprehension? Mili quite clearly laid
out the circumstances as he saw them. What part don't you understand, loser
boy?
>DJ "Majk" Miller
>VMF-214 (Warbirds)
Oh goody, more cannon fodder...
>FYI, nrul is a Squad mate of mine. He is many things, but a hacker and a
>cheat are not among them.
FYI, Mili is a Squad mate of MINE. Insult him at your own peril.
Live in Fear, dweeblet...
Smut
<F'ing Pigs>
Tony Lovell
In article <4sk2qm$r...@news.nstn.ca> pu...@fox.nstn.ca (punkz) writes:
>nrul you say?
> Weird thing happened last night. When I logged on, the FE sent me
>to Purple land instead of Greenland, and I was able to view the radio
>chatter of the 501st squad. I typed on the squad radio, "what squad is
>this?". It came out as:
>
>nrul: what squad is this?
>The FE thought I was nrul!
>The real nrul said,"what the hell! I didn't write that!"
>
> I then apologized to the 501st for losing my way and logged off.
>Logged back on to and was sent to Purple land again. Tested the squad
>radio and was greeted by my fellow Dweebs of Death. Everything was normal
>except that I was a Purple. Had to remove myself from my squad to get
>back to Green. Luckily my CO showed up and was resquaded soon after.
> So...if your saying nrul hacked the FE, maybe that explains my
It also seems to indicate there is some doubt as to this incident.
Please, let ICI or someone who can really dig into this do the
investigation. nrul might be innocent -- it coulda been someone the host
was mistaking for nrul who was replaning at the base, "capturing" it
merely by trying to take off.
Until we KNOW, we'd be wise to give the guy the benefit of the doubt.
tone
Stephen W. Evans
In article <4t0mrp$f...@news.nstn.ca>, spco...@enviroclean.ca (Lephturn
(Sean Conrad)) wrote:
>My impression was that Tone did a great deal of work and created a
>great tool for scenario CO's with Wildfire. Then -HT- killed it at
>the last minute with a knee-jerk reaction that it was a 'bot' and he
>wanted the WB world to be filled with all real people, not taken over
>by bots.
That may have been HT's objection, mine was the bandwidth and extra
message traffic involved. HT's objection would have won even if I
didn't dislike the extra network traffic, though if he hadn't disliked
it for other reasons I would still have not wanted it around due to
the extra traffic.
>It just seems to me like ICI blew off a great opportunity. If Tone
>had been told that there was concerns that -wf- would eat up too much
>bandwidth things might have been different. If ICI had said "this is
>great, we can work with this concept to still accomplish these goals
>and save bandwidth", I think Tone's reaction would have been much
>different. The end result might have been a great scenario tool that
>would geatly enhance gameplay value (by decreasing time wasted in
>comms. confusion), with relatively little investment of rescources by
>ICI.
WildFire was, I thought, a generalized message reflector that Tone had
made to work with WarBirds, not something specifically written FOR
WarBirds. Some of it's functionality it would be nice to have in the
game and some things might actually get put in eventually. A real help
will be generally tuneable radio channels. We just have to get the
programmer hours to get it in.
>Since ICI didn't seem to be interested in Tone's solution, do you guys
>have a better one?
Actually the orders part was the nicest bit of it, although there are
security issues there WRT walkons and such. I've been trying to think
of a way to come up with something similar. An .orders command that
gives you orders from your squadron leader or whatever would be nice.
Unforunately right now setting it up so someone can enter more than one
line of text at a time would be a real pain in the butt. Someday
though it could happen....
--- Steve
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
<snip>
>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed.
To my knowledge, Wildfire was only ever tested in practice and on a
very limited basis. Tone let HT know what was going on, and HT killed
it before the first frame. Wildfire was never used in Solomons, and
had nothing to do with Sol. getting scrubbed to my knowledge.
>There were alot of msg's flying
>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
When was this? I was on the US side, and we never got to actually use
Wildfire.
>Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
>wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
>Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
>evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio. Even the
>system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
>the text buffer).
Funny, that's not the objection I heard. Please correct me if I don't
have the facts here, but the only objections I heard were based on the
fact that Wildfire was a bot that sounded like a person. This is the
first I've heard of any objection based on bandwidth.
<stuff on vision snipped>
My impression was that Tone did a great deal of work and created a
great tool for scenario CO's with Wildfire. Then -HT- killed it at
the last minute with a knee-jerk reaction that it was a 'bot' and he
wanted the WB world to be filled with all real people, not taken over
by bots.
Again, please correct me if I am missing some facts here. This is
just the impression I got from watching the US e-mail and Tone's
account of what happened.
It just seems to me like ICI blew off a great opportunity. If Tone
had been told that there was concerns that -wf- would eat up too much
bandwidth things might have been different. If ICI had said "this is
great, we can work with this concept to still accomplish these goals
and save bandwidth", I think Tone's reaction would have been much
different. The end result might have been a great scenario tool that
would geatly enhance gameplay value (by decreasing time wasted in
comms. confusion), with relatively little investment of rescources by
ICI.
I still think there is a need for something to alleiviate the comms
problems in scenarios. Just think how easy the Scenario Lite's could
be if Fletch just had to program orders into -wf- beforehand. -wf-
could be The-Godz_of-War instead and automatically assign planes,
fields, track newbies, etc. Upon entering the arena for example you
just type a message private to Godz: /?, and you get your help, an
explanation, start times, and various instructions automatically.
Since ICI didn't seem to be interested in Tone's solution, do you guys
have a better one?
L8er,
Sean P. Conrad <Lephturn> http://fox.nstn.ca/~spconrad/lephturn.html
Stephen W. Evans
In article <4spv5s$l...@herald.concentric.net>, Sm...@cris.com (Scott
Thomson) wrote:
>Now that I think about it, it would *not* be so funny, since who ever got
>"faked" would have a hell of a time clearing his name. Probably have to
>cancel his account and get a new one. So I guess I would not do it, and
>I hope my stupid little story explains why this is a serious bug that
>ICI needs to look into.
hehe that was pretty good.... actually I think HT fixed that one
last Thursday or Friday (I forget which) :-)
fats
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
>evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio.
Has there been discussion about the idea Drum wrote to the BBS WRT
radio macros (actually he was talking about voice files.)?
fats.
Lewis Moose Gregory
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>In article <31F183...@mail.gld.com>, sl...@mail.gld.com wrote:
>The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
>crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
>of players (a squadron or your country), you send one message to the
>host, it sends one message to each player. With WildFire you send one
>message to the host, this goes to WildFire which then sends one message
>per player contacted to the host that sends one message to each such player.
>Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
A valid point, but just a historical correction--Wildfire never got
into the game on an actual scenario frame. It was nixed right before
frame 1. I believe it was used in some of the practices, but it never
made it to prime time.
>Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
>wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
>Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
>evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio. Even the
>system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
>the text buffer).
That, and the fact that some lame bunch of leeeyuzers are going to come
up with their wonderful cutesy macros and shit 'em all over everybody
constantly. It's one thing to maybe pop off a "WOLF PACK!" after every
kill, but some people have taken it way overboard on AW and are spewing
the bloody things *constantly*. The buffer in WB is hard enough to follow
at the speed it moves (particularly since it's really two lines of text
per kill--the "xxxx crashed/shot down/exploded/bailed/killed/whatever"
line and the "Kill of xxxx awarded to yyyy" line) without having
rapid-fire macros cluttering it up on a night where there's 130 people up.
Check six,
Lewis "Moose" Gregory | POINTLESS PERSONAL INFORMATION:
lgre...@concentric.net | Truck: 1996 Dodge Ram 1500 4x2 Club Cab
mo...@broughton-sys.com | Computer: Gateway 2000 P5/133
7646...@compuserve.com | Web Page: http://www.cris.com/~lgregory
----------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
Air Warrior: #6340/#5241, C-land | CO 94th Composite Grp-"The Flying Squirrels"
WarBirds: "moos", green | <FS> WATCH YER NUTS! <FS>
----------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
"Can't waste a day when the night brings a hearse
So make a move and plead the Fifth 'cause ya can't plead the First"
-- Rage Against the Machine, "Down Rodeo"
No.6
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
>crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
>of players (a squadron or your country), you send one message to the
>host, it sends one message to each player. With WildFire you send one
>message to the host, this goes to WildFire which then sends one message
>per player contacted to the host that sends one message to each such player.
>Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
>wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
>Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
>evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio. Even the
>system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
>the text buffer).
>--- Steve
>Stephen W. Evans clgl - Caligula - WarBirds
>ICI Host/Mac Programmer 4548 - Caligula - Air Warrior
>cali...@cris.com Friends don't let friends do DOS.
>PGP public key available by finger ev...@rex.pfc.mit.edu
>My opinions are my own... etc ... etc ...
Without starting up another -wf- flamestorm (crossing fingers), as a
flight leader and participant in the Solomons campaign, I must dispute
the claim that WildFire (may have) contributed to the scrub.
Your math is fine insofar as messaging and bandwidth are concerned,
and I agree that consuming minimal bandwidth is a >good thing<. I
also respect ICI's decision regarding -wf-.
However, mission #3 was run >without< WildFire present at all, and the
problems experienced in #1 and #2 continued. Moreover, during some
practice missions (both in practice and Sol arenas) -wf- was present
during high-volume attendance without causing the mass disco frenzy
that happened during the real missions.
I happen to agree that a virtual player isn't the answer ... unless
it's part of the host code, in which case we're back to N+1 again.
May I suggest that in addition to the country (10x) and squad (110)
channels, the option to tune a custom channel be added? The protocol
might run something like
.radio 3 no-6 frch rube trix bear chig
so that a message on channel 3 would produce msgs to no-6, frch, rube,
trix, bear, and chig only. IMO, this isn't very different from the
existing tune-to-one-pilot already in place >or< from the existing
squad channel functionality.
BCNU,
No.6 (no-6) CO --4th FG--
http://www.cris.com/~no6/4thFG.htm
n...@cris.com
Daniel Drumm
Geof Evans (rxx...@minyos.its.rmit.EDU.AU) wrote:
:
: I don't really care too much, still plenty of fish etc...but it is one
: of those things that I wouldn't mind knowing what *is* going on....
:
: Doc.
Well, I find it annoying as hell. I'd love to find a smoking gun, like the
specs on how to build one sitting in a certain player's home directory.
Hmmmmm......
--
--
Daniel G. Drumm
dr...@tezcat.com - PGP Key via WWW
http://www.tezcat.com/~drmm
Bullseye
On 23 Jul 1996 11:03:26 GMT, rxx...@minyos.its.rmit.EDU.AU (Geof
Evans) wrote:
>tweak ? Both times, the plane was the same colour/type. Flew straight
>and level, until the strikes upon the airframe appeared...then vanished
>into thin air. No manuevring, nothing. Almost like they were waiting....
Yep...same thing here. I posted a big one above.
>I don't really care too much, still plenty of fish etc...but it is one
>of those things that I wouldn't mind knowing what *is* going on....
Me too....but in the mean time, I'll shoot the little pissants down at
any opportunity. >|-)
Bullseye
beye<ELITE CORP>
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>In article <4t0mrp$f...@news.nstn.ca>, spco...@enviroclean.ca (Lephturn
>(Sean Conrad)) wrote:
>>My impression was that Tone did a great deal of work and created a
>>great tool for scenario CO's with Wildfire. Then -HT- killed it at
>>the last minute with a knee-jerk reaction that it was a 'bot' and he
>>wanted the WB world to be filled with all real people, not taken over
>>by bots.
>That may have been HT's objection, mine was the bandwidth and extra
>message traffic involved. HT's objection would have won even if I
>didn't dislike the extra network traffic, though if he hadn't disliked
>it for other reasons I would still have not wanted it around due to
>the extra traffic.
OK, I don't get this. How can -wf- cause a problem with bandwidth
through a modem connection? -wf-'s text messages can't possibly be as
much of a load on the bandwidth as one singe extra player. Also, it
seems to me that WF did some things the host would do, thus extra
bandwidth would be partly off-set by less host load. Anyway, this is
all a moot point since Wildfire is dead because HT objected that she
acted too much like a person.
>WildFire was, I thought, a generalized message reflector that Tone had
>made to work with WarBirds, not something specifically written FOR
>WarBirds.
Wherever Wildfire came from, it was by no means a generalised
anything. Tone put alot of work into Wildfire, and had programmed
"her" as an AI to handle the "secretarial" duties of command. If it
was just some generalized program Tone had hooked up to Warbirds, I
doubt he would have been adamant that Wildfire be a very human AI.
>Some of it's functionality it would be nice to have in the
>game and some things might actually get put in eventually. A real help
>will be generally tuneable radio channels. We just have to get the
>programmer hours to get it in.
>>Since ICI didn't seem to be interested in Tone's solution, do you guys
>>have a better one?
>Actually the orders part was the nicest bit of it, although there are
>security issues there WRT walkons and such. I've been trying to think
>of a way to come up with something similar. An .orders command that
>gives you orders from your squadron leader or whatever would be nice.
>Unforunately right now setting it up so someone can enter more than one
>line of text at a time would be a real pain in the butt. Someday
>though it could happen....
Well, I do appreciate your honest answer. I just think it was a waste
to dump something that could have done all this right now, untill you
guys "might actually" "eventually" "someday" "could happen" get a
solution to it. You'll understand if I'm not to confident it will get
done what with all the maybe's I pulled from your statement.
Wildfire was not perfect, but could easily have been altered to use
less bandwidth and still deliver the functionality we really need to
keep these scenarios from being such a Charlie Foxtrot.
If Tone did this so easily, then howcome you guys can't set up a
similar reflector or whatever to help with the Scenario Lites? Seems
like a decent short-term solution too me. Just think, if Tone had
been treated with some consideration for all his hard work, somebody
else might have done the work for you.
You guys have a great game here as it is, and it's potential is
staggering. I understand when you don't have time to fix and update
everything all at once. It just frustrates me to see good ideas by
players get slamed that could have solved the problem, at least
temporarily.
Keep working on WB ICI, I'll still support you. But try to be more
open minded to the input of the players, especially if they come up
with solutions to things you may not have the time or rescources to
fix yourself.
Just another paying customer....
Michael Toler
Zeno303 (zen...@aol.com) wrote:
: So I at least know who to root for here, what is "wildfire" and how could
: it relate to WB?
WildFire was a program, created by Tone that, basically, performed ALL
staff functions for a scenario.
You could get orders from her (Where to go, who to report to, what your flying)
You could communicate with your entire country (BAD POOKIE for bandwidth.
since she sent an individual message to everyone in the country
so actuall 2N+1 messages were sent by the host. This was the one thing
that *I* would have done differently.)
You could send messages to individuals without having to retune a radio.
(Hmmm, 1 message to host, 1 message to -wf-, 1 message to host,
1 message to target. 4 messages total.
To retune a radio, 1 message to host to retune, 1 message back saying
radio retuned, 1message to host with message to target, 1 message
from host to target. 4 messages total.
NO BANDWIDTH LOST HERE)
In the US practices, -wf- decided if you were suppose to fly for the US, or
be the 'enemy' for this practice. Assigned you to a flight, and told you
what you needed to do to get started.
-WF- also could tell you who was flying certain planes, where someone was,
who was suppose to fly a certain plane, who the CO's were, Flight Leaders,
etc.
It was an amazing tool. An -HT- killed it because he didn't like
the fact that it 'acted human.' According to what I've heard from
fairly reliable sources, if Tone had changed her to resemble a robot
more, she might have been allowed to stay. But he didn't want to
do that, and she died.
And she is sorely missed.
Ouch out
--
Michael "Ouch" Toler | Don Gaspard Du Lac
Dallas, Texas | Barrony of the Steppes, Ansteorra
Check out my new Web page (CK) at:
http://www.cris.com/~ouch01/ouch.shtml
John Killer Macqueen
mto...@bnr.ca (Michael Toler) wrote:
>Zeno303 (zen...@aol.com) wrote:
>: So I at least know who to root for here, what is "wildfire" and how could
>: it relate to WB?
>WildFire was a program, created by Tone that, basically, performed ALL
>staff functions for a scenario.
>You could get orders from her (Where to go, who to report to, what your flying)
>You could communicate with your entire country (BAD POOKIE for bandwidth.
> since she sent an individual message to everyone in the country
> so actuall 2N+1 messages were sent by the host. This was the one thing
> that *I* would have done differently.)
>You could send messages to individuals without having to retune a radio.
> (Hmmm, 1 message to host, 1 message to -wf-, 1 message to host,
> 1 message to target. 4 messages total.
> To retune a radio, 1 message to host to retune, 1 message back saying
> radio retuned, 1message to host with message to target, 1 message
> from host to target. 4 messages total.
> NO BANDWIDTH LOST HERE)
>In the US practices, -wf- decided if you were suppose to fly for the US, or
>be the 'enemy' for this practice. Assigned you to a flight, and told you
>what you needed to do to get started.
>-WF- also could tell you who was flying certain planes, where someone was,
>who was suppose to fly a certain plane, who the CO's were, Flight Leaders,
>etc.
Thats not the whole story.
Scenarios are supposed to guage the players ability to work together,
set up a command staff, and organize and execute an effective chain of
command ans battle plan. Wildfire, while an excellent tool, takes away
from that aspect of the game, it removes some of the human aspect and
"fog of war". Thats a huge part of deciding the outcomes of scenarios.
>It was an amazing tool. An -HT- killed it because he didn't like
>the fact that it 'acted human.' According to what I've heard from
>fairly reliable sources, if Tone had changed her to resemble a robot
>more, she might have been allowed to stay. But he didn't want to
>do that, and she died.
>And she is sorely missed.
>Ouch out
WF also promotes people not talking directly to each other and has
folks passing dialog through a third person. HT flew a practice with
wildfire and was not able to be as effective with the group he was in
(all seasoned scenario vets with over 50 missions). It actually got in
the way for them to be on a team that was using -wf-, but they were
pretty much forced to use it because the rest of the US was. Thats
what I think really got to HT, that he wasn't talking directly to
people as he was used to doing and it took the enjoyment of
interaction away for him while decreasing his groups effectiveness.
The fact that that third person intermediary was a bot that acted like
a human female made it worse and ruined the enjoyment more for him.
The main point is that people are supposed to be doing alot what
wildfire does.
-wf- has very good elements but is taken too far in some respects.
Granted there is plenty of room for improvement in the current host
setup for radios, and other organizational tools on the ground. They
will come, and that part of what wildfire does there is no problem
with.
I never flew with -wf-, but as I understand it I would surely feel the
same way if I did. I have flown over 60 scenario missions myself, and
I know it would detract from my enjoyment to pass comms and take
orders that way even if it did make things easier for some.
Basically had wildfire been allowed to be used, both sides would have
to have that access, guaranteed to be privacy secure for each side,
and it would have -totally- changed the scenario environment. HT
thinks for the worse. Some of you feel differently, but HT, and I for
that matter feel its harmful to have a non-player program to have that
much permanent effect on the game. Effect that takes the game away
from the direction of direct human-human interaction. Effect that
takes that direct interaction aspect away from group interaction,
co-ordination, and execution and put it in the hands of a computer
program.
John MacQueen
kil...@www.icigames.com
VP Operations Interactive Creations Inc.
Art Day
In article <Caligula-220...@news.cris.com> Stephen W. Evans,
Cali...@cris.com writes:
>We like the orders part, and we are working on making radio channels
>arbitrarily tuneable at some point in the future (thus eliminating
>the trouble of either sending to one person, your country, or your
>whole squadron). But I don't see much difference in functionality
>between that and having squadron frequencies.
Squad freq (110) doesn't work well when the host keeps disbanding the
squads every couple of weeks.<g>
I hope you're right, though, about reducing the yellow in the text
buffer. The text buffer is presently unusable in small-window mode.
Fogy
pd...@kaiwan.com
py...@cris.com
-Squid- wrote:
>
> > "Py...@cris.com" <py...@cris.com> writes:
>
> > WRT to the stall model, it's never been a secret that there's faults
> > in the post-departure and stability model.
>
> an article talking about the post-departure problems. Not criticizing, not
> flaming, just stating the problem. An ICI employee, who I won't name,
> replied that I obviously didn't know what I was talking about, since
> the plane handled exactly the same post-departure as it did pre-departure.
>
> Apparently, it HAS been a secret, especially to members of your own company.
>
> -Squid-
It's hard for me to comment on this since I don't know what was
said or exactly what you are describing. If the person was saying that
the model doesn't treat post-departure flight differently, then that
is correct. There is no separate stall model.
Inaccuracies in post-depature have been discussed for a long long time.
I've also stated for a long time that more work was going to be on the
stability and post-departure portions of the flight model. That work is
being done now.
Keep in mind that the employees here are pretty active on the net
and well-meaning. Naturally, anything that comes from an ICI employee
is generally taken as gospel. Sometimes this results in a
misunderstanding or opinion that becomes mis-information. This is
definately something we should be more careful about.
There are also the limits of this medium. It's very easy to miscontrue
a post when both parties may not be in that much disagreement at all.
Even what I consider obvious jokes always goes over someone's head.
-Pyro
MacCorMac
CJ Martin wrote:
snip
> The -wf- incident, and the current fallout, is pretty compelling
> proof that the ICI staff is NOT devoting a great deal of time to
> WB these
> days. In fact, Pyro practically admitted that on the ICI BBS, saying in
> effect
> that some short term (his words) delays on Warbirds because of things
> like
> Planetary Raiders will have long term benefits to all ICI's products.
> Well,I'm feeling kinda cheated by that...
snip
Hi Smut, et al...
I'm no insider with special info, I just watch and listen (and post once
in awhile :), but I noticed this trend about a month or so ago. My
read is that ICI has invested an awful lot of money in WB (salaries for
over a year, computers, offices, net access, etc.), and unless they had
personal fortunes to invest they've had to go to into big-time debt. And
face it, WB caters to only the most hard-core flight-simmers - not a
large and wealthy market. I think that ICI is targeting PR to a larger,
thus wealthier, market (PR has no real physics, no steep learning curve,
etc, from what I've gleaned), and that this is the market that will
enable ICI to succeed in the long run (ie - pay off it's debts and allow
them to live well - like John Romero (sp?) and the Doom folks at Id
- hehe, just kidding?).
Perhaps those bankrolling ICI are doing so based primarily on the
potential profits of the "more marketable" PR, and they want results now.
Perhaps, in the short run, WB has been allowed to "slide" because ICI is
thinking 1) No PR, less money or no money for WB improvements, current
and future 2) stuff developed for PR will port over to WB anyway, 3) PR
can guarantee ICI long-term success better than WB can, and 4) delayed WB
improvements are better than no improvements.
I admit I also feel kinda cheated, but I understand why it's the way it
is (assuming I'm not way off-base on this), and that this is necessary
for WB's long term success. I'm not defending ICI - it's not my place to
do so, and they sure don't need my help, anyway - just posing my current
theory on this matter.
If course, I've been wrong before (g)
MacCorMac
rend <Wild Bunch>
PS thank goodness people like Flet are stepping up to fill the void!
kat...@cris.com
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
>crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
That's not even *close* to the reason that was given at the time,
though.
If bandwidth had been the arguement, I don't think there would have
been much disagreement if -wf- was indeed eating too much of it. I've
heard several reasons for -wf-'s demise...from ICI employees...and
this is the first time I've heard "bandwidth" as the excuse. If that's
going to be the new arguement against it, I'd like to see some numbers
comparing the Sol missions that were run without -wf- (HT scrubbed it
before the first mission) and the practices that were run with it.
If bandwidth had indeed been a problem, it would have been a simple
matter and would not have needed the "it acts like a person" excuse.
>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
HT told Tone right before the first mission started that he preferred
-wf- not be used (because "-wf- acts like a person"). He was also told
that if -wf- was changed so that it didn't act like a person, he would
be more comfortable allowing it (no mention of a bandwidth-eating
impersonal -wf-). Naturally, tone was not willing to change his vision
of what -wf- should be, so he pulled the plug.
Additionally, because HT did not want -wf- online, it wasn't used for
the Sol missions. It could therefore have no effect whatsoever on
bandwidth or the resulting problems that caused Sol to be scrubbed.
Stating that -wf- may have been one of the reasons Sol had to be
scrubbed is a rewrite of history.
>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
>Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
>wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
>Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
>evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio. Even the
>system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
>the text buffer).
I often heard Killer on the radio "bragging" about the low percentages
being used during practices. If you're going to make the claim that
you've made, I'd be interested in hearing some percentages both from
actual Sol missions (when -wf- was not used) and from Sol practices
(when -wf- was used). Bandwidth was not an issue when -wf- was
"banned"...her personality and the ever important "ego factor" was the
issue. That's straight from one or more ICI employees I talked to
after the incident.
Kat
-Squid-
Greg Cisko
In article <31f4259b....@news.cris.com>, kat...@cris.com writes:
>I often heard Killer on the radio "bragging" about the low percentages
>being used during practices. If you're going to make the claim that
>you've made, I'd be interested in hearing some percentages both from
>actual Sol missions (when -wf- was not used) and from Sol practices
>(when -wf- was used). Bandwidth was not an issue when -wf- was
>"banned"...her personality and the ever important "ego factor" was the
Yep I keep checking some WB posts to see whats new... Eventually I will
come back. I have read just about all the -wf- posts. -wf- sounds like
a pretty intense comms package/reflector. Comms was a big pain when I
flew WB, and it seems like nothing in that dept has changed. Too bad.
Also too bad the "ego factor" has to be in the mix. From what I read
in all these posts, it seems that Kat hit the nail right on the head.
ie someone out programed someone else. WTG tone :-)
jaguar
P.S. Imagine that. Programing something that seemed *too* human. Huh...
-Squid-
> Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) writes:
>
> The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
> crazy.
This is a joke, right? A computer, hooked up to the internet via
a modem, is eating too much bandwith? Too much where? On your server?
-Squid-
Bullseye
On 23 Jul 1996 03:35:04 GMT, lanc...@glink.net.hk (CHAN Lancelot the
Jedi) wrote:
> I don't believe warp on demand at first until yesterday, I fought with
>a big group of Reddies. They don't warp at all when I approach to 6. And I
I was flying last night, and approached a wing (2) of purps, I wont
say their names, but they're still in my scores last kills.
They must have both been new to warp@will, because they never warped
far enough away. It goes like this:
I close inside 30 and see that I'm about to engage a Barney wing,
which another Red was engaging without success. I close to 15 and see
my chance to (in honor of Scav) Go Diving Down. One is still a little
higher than the other, so I go nose up 10 degrees and invert (so I can
see em). Seems the high one was not even paying attention, 'cause he
continued right on after the other Red. Well that was my chance, so as
I flew over 'im, inverted, I eased on back on the stick, completed my
half loop, and the range started closing nicely. I'm comin' right up
'is butt, 9...8...7, smooth as glass, 6...5...4...open up w/ cannons &
guns, get what looked like about 3 or 4 pings and POOOOF, he makes a
micro warp to 5, then DISAPPEARS! SHIT...I HAD 'IM !!!!!!
So, now I'm PISSED. I bring the nose up to 30 deg, trim 'er out, and
start scanning the sky for 'is warpin ass. He's over my left shoulder
at range 17 and I got Alt on 'im, and his wingie is engaging the other
Red, he won't be a prob. So I pull a yo-yo to get even a little mo'
alt on 'im, and come around. He musta completely lost SA during his
little warp, cause he was just kinda flying along lookin' sleepy, and
COMPLETELY SMOOTH, no warping until I closed to within 6. Again this
time I got a few rounds into 'im before he warped away. Once again, he
didn't go far, and ended up lower, so I had 'im again. A little more
ACM and he was mine, but DAMN....THAT'S FRUSTRATING!!!!!!
It was the same with his wingie....fly, shoot, warp...fly, shoot,
warp......fly, shoot, kill....you get the picture.
Like I said before, DAMN...THAT'S FRUSTRATING!!!!!!!!
a noncheating, fairplaying WB'er whose pissed,
Kev
CHAN Lancelot the Jedi
In article <Caligula-220...@news.cris.com>, Cali...@cris.com
says...
>Well.... The flight model problem turned out not to be a bug in the
>front end itself, but rather a bug in one of the data file builders
>that got introduced god only knows when. The warping bugs we are
>having problems with because, needless to say, those people who have
>discovered "warp on demand" methods are NOT eager to share them with
>us, thus we have a hard time stomping them out. If you can get the
>people who have come up with clever cheats to contact us via EMail,
>or have a list of clever cheats that people have come up with, please
>let us know. Always trying to plug a few holes....
I don't believe warp on demand at first until yesterday, I fought with
a big group of Reddies. They don't warp at all when I approach to 6. And I
fired to them and pinged them well. Suddenly, it warped to 3 and to 6 then to
5 then to 2 then to 0 (almost crash)...... and it's direction doesn't change
at all (I think he's a newbie of warp on demand. Forget to pull). Also, same
situation happened many times but others seem to be having more experience in
warp on demand. They warp like hell! And trust me, they don't warp until you
fire. Don't said that my connection and their connection is bad. Both are very
smooth... until I fired.
dmds http://www.glink.net.hk/~lancelot
Michael Toler
Stephen W. Evans (Cali...@cris.com) wrote:
: The principle problem with Wildfire was that it ate up bandwidth like
: crazy. Think of it like this. If you are sending a message to a group
: of players (a squadron or your country), you send one message to the
: message to the host, this goes to WildFire which then sends one message
: per player contacted to the host that sends one message to each such player.
: Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
Agreed. I thought that the send a message to X thing was useless, along with
send a message to all. But to tell the truth, that was not used that often.
What Wildfire DID do, with a great deal of success, was regulate players.
A player would show up with no clue and set his radio to -wf- and ask
": orders"
and Wildfire would respond with the plane he was suppose to fly,
the field he was to report to, and who was in charge of his flight.
IN THE US PRACTICES, WE WERE COMPLETELY ORGANIZED AND READY TO ROLL
IN LESS THAN 10 MINUTES. IN LESS THAN 5 ON THE SECOND FRAMES OF THE
PRACTICES.
And NO US pilot will attribute this to anything BUT -wf-.
: This is entirely ungood from a
: bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
: reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed.
NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!!
WF was NEVER used in the actual scenario. At all. Period. -HT- pulled
the plug before the first plane took off on the first mission.
: There were alot of msg's flying
: along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
: Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
: wastes it. We optimize the game to try to cut DOWN on bandwidth usage!
: Why do you think there aren't radio macro's in the game? HT didn't want
: evenone having long ass kill Macro's to jam up the radio.
Agreed.
: Even the
: system messages are going to be pared down soon. (Too much yellow on
: the text buffer).
About time for that.
Sean Long
John Killer Macqueen wrote:
[snip]
> but HT, and I for
> that matter feel its harmful to have a non-player program to have that
> much permanent effect on the game. Effect that takes the game away
> from the direction of direct human-human interaction. Effect that
> takes that direct interaction aspect away from group interaction,
> co-ordination, and execution and put it in the hands of a computer
> program.
Get rid of otto then. Or maybe ACK doesn't affect game play? Hmmm I
seem to remember HUNDREDS of times when otto kept me from keeling
someone who dove back into their AAA umbrella. I remember many times I
nursed a wounded plane back to a field, to a landing due to the
interference of a non-player program. Direct interference in gameplay
is the standard? Then otto should go.
Killer, you cited the initial confusion and barriers to communication
that resulted the first time wf was used. By the second or third sortie
however, wf was not a barrier any more, and cut by nearly 80% the chaos
on the ground. In addition, wf provided the services a ground
controller in real life might be able to give. In real life, 2 airborn
planes may depend on a more powerfully transmitting ground station to
relay commands. When people became comfortable with using wf
(strangely, very shortly after tone posted her "vocabulary" ;), instead
of a barrier to interpersonal communication, wf acted as a
content-enhancer, in the sense that messages tended to be repeated less
often, and people could quit broadcasting requests for info and
informative replies. Personal communications were easier, since the
endless repeated messages were almost completely gone.
As for keeping the game personal, the obligatory 25 minutes of chaos
before a scenario frame is intensely personal... The extra 90 cents
given to ICI for spending that extra personal time is not well spent
imo. If I want to spend $2.00/hr practicing admin skills, I'd volunteer
to do admin in my squad at work, and get paid for it instead.
eagl
wwaters
> That's probably good advice Eagl, even though when I see a report by
> somebody like Mili, I HAVE to give it credence (or he'll kill me)
>
> I had a weird experience similar to that of (? damn forgot to see who it
> was two articles up...) where I got teleported to Greenlandia and was
> getting all of their transmissions but still in my good old purp squad.
>
> Its possible that there is a benign and accidental cause for this
> phenonmenon. If not however, I vote to let GTOJON loose on his family!
>
> (that would be a form of CAPITAL punishment... n'est pas?)
>
> Chry hey you have to find out if he is realy cheatin before I keel him
and and his family;) but my apologies if its some kinda mistake!
and remeber I DONT KILL DOGS... FAMILIES YES CATS YES WHALES YES
WOMEN YES!!! KIDS ...... WELL DEPENDS!!!BUT MOSTLY YES
BUT NEVER EVER DOGS UNLESS ITS A CHUWOWWA (DONT KNOW ABOUT SPELLING BUT A SMALL RAT LIKE
MEXICAN DOG)
well all in good humor!!( mabye bad humor?)
later GTOJON VF-17
Geof Evans
I don't really want to add to any threads that might vilify a player
for warping on *demand* but...twice now I have followed an F6F of an
unnamed (thus far :) colour....figuring he didn't see me closing on
his 6 because of the Hellcats dismal rear view (I like this feature :)
and holding my fire till range 6 (fast closure and 4 x 20mm) then I'd
open up them guns...at range 4 (also my .conv setting, so whammo!) I
can see the hits...this should be really tearing his airframe up is what
I'm gleefully thinking...and then POOF! he dissappears.
No reappearance elsewhere nearby...just nothing. I fly around for a bit
hoping to see him decloak...but nothing eventuates. No message from the
System: xxxx leaves...System: xxxx has aborted flight...zippo, ziltch.
Both times I had a Gold with me who witnessed the entire incident and
expressed equal confusion to myself. Would this be a deliberate modem
tweak ? Both times, the plane was the same colour/type. Flew straight
and level, until the strikes upon the airframe appeared...then vanished
into thin air. No manuevring, nothing. Almost like they were waiting....
I don't really care too much, still plenty of fish etc...but it is one
of those things that I wouldn't mind knowing what *is* going on....
Doc.
--
___________________________________________________________________
|| Geof Evans !2! Baby! | DOMAIN:rxx...@minyos.its.rmit.EDU.AU ||
|| God is a comedian playing to an audience too frightened to laugh. ||
-------------------------------------------------------------------
kat...@cris.com
Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>By the way, if you are sitting in the tower, the endless streams of
>radio 100 messages are either from people inflight or people in the
>room with you, if no one was inflight it was "in your room only" traffic.
You cannot hear or send channel 100 messages to pilots in the air from
the tower...surely you knew that, right?
Channel 100 is silent in the tower except for messages sent from those
in the same "room". Messages you send on channel 100 when in the tower
stay withing the room. There is no way to communicate with "all" from
the tower, as you can in the air with channel 100.
Kat
MJes...@aol.com
Art Day <pd...@kaiwan.com> wrote:
>In article <Caligula-220...@news.cris.com> Stephen W. Evans,
>Cali...@cris.com writes:
>
>>We like the orders part, and we are working on making radio channels
>>arbitrarily tuneable at some point in the future (thus eliminating
>>the trouble of either sending to one person, your country, or your
>>whole squadron). But I don't see much difference in functionality
>>between that and having squadron frequencies.
>
>Squad freq (110) doesn't work well when the host keeps disbanding the
>squads every couple of weeks.<g>
>
Spent an annoying 5 minutes this evening trying to find one of our
squadron mates who could successfully start a squad. At least five of us
tried, only to get the "Squadron creation failed due to an unknown
error" message.
The squadron database seems to have a few loose links in it ;)
- Matt
WB: para
JG14
CJ Martin
In article <31f57527....@news.cris.com>, kat...@cris.com wrote:
>Cali...@cris.com (Stephen W. Evans) wrote:
>
>>By the way, if you are sitting in the tower, the endless streams of
>>radio 100 messages are either from people inflight or people in the
>>room with you, if no one was inflight it was "in your room only" traffic.
>
>You cannot hear or send channel 100 messages to pilots in the air from
>the tower...surely you knew that, right?
LOL!
>Channel 100 is silent in the tower except for messages sent from those
>in the same "room". Messages you send on channel 100 when in the tower
>stay withing the room. There is no way to communicate with "all" from
>the tower, as you can in the air with channel 100.
>
>
>Kat
You mean even Cal is confused by the current radio setup? Who would have
'thunk' it?!
I've missed a number of post's on the subject of -wf-, and why ICI (read HT)
killed her, so rather than try to address any specific point, let me just say
this:
IMHO, ICI has lost their way with WarBirds. Now don't get all spooled up yet,
hear me out. The -wf- incident, and the current fallout, is pretty compelling
proof that the ICI staff is NOT devoting a great deal of time to WB these
days. In fact, Pyro practically admitted that on the ICI BBS, saying in effect
that some short term (his words) delays on Warbirds because of things like
Planetary Raiders will have long term benefits to all ICI's products. Well,
I'm feeling kinda cheated by that...I remember all the cool things that were
discussed and even demo'd during beta (Remember the 'Big Secret'? When was the
last time you heard "GunJam is a putz?"). Now I have to sit and wait while PR
is developed, and then perhaps a Mech game too, while progress on WarBirds
slows to a crawl.
It is my contention that these 'other projects' are adversely affecting the
support for WarBirds, and it seems that even within ICI, one hand does not
know what the other is doing.
Case in point: Warp cheating. Widely reported on the ICI BBS, and acknowledged
by Pyro as 'under investigation'...and then Cal comes out and says he knows
nothing about it! Oh, come on now...that is silly. Every one knows it is
happening, it so getting worse and worse, and now we are being told there is
no problem! LOL! If it is not outright cheating, then there is something
*seriously* wrong with the host. Denial will not make the problem go
away...but it will make the players go away.
Another case in point: Wildfire. Cal comes op with this long bandwidth
discussion which was never given as a reason for HT pulling the plug in the
past. Now Killer supports HT (sorry Cal), and the real issue, the crappy comm
setup, is getting ignored! Never mind that Killer never saw -wf- in action.
God help us that a *player* came up with a better way to do something...and
make no mistake, -wf- was a better way. Cal even tried to insinuate that -wf-
may have had a roll in the postponement of the entire event...my gosh, how
much more ignorance must we players be expected to swallow? Treat us like
morons at your own peril...
The host is more flaky than ever, with mini warps back with a vengeance. Lemme
guess, Cal doesn't know about that problem either, right?
In a way, this is All ICI's Fault. They wanted us to beta test for them, and
they needed us worse than we needed them. Now some of us feel a certain sense
of ownership in the game. We all love it, we all want Big Things for it.
Lately, the ICI staff seems somewhat distracted, confused, and downright wrong
about certain things that have happened or are happening in the game. Things
need to change. All of ICI's oars need to be pulling in the same direction.
That direction needs to be more clearly defined.
I used to think we players could make suggestions that would improve the
game...certainly that was the case during beta. But now, I rarely bother. So
many good ideas have been put out that I fear most have been forgotten.
Few if any have made it into the game. Some of us had such high hopes...
Perhaps PR will allow for a better WB. I don't see it, however. I think ICI
has lost their way, and I pray that they return to their roots before it is
too late.
That's all.
Smut
Trips
Greg Cisko wrote:
>
> In article <7187cc$7300.30@NEWS>, tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) writes:
> >IMHO, ICI has lost their way with WarBirds. Now don't get all spooled up yet,
> >hear me out. The -wf- incident, and the current fallout, is pretty compelling
> >proof that the ICI staff is NOT devoting a great deal of time to WB these
> >days. In fact, Pyro practically admitted that on the ICI BBS, saying in effect
> >that some short term (his words) delays on Warbirds because of things like
> >Planetary Raiders will have long term benefits to all ICI's products. Well,
> >I'm feeling kinda cheated by that...I remember all the cool things that were
> >discussed and even demo'd during beta (Remember the 'Big Secret'? When was the
>
Don't feel too cheated... The thing that doesn't get mentioned is that Planetary Raiders is also
being delayed because necessary fixes to WarBirds are taking place too... No one here is giving
up development on Warbirds because of Planetary Raiders... it's just that we're realizing that
we can't be a one product company if we want to succeed.
> The 'Big Secret'? OH MY GAWD!!!! That was so *long* ago, I was still flying
> regularly :-) I remember the digitized speech very vividly. It was, & would
> have been very cool. BTW, I agree completely with everything smut said, and
> cut all that stuff to save space.
>
> About wf??? I do think it was a knee-jerk reaction in pulling it. Without
> putting enough time to understand the whole deal (like kat said). I also
> know a bit about how much of a cluster *F* the comms are. I was a CO for
> the 317th for a time. The most difficult part of coordinating flights was
> communicating properly. I read Killers comments about the "fog of war". I
> just do not agree that the way it is now (which is really not much different
> from what it was back then) is more realistic. Typing alot and flying is not
> very realistic. Also if you can choose to use it or not, I don't see what the
> big deal is? Maybe ICI is worried about copywrite issues or something. That
> really is about the only thing that makes sense to me.
The most difficult thing about coordinating flights on the Japanese side was communications
too... if the US forces had been allowed to use Wildfire during the event it would hardly have
been fair IMHO. (That's just MY opinion, I do NOT speak for ICI on the Wildfire issue... As a
pilot for the IJA, I was completely unaware of the existence of Wildfire until after the
fact...)
Trips
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
Trips <tr...@cris.com> wrote:
>The most difficult thing about coordinating flights on the Japanese side was communications
>too... if the US forces had been allowed to use Wildfire during the event it would hardly have
>been fair IMHO. (That's just MY opinion, I do NOT speak for ICI on the Wildfire issue... As a
>pilot for the IJA, I was completely unaware of the existence of Wildfire until after the
>fact...)
Yup, but not Tone knew this and offered to setup -wf- for the IJA side
too. HT squashed it anyway. In fact, if the reasoning had been that
the IJA side didn't have time to get used to and implement -wf-
effectively, I'm sure Wildfire would be still around for the next
scenario. Question is, do you think -wf- would have added to the
experience or diminished it?
>Trips
Steve Anderson
First off, Caligula, I apologize if my post seemed a bit angry. I
was, and though I tried to rein it in, I probably should have sat on
the message for a day first.
eyas>First, I am sure ICI is aware of how the latest deliberate warp
eyas>scourge is accomplished.
cal>>I haven't heard jack shit about it. Please, fill me in if you think
cal>>I know because I'd sure like to hear about it.
I will, through email. I agree completely with Duck (another
posting), that the instances of netwarps looking like warpdrive far
outnumber deliberate cheating. But I have seen netwarps (lots), and
these, sir, are no netwarps. Pending a fix, I think the less said
publicly about it, the better.
cal>>By the way, if you are sitting in the tower, the endless streams of
cal>>radio 100 messages are either from people inflight or people in the
cal>>room with you, if no one was inflight it was "in your room only" traffic.
Oops.. yes, I know how the radio works. I was referring to endless
streams of "Hey CO, where do I go" on the COUNTRY channel. I think we
agree that minor (IMHO) changes would make things much better,
especially in large scenarios.
For instance, if you could say something like "/:BOOM Damn fine system
you have here!" Instead of "/.radio 4 BOOM /Damn fine system you have
here! /.radio 4 yada" it would go a long way to reducing lazy use of
broadcast channels. I even added the leading ':' so the host didn't
have to parse & match the first word to see if it is a player ID.
The chaos before a scenario is just aggravating, and no part of the
"fog of war" I can imagine. Yes, during the run, use of the country
channel was fairly disciplined. Using -wf- went a long way to
alleviate the 15 minutes of reading text buffers preceeding each
event.
cal>>The frames I flew (IJA) section leaders and people reporting SBD's were
cal>>the only ones allowed to use the country channel. All the other groups
cal>>were organized into squadrons and used 110 for "normal" traffic. This
cal>>worked just fine without any message reflectors.
I agree. You have a point - but - how does a scout talk to all the
SBDs? By telling his group ldr, who then does, uh.... the radio
retune dance to SBD leader, who types to his group - sheese. Seems
like an exercise in typing to me, not realistic, not fun.
The point is that message relaying would be very useful. Allowed use
would of course be up to COs and GMs, but the facility should be in
the host. Putting it there cleverly (see Tone's post for details - he
has thought a lot about this.) would alleviate the text bandwidth
required. And yes, I agree -wf- had a bandwidth effect, we just
disagree about the amount relative to other demands on bandwidth. You
are the expert here; it is silly for me to argue that text, even
1:many text, has no effect compared to vector&tracer 1:many messages.
I'm still of that opinion, but I won't argue about it. :)
cal>>We like the orders part, and we are working on making radio channels
cal>>arbitrarily tuneable at some point in the future (thus eliminating
cal>>the trouble of either sending to one person, your country, or your
cal>>whole squadron). But I don't see much difference in functionality
cal>>between that and having squadron frequencies.
I am glad you agree with the "orders" part, and are planning on adding
both these features. If you could address messages to squadrons, that
would be the missing piece. Consider, in -wf- usage: The SBD group
all had handles like: "fubr <US SBD1>" or "foo- <US f6f>". Typing
"/:sbd1 bandits se hi!" should allow fubr to send directly to all same
country sbds, without going through the sbd squadron leader. What if
the squadron leader is dead, and unable to relay messages? Using the
handle text in this way was ingenious.
And now, what got my dander up. What Smut referred to as "mean
spirited" I hope was just hyperbole on your part. Read carefully,
now, as I always try to do.
eyas>To say that *Wildfire* was actually RESPONSIBLE for cancelling
eyas>Solomons is both ludicrous and infuriating. Wildfire was squelched well
eyas>before the disastrous "dumpster" frame.
cal>Yepper that IS true.... Message traffic wasn't that BIG a factor, but it
cal>IS still a factor. What hosed the Solomons scenario was the unfortunate
cal>fact that the entire Internet barfed that day.
...
cal>Besides, I didn't say WildFire was responsible for cancelling Solomons,
cal>I will leave the cite, which you left here but apparently didn't bother
cal>to read, to give you another shot at it.
cal>...
Now, now, waaaaait a minute. Your first message may have been
ambiguous, but I read it most carefully. I agree the Internet barfing
was the cause of the cancellation, and am very glad to see ICI adding
hardware & effort to make it work. But you said, in a more complete
citing:
cal>Basically WildFire turns an N+1 operation into a 2N+2 operation where N is
cal>the number of players on your "channel". This is entirely ungood from a
cal>bandwidth and message processing standpoint and might well be one of the
cal>reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed. There were alot of msg's flying
cal>along the WildFire line that did help reduce what bandwidth we had.
cal>Now, of course, we have more bandwidth, but something like WildFire just
cal>wastes it.
Doesn't "This" in line 2 refer to WildFire? Doesn't ".. and might well be
one of the reasons that the Solomons got scrubbed" attribute the cancellation
to -wf-?
OK, you said "might well be one of the reasons". Kind of weak
attribution, but you went on to say "something like WildFire just
wastes it.", which tripped my breaker. It was far from a waste of
bandwidth, in my opinion.
Tone worked hard on the thing, it was wonderful, and it was abruptly
squashed by HT. Perhaps you were not aware of these three factors,
being a benighted IJA flyer.
Speaking of HT, I can see the collision of 'babies' which came up to
this. Tone's baby was an AI, pure and simple. He _tried_ to make it
personable, for fun and entertainment. This rubbed HT the wrong way,
as he does not want 'bots' masquarading as humans getting in to WB.
(Except "Ack Weenies", eh Kat?)
Fine, I can understand both viewpoints. Lets move on. This is a
great game/sim here (my VISA bill attests to this), and we all want it to
be the best it can be.
Best Regards,
A long winded Eyas
John Killer Macqueen
tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) wrote:
>I've missed a number of post's on the subject of -wf-, and why ICI (read HT)
>killed her, so rather than try to address any specific point, let me just say
>this:
>IMHO, ICI has lost their way with WarBirds. Now don't get all spooled up yet,
>hear me out. The -wf- incident, and the current fallout, is pretty compelling
>proof that the ICI staff is NOT devoting a great deal of time to WB these
>days. In fact, Pyro practically admitted that on the ICI BBS, saying in effect
>that some short term (his words) delays on Warbirds because of things like
>Planetary Raiders will have long term benefits to all ICI's products. Well,
>I'm feeling kinda cheated by that...I remember all the cool things that were
>discussed and even demo'd during beta (Remember the 'Big Secret'? When was the
>last time you heard "GunJam is a putz?"). Now I have to sit and wait while PR
>is developed, and then perhaps a Mech game too, while progress on WarBirds
>slows to a crawl.
Not at all the case smut. You just don't know whats going on and we
cannot tell it all. The things that are happening now with WB are just
alot tougher to get done, and some are requiring some pretty extensive
re-writes of code. You haven't heard Gunjam is a putz because it
crashes every Win95 Machine online when its done, and its not going to
be easy to get working.
Were doing what we have to do to stay in business. Weve spent millions
getting this thing going and we have to what we have to do to survive.
>It is my contention that these 'other projects' are adversely affecting the
>support for WarBirds, and it seems that even within ICI, one hand does not
>know what the other is doing.
Of course any other project will adversely affect Warbirds, but we
have to have other products or warbirds will go away completely, is
that a tough thing to understand?
Much of whats bieng done and tested for PR will fall back into
warbirds at the same time, we are absolutely trying to maximize
progress in both areas at the same time.
>Case in point: Warp cheating. Widely reported on the ICI BBS, and acknowledged
>by Pyro as 'under investigation'...and then Cal comes out and says he knows
>nothing about it! Oh, come on now...that is silly. Every one knows it is
>happening, it so getting worse and worse, and now we are being told there is
>no problem! LOL! If it is not outright cheating, then there is something
>*seriously* wrong with the host. Denial will not make the problem go
>away...but it will make the players go away.
Get real, weve know about this forever, I was well aware of it as was
HT months ago. The problem is that Win95 leaves so many ways to do
this its a royal pain if not impossible to eliminate it alltogether.
What Cal was refferring to was the fact that no -PLAYER- (such as you)
is telling him how they are specifically inducing warps.
I could rattle off a half a dozen ways myself, and probably come up
with a few new ones if I tried. I sorry we cannot fix them all in a
day, or week, or month. We cannot get rid of this altogether -ever-
You should know this.
>Another case in point: Wildfire. Cal comes op with this long bandwidth
>discussion which was never given as a reason for HT pulling the plug in the
>past. Now Killer supports HT (sorry Cal), and the real issue, the crappy comm
>setup, is getting ignored! Never mind that Killer never saw -wf- in action.
>God help us that a *player* came up with a better way to do something...and
>make no mistake, -wf- was a better way. Cal even tried to insinuate that -wf-
>may have had a roll in the postponement of the entire event...my gosh, how
>much more ignorance must we players be expected to swallow? Treat us like
>morons at your own peril...
Cal has his concerns about -wf-, HT has his, and I have mine, and none
of them are the same smut. The treating people like morons works both
ways as well. HT made the call, he's got the authority on that. I'll
back him whether I think he's right or not.
Cal didn't get to see wildfire, I didn't get to see it either, I was
too damn busy working at the time and I wasn't in the scenario. I had
planned to take a look at it but there wasn't much point after HT and
tone talked.
Personally I have mixed feelings on -wf-. I think its a great tool, I
have alot respect for tone's work. It's just not that simple.
Which leads to my other problem with -wf-, having outside programs
integral to our host and game function is a bad thing unless we have
source and complete license for the code. I don't think tone wants to
give that away, though I may be wrong.
>The host is more flaky than ever, with mini warps back with a vengeance. Lemme
>guess, Cal doesn't know about that problem either, right?
>In a way, this is All ICI's Fault. They wanted us to beta test for them, and
>they needed us worse than we needed them. Now some of us feel a certain sense
>of ownership in the game. We all love it, we all want Big Things for it.
>Lately, the ICI staff seems somewhat distracted, confused, and downright wrong
>about certain things that have happened or are happening in the game. Things
>need to change. All of ICI's oars need to be pulling in the same direction.
>That direction needs to be more clearly defined.
And alot of folks here are suffering from burnout from a year of
working obscene hours to give their level best shot at making their
dream game only to be trashed constantly on every comment or decision
they make, or failure of any feature to appear when it hits a snag in
implementation. In short we have to slow down some or lose our people.
The pace we worked at last year is impossible to maintain.
>I used to think we players could make suggestions that would improve the
>game...certainly that was the case during beta. But now, I rarely bother. So
>many good ideas have been put out that I fear most have been forgotten.
>Few if any have made it into the game. Some of us had such high hopes...
You don't have a clue whats going on here smut, all the ideas are
still there, they all have to get done. Weve been open for seven
months now, God what a lifetime, I guess if we can't slam out every
neat idea that every player has (plus our own) in that timeframe maybe
you guys should all go play that game that hasn't been able to do what
weve done in a year in seven years of trying.
Sometimes I wish we had gone to 4 updates a year and not thrown
things out as soon as they are done. Nowadays if we don't have a new
version out within 4 weeks of the last one we get crucified. What
other company tosses out new stuff as fast?
>Perhaps PR will allow for a better WB. I don't see it, however. I think ICI
>has lost their way, and I pray that they return to their roots before it is
>too late.
There no doubt about it. PR will change WB's damage model, it will
allow for multiple terrains to be used from the same front end instead
of a different front end for each terrain. it will change the way the
FE logs into the service and the way new versions get updated and alot
more.
Alot of this is done and bieng tested now, it will get to warbirds as
quick as we can put it in and no sooner. There are large and difficult
tasks bieng worked on here.
There one hell of alot going on here you aren't, can't and won't be
aware of smut, anyone with intelligence can figure that one out on
their own. If you don't want to be treated like a moron by me, don't
act like one.
fats
Trips <tr...@cris.com> wrote:
>The most difficult thing about coordinating flights on the Japanese side was communications
>too... if the US forces had been allowed to use Wildfire during the event it would hardly have
>been fair IMHO. (That's just MY opinion, I do NOT speak for ICI on the Wildfire issue... As a
>pilot for the IJA, I was completely unaware of the existence of Wildfire until after the
>fact...)
Japanese zekes didn't have radios...<g>
From Leph's message:
<<Tone offered to give -wf- to the IJA side as well. He had no
problems sharing this great tool at the time.>>
>Trips
Hptmn. Fats, 2./JG 53 "Pik As"
***Choose life -run now!***
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
kil...@www.icigames.com (John "Killer" Macqueen) wrote:
>There no doubt about it. PR will change WB's damage model, it will
>allow for multiple terrains to be used from the same front end instead
>of a different front end for each terrain. it will change the way the
>FE logs into the service and the way new versions get updated and alot
>more.
>Alot of this is done and bieng tested now, it will get to warbirds as
>quick as we can put it in and no sooner. There are large and difficult
>tasks bieng worked on here.
This might sound silly, but the more you give us this kind of info,
the more patient we will be IMO. It's a shame that we have to have a
huge flame-fest before we get any info on what is coming.
I know a simple screen-shot or two of the new terrain would help me to
be more understanding. Something to try would be to post a screenshot
or some hint on what is coming on the BBS every week, let us know what
you all are working so hard on. I think something simple like this
would go a long way toward the players' understanding that you are
working on things.
Just a hint.
L8er,
Bullseye
On 24 Jul 1996 14:30:22 GMT, M...@cris.com (Michael Carney) wrote:
>Agreed Thun, methinks when ICI does squash the methods of intentional
>warping, there are going to be alot of people who won't believe they have
>fixed it. Simply because they have gotten used to accusing (or at least
>thinking) that any player who warps from a position of disadvantage to
>a position of advantage is cheating. The simple fact is, the majority
>of (honest) warps that take place will be from a position of disadvantage.
I, for one, do not just accuse someone without first taking steps to
insure that my allegations are correct. If I accuse u, Duck, of
cheating for 45 MINUTES on ch100, are u going to answer? I think 45
min is sufficient time to try to quell any doubts, especially if the
pilot u accuse is still flying along just fine, i.e. no apparent
connection probs 'til shot at, and u can SEE him during these
attempts.
>Also (honest) warpers will be smooth untill engaged, then they will start
>to warp. (Because smoothing code can handle poor connects if pilot is
>flying straight and level, but when pilot starts to evade a bogey...)
I am completely aware of these micro warps for people with high ping
times during violent maneuvers, and can tell the difference in them
and an unnatural occurrence. They will be timed warps( x seconds
apart), and usually the same distance EVERY time.
>But in closing, lemme state that if anybody is caught cheating I am all
>for banning the dweebs and posting their handle and email address. BUT
>BE DAMN SURE THEY WERE CHEATING, because if you are wrong, you owe the
>pilot something that cannot be given.
Roger that, Duck. See above.
Just a pissed off, fair player,
Kev
Bullseye
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996 00:53:04 -0700, David Staines
<dsta...@concentric.net> wrote:
>Sorry bullseye... I'm still not convinced this is warp on demand.
After last night, I am completely convinced. Again, a purp (not 1 of
the 2 from the day before), and this time I'm gonna say his name,
Hey everyone, FOX8 is a cheater !!!! I accused him and he refused to
answer, on channel 100 !!!
Last night between 8:30 and 9:30 Texas time, I encountered this
pissant in the arena. During our first engagement (in which he USED
WARP@WILL, the little CHEAT) I was flying between 1,4 and 3.
After I finally killed 'im, I was pretty pissed. So I thought (being
the reasonable person that i am), that I'd just go to another part of
the Arena rather than be frustrated anymore by the little SHITHEAD!
So, off I go. I take a northerly heading, flying over 2 to 7. As I get
within vis of 7....LO AND BEHOLD, there's that purple P38 again, AND
HE'S COMING RIGHT FOR ME, like he KNEW it was me.
So to make sure it was him again, I killed him. Sure enough,
System: Kill of fox8 awarded to beye
I've come to believe that not only are A LOT OF PEOPLE USING IT, but
ITS MORE REFINED THAN WHEN IT STARTED, i.e....
Once during the second engagement with FOX8, he seemed to have some
kind of SUPER ENGINE. I was behind at about 10-11, and all the
sudden, he started accellerating. I was at 275 kts or so, and he
opened up the range at about the same rate as closure would be if we
were in a head-on pass. AND SMOOTH...NOT WARPING. He kept this going
far too long for it to be a warp.
> One
>thing that is common is that you pinged the aircraft a few times then it
>warped. I wonder if it is possible that upon occasion, when a part of
>an aircraft is destroyed, if it is causing some kind of warping
>problem. I have seen this very thing happen also. I was flying and
>everything was smooth, then I started encountering the same problem.
>The plane would warp whenever I started to ping him repeatedly. I got
>pretty pissed, but found that this was happening with the next 10 or so
>different planes I engaged. I believe this to be something of a bug for
>the most-part. I just wish ICI would acknowledge it and do something
I would tend to agree with u a month ago....but now...no, this is no
bug, its a HACK. Besides, I don't know anything about programming, but
if it was a bug, why did it take so long to manifest itself after the
release of v1.08....huh????
>about it. I do, however, believe that some people have the warp on
>demand figured out, and are using it. I just don't think that it is
>more than a handful of people.
I would have agreed here, too.....a MONTH ago. Now there are more
than just a handful. And the number is growing, as is the HACK itself,
includes more features all the time.
I went so far as to call ICI today and talk to them at length about my
encounters with the hackers, names and all, so maybe at least a couple
will be gone. They were discussing the issue when I called, they are
"working on it, and can track the activities of the hacked FE's better
than most realize." That's a quote from ICI.
What's REALLY funny though, Thun, is that all of the ones I've engaged
using it, REALLY NEED IT BAD because they can't fly for shit !!!!
I mean...they're using it, and I STILL GET THE KILL, now THAT'S
FUNNY!!!
A noncheating, fairplaying WB'er whose PISSED!
Kev
>
>-Thunder, out
Greg Cisko
In article <4t5g2j$e...@liberator.concentric.net>, kil...@www.icigames.com (John "Killer" Macqueen) writes:
>Personally I have mixed feelings on -wf-. I think its a great tool, I
>have alot respect for tone's work. It's just not that simple.
>
>Which leads to my other problem with -wf-, having outside programs
>integral to our host and game function is a bad thing unless we have
>source and complete license for the code. I don't think tone wants to
Bingo... I like I said in my previous post. Licensing. Oh well I did
appreciate killers reply. It really makes sense :-)
jaguar
>give that away, though I may be wrong.
>John MacQueen
Bullseye
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996 15:29:20 GMT, kil...@www.icigames.com (John
"Killer" Macqueen) wrote:
-------mongoloid snip---------
>Get real, weve know about this forever, I was well aware of it as was
>HT months ago. The problem is that Win95 leaves so many ways to do
>this its a royal pain if not impossible to eliminate it alltogether.
>What Cal was refferring to was the fact that no -PLAYER- (such as you)
>is telling him how they are specifically inducing warps.
>I could rattle off a half a dozen ways myself, and probably come up
>with a few new ones if I tried. I sorry we cannot fix them all in a
>day, or week, or month. We cannot get rid of this altogether -ever-
>You should know this.
Don't sweat it John...all u guys have to do is to <DELETE> the people
u catch doing it. Cheaters are just like Cockroaches, if u kill every
one of 'em u see, each and every day, pretty soon they're all gone.
ICI should really think about making this a PRIORITY. I know there are
a lot of things on the ICI plate right now, but the roaches are REALLY
gettin' bad in the Arena!
A fair-playing pilot who's a little pissed,
Kev
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
ke...@cris.com (Bullseye) wrote:
>Once during the second engagement with FOX8, he seemed to have some
>kind of SUPER ENGINE. I was behind at about 10-11, and all the
>sudden, he started accellerating. I was at 275 kts or so, and he
>opened up the range at about the same rate as closure would be if we
>were in a head-on pass. AND SMOOTH...NOT WARPING. He kept this going
>far too long for it to be a warp.
Well, I sometimes have a bad connect. I can tell you one affect the
smoothing code has is this exact the behavior you are describing.
When I see warps, alot of the time thats exactly what they look like.
Sounds to me like a bad connect. The only guys I start to wonder
about are the ones that just instantly vanish for a few secs at a
time.
From what you are describing, Fox8 may just have had a bad connect.
Did you ask him about his connect first in private? Are you sure he
speaks english?
Stephen W. Evans
In article <7187cc$7300.30@NEWS>, tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) wrote:
>It is my contention that these 'other projects' are adversely affecting the
>support for WarBirds, and it seems that even within ICI, one hand does not
>know what the other is doing.
Well, we DO know what the other "hand" is doing.....
>Case in point: Warp cheating. Widely reported on the ICI BBS, and acknowledged
>by Pyro as 'under investigation'...and then Cal comes out and says he knows
>nothing about it! Oh, come on now...that is silly. Every one knows it is
>happening, it so getting worse and worse, and now we are being told there is
>no problem! LOL! If it is not outright cheating, then there is something
>*seriously* wrong with the host. Denial will not make the problem go
>away...but it will make the players go away.
Sorry dude, I didn't say that I didn't know the problem existed, what I
was saying was that NO ONE HAD GIVEN ME EXAMPLES. Now at least one person
has, and with what they told me, I just don't know what the hell to do.
Basically there isn't alot we can do about people who are willing to go
out of their way to make their connections warpy. I've been checking into
this and have found that one squadron went so far as to distribute plans
on how to add a hardware switch to an external modem to act as a sort of
pseudo cloaking device.
Fine, no problem. We write shitloads of code to ease out internet latency
and some moron decides to use a 59 cent switch to deliberately fuck up
his comms. Then, deciding other people must be doing the same thing because
by golly HE sees warps still he decides his whole squad has to do it to "get
parity". The person that Emailed me didn't tell me WHICH squad did it,
and I didn't ask, probably because I would have been tempted to ban the
whole bloody lot of them, guilty or innocent alike. Of course HT wouldn't
have let me, but I woulda been damn tempted.
So, with regard to connection warps.... We have two choices, and I'll let
the players get their two cents in. First, we can start tracking updates,
ect, and logging when people cut in and out and what/who was around when
they did it. Then we find people who seem to convieniently warp when
there are enemy around and we ban the suckers. The second is that
we count on our players to have a reasonable amount of honor and not
do this kinda crap.
Apparently the second option isn't that great. The problem is that people
are going so far as to snailmail circuit diagrams of serial cables and
where to put a switch, so I guess there just isn't much we can count on
in the way of player honesty since it took this long for someone to bother
to inform us.
The only thing that bothers me about the first option is that some people
who have genuine warping problems not of their own devising are going to
get caught up in it. That kinda sucks for them, but its an artifically
generated problem, so its got to have an artifically generated solution.
Sure someone thats banned can just generate a new account with a new
credit card. Then maybe having had one account deleted they will be alitle
nicer and not cheat. Or Not, eventually they will run out of credit cards
they can use ;-)
>Another case in point: Wildfire. Cal comes op with this long bandwidth
>discussion which was never given as a reason for HT pulling the plug in the
>past. Now Killer supports HT (sorry Cal), and the real issue, the crappy comm
>setup, is getting ignored! Never mind that Killer never saw -wf- in action.
>God help us that a *player* came up with a better way to do something...and
>make no mistake, -wf- was a better way. Cal even tried to insinuate that -wf-
>may have had a roll in the postponement of the entire event...my gosh, how
>much more ignorance must we players be expected to swallow? Treat us like
>morons at your own peril...
I was WRONG about WildFire having any influence on "cancelling" the Solomons,
apparently that decision was made by DoK and had nothing to do with WF.
I will, however add at least this one cavaet, and that is I was not, and am
still not wrong about it hurting host performance. At the time of the Solomons
we were running off a single T1 on a box with on 2 60MHz CPU's. Now we have
two T1's and 4 85MHz CPU's. At the time of the Solomons we were having
problems with "normal" message traffic between processes, much less the boost
in message traffic WildFire caused. I didn't care about the feel of WildFire,
or that it seemed like a human, or changed the nature of the game. That wasn't
my responsibility at the time. I was concerned ONLY with host performance
under the message load from connected players. I gamed it out and under
almost ALL circumstances WildFire contributed to increased message traffic
to the point where some messages would get lost (remember the old missing
radio messages bug that isn't around anymore?).
>The host is more flaky than ever, with mini warps back with a vengeance. Lemme
>guess, Cal doesn't know about that problem either, right?
Well, actually, no, I didn't... Part of that is that for the last few weeks
I have been working on something designed to make it easier for new users to
connect to our game(s) and to get timely updates and such. Yeah there are alot
of old nasties hiding in our code, yeah we gotta get rid of them. I would
like NOTHING more than to just IGNORE Planetary Raiders, fancy Easy to Use
User Interfaces, and all that other stuff and JUST work on making WarBirds
a totally awesome game with every bell and whistle you can imagine.
I'll spend a bit of time in the air this afternoon SPECIFICALLY looking for
hacks/mini warps/ect. My connection is 10Mbps to the host and I will run
as clean as possible. Maybe I'll find something, maybe it will help, if
nothing else I will actually have an excuse to get to play the game for awhile
instead of having my head buring in rather boring "other things".
The problem is, as I noted at top, we do know what the other "hand" is doing,
and its been decided, (and a good decision IMHO) that ICI will NOT survive
as a "one game company". We have to get at least one other game out there
that appeals to a different audience and we have to do it ASAP otherwise
we will rather quickly go out of business and WarBirds will be nothing but
a fond memory. Now, since The Beginning, we have gone from 1 Programmer
(HiTech) to three (added me <Caligula> and Mandrake) and now to 5 (added
QUIZ and Random) to deal with this extra load. We are NOT ignoring WarBirds,
we will NEVER "ignore" WarBirds. We've done alot of the easy stuff in
WarBirds, and now we are working on some of the harder bits as well as having
to get rid of old artifacts (e.g. bugs). The stuff that Quiz has tucked in
for 1.09 is VERY cool but has taken a non-trivial amount of time.
>Lately, the ICI staff seems somewhat distracted, confused, and downright wrong
>about certain things that have happened or are happening in the game. Things
>need to change. All of ICI's oars need to be pulling in the same direction.
>That direction needs to be more clearly defined.
It's defined, it's just that we don't tend to publish our business plans
on usenet. As it is we give one HELL of alot more information here than
any other company I know of. Admittedly its all officially unofficial, but
its still more info than you get elsewhere :-)
>I used to think we players could make suggestions that would improve the
>game...certainly that was the case during beta. But now, I rarely bother. So
>many good ideas have been put out that I fear most have been forgotten.
>Few if any have made it into the game. Some of us had such high hopes...
Bullshit. Someone comes up with a good idea that can be quickly implemented
and it gets done. If it takes more work it might take alittle longer. We
certainly DO listen to player suggestions and complaints or we wouldn't
be bothering to read and post to usenet. I mean, gimme a break, how many
other companies can you regularly flame online and actually get responses
from? ;-)
>Perhaps PR will allow for a better WB. I don't see it, however. I think ICI
>has lost their way, and I pray that they return to their roots before it is
>too late.
PR will make for a better WarBirds. I WILL admit that if we spent all the
effort going on with ALL other projects (PR and the abortion from hell that
I am working on) then WarBirds WOULD be more improved. But as I said before,
we can't survive as a one game company. WarBirds targets the high end realism
combat flight simmer. Many people who "are good at flight sims" can't even
get the planes in WarBirds into the air at first. We lose not a few players
just because the sim is TOO realistic. We need other games to attract other
audiences. If we don't, we die, and WarBirds dies as well. SO, bear with
us for the next 6 months or so as we straighten this shit out. There WILL
be changes ect to WarBirds over that time, Planetary Raiders will hopefully
go out of beta, network performance will improve. These are things we NEED
to survive as a company and things that MUST be done. Its like all that
billing and administrative code I wrote. I could have gotten the Mac version
out a month or two earlier, but that other crap HAD to be written. I didn't
like it, the Mac users certainly wouldn't have liked it if I had told them
about it, but it had to be done.
Anyway back to the MAIN topic at hand.... We COULD monitor connection quality
from the host. It was decided earlier that this would be a Bad Thing in that
disconnnecting people who happen to suffer a temporary network latency would
be horribly unfair. We were HOPING that the players would realize that doing
things to deliberately stall their connection (yeah, there are shitloads of
things you can do in Win95 and the MacOS to do this) would hurt the game
overall and would refrain. Maybe we were wrong.
If it appears, from the volume of the screams, that we were indeed wrong I
will ask HiTech if I can code a connection monitor into the host. Basically
logging when people "blank" due to missed updates, and what their situation
was at the time. Maybe even an auto disconnect feature.... Instead of seeing
red beacons when your net acts up we'll just have to assume you're a hacker
and drop you right there...... see the problems?
--- Steve
Stephen W. Evans clgl - Caligula - WarBirds
ICI Host/Mac Programmer 4548 - Caligula - Air Warrior
cali...@cris.com Friends don't let friends do DOS.
PGP public key available by finger ev...@rex.pfc.mit.edu
My opinions are my own... etc ... etc ...
David Staines
Lephturn (Sean Conrad) wrote:
>
> ke...@cris.com (Bullseye) wrote:
>
> >Once during the second engagement with FOX8, he seemed to have some
> >kind of SUPER ENGINE. I was behind at about 10-11, and all the
> >sudden, he started accellerating. I was at 275 kts or so, and he
> >opened up the range at about the same rate as closure would be if we
> >were in a head-on pass. AND SMOOTH...NOT WARPING. He kept this going
> >far too long for it to be a warp.
>
> Well, I sometimes have a bad connect. I can tell you one affect the
> smoothing code has is this exact the behavior you are describing.
> When I see warps, alot of the time thats exactly what they look like.
> Sounds to me like a bad connect. The only guys I start to wonder
> about are the ones that just instantly vanish for a few secs at a
> time.
> From what you are describing, Fox8 may just have had a bad connect.
acceleration away from you... very indicative of a bad connect.
The original "warp on demand" people were prone to disappear and
re-appear on your 6. It is beleived that there is a way to induce this,
and I have to believe it. I actually was flying under the condition of
being invisible befor due to some kind of communications glitch. I was
seeing very smooth flight on all the enemy aircraft, but they could only
see me for 1 sec at a time if at all. I was able to get on their 6 very
easily (with VERY experienced pilots) as if they didn't see me. I
disengaged and logged off. I beleive that this is possible to induce
either via software or hardware patches. I don't believe that this is
something that many people are going to be able to do though.
Warps have always been noticed predominantly while you are on someone's
6 and at close range. Now, any perceived warp is seen as a "warp on
deman". In the case of Bullseye, I think the fact that he still got the
kills speaks in favor of the accusee. If it is not helping them get a
kill, it is not a cheat.
-Thunder, out
Mickey Kerkes
On Wed, 24 Jul 1996 07:47:59 GMT, tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin)
wrote:
Very nice post Smut, you seem to have summed it up pretty good.
-POPS-
Lephturn (Sean Conrad)
kil...@www.icigames.com (John "Killer" Macqueen) wrote:
>Thats not the whole story.
>Scenarios are supposed to guage the players ability to work together,
>set up a command staff, and organize and execute an effective chain of
>command ans battle plan. Wildfire, while an excellent tool, takes away
>from that aspect of the game, it removes some of the human aspect and
>"fog of war". Thats a huge part of deciding the outcomes of scenarios.
Well, gee, I play this game for fun. Sorry Killer, but anything that
takes away from the fun I'm not willing to pay $2.00 an hour for. Not
only is the 1/2 hour Charlie Foxtrot before a scenario frame
frustrating, but it isn't realistic either. Wildfire was the
equivalent of ground control. I pay to play WB to be a PILOT, not a
radio opperator, typist, or clerk.
Wildfire rewarded the playes who had worked together, set up a
command staff, organized, and set up an effective battle plan. All
Wildfire did was remove the confusion and frustration IMHO. Wildfire
really only helped if you pre-planned and were organised, I think it
enhanced that part of the scenario.
>WF also promotes people not talking directly to each other and has
>folks passing dialog through a third person.
I don't see the difference between Wildfire relaying a message and the
host doing it. I know who I'm talking to, and they know who is
talking to them. It's still person to person, regardless of what
passes the message along.
<snipped stuff about HT not liking Wildfire>
>The main point is that people are supposed to be doing alot what
>wildfire does.
My main point is that maybe your customers don't WANT to pay you guys
$2.00 /hr to do those things. I know I don't want to. Having
Wildfire handle those things makes the rest of the scenario much more
enjoyable for me.
> -wf- has very good elements but is taken too far in some respects.
>Granted there is plenty of room for improvement in the current host
>setup for radios, and other organizational tools on the ground. They
>will come, and that part of what wildfire does there is no problem
>with.
I fail to see why we should wait for ICI to get around to a fix when
we had a perfectly good one. At least we could have used -wf- untill
you guys got similar host functions and the radio fixed up.
>Basically had wildfire been allowed to be used, both sides would have
>to have that access, guaranteed to be privacy secure for each side,
>and it would have -totally- changed the scenario environment.
Tone offered to give -wf- to the IJA side as well. He had no problems
sharing this great tool at the time. As for -wf- totally changing the
scenario environment, I don't think it would have been THAT big of a
change, and it sure as hell would have been a change for the better
IMO.
> HT
>thinks for the worse. Some of you feel differently, but HT, and I for
>that matter feel its harmful to have a non-player program to have that
>much permanent effect on the game. Effect that takes the game away
>from the direction of direct human-human interaction. Effect that
>takes that direct interaction aspect away from group interaction,
>co-ordination, and execution and put it in the hands of a computer
>program.
Killer unless we are sitting in the same room we don't have direct
human-human interaction. The only question is what technology do you
use to simulate this. We don't have a radio or voice comms, so we
must make a text comm system with some special features to make up for
the problems. The host does this now, but Wildfire did it better
IMHO.
CJ Martin
In article <31F5B...@iastste.edu>, MacCorMac <jbb...@iastste.edu> wrote:
[snip]
>I admit I also feel kinda cheated, but I understand why it's the way it
>is (assuming I'm not way off-base on this), and that this is necessary
>for WB's long term success. I'm not defending ICI - it's not my place to
>do so, and they sure don't need my help, anyway - just posing my current
>theory on this matter.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree, to a point. Understanding
some of what is going on doesn't make me much happier. Seeing Cal attempt to
shift a small part of the blame for the Solomons slid was the last straw for
me. Now he is trying to make a furious backpedal...but just the fact that he
*tried* to shift the blame (even though not said directly) is a prime example
of the shift in attitude many of us have noted by ICI lately. Lashing out is
becoming more common for ICI these days, it seems...Pyro toasted Finn on the
BBS, Cal rants that no one has told him about the warp cheating, and from what
I understand (having not yet seen it), Killer has responded somewhat
negatively to my post.
This is not the ICI of old. I repeat, IMHO, they have lost their way. Whether
it is due to burnout, stress, money problems, whatever...that simple fact is
that things are not the same, and old promises are on hold indefinately.
It saddens me...
>If course, I've been wrong before (g)
As have I, LOL, as have I...
>MacCorMac
>rend <Wild Bunch>
Smut
>PS thank goodness people like Flet are stepping up to fill the void!
>
Trips
Lephturn (Sean Conrad) wrote:
>
> Trips <tr...@cris.com> wrote:
>
> >The most difficult thing about coordinating flights on the Japanese side was communications
> >too... if the US forces had been allowed to use Wildfire during the event it would hardly have
> >been fair IMHO. (That's just MY opinion, I do NOT speak for ICI on the Wildfire issue... As a
> >pilot for the IJA, I was completely unaware of the existence of Wildfire until after the
> >fact...)
>
> too. HT squashed it anyway. In fact, if the reasoning had been that
> the IJA side didn't have time to get used to and implement -wf-
> effectively, I'm sure Wildfire would be still around for the next
> scenario. Question is, do you think -wf- would have added to the
> experience or diminished it?
I wasn't aware that the offer had been made... I hadn't heard any mention of it
from the IJA commanders during preparations...
To answer your question fairly, I would have to try playing the game with
Wildfire... I didn't so I don't know if it would have enhanced or degraded my
experience...
I can see it being a great help to a CO during a frame, but I can also see it
being a hindrance in some ways... often newcomers to scenarios need extra
attention and handholding that a program like Wildfire may not have been able to
provide... but an attentive CO could take the extra bit of time to clarify matters
for a newcomer if need be, or shuttle him off to one of the squad leaders for
further personal attention... It's that very element of human interaction that I
imagine is what HT felt was being given up...
Since I didn't experience Wildfire firsthand, my remarks may be completely
inappropriate... if so, please understand that any slights on my part come from my
own ignarance, and not any bias on my part.
Thanks,
Trips
Claude Frederick Lumpkin
In article <Caligula-240...@news.cris.com>,
Stephen W. Evans <Cali...@cris.com> wrote:
>
>The stuff that Quiz has tucked in
>for 1.09 is VERY cool but has taken a non-trivial amount of time.
>
Perhaps part of the perception that little progress is occuring
in WB is the lack of "what's coming" we've had recently. Used to
be, we could check in on BK's page or read posts from the ICI
guys here or on the BBS, and say "oh, cool! We're gonna get
XXX!"
I just read a post from Killer mentioning Dopplar-shifted
(engine?) sounds and fixed joystick codes for WB95. Great!
But this is the first news I've heard since the rolling terrain
thread on what's coming.
I realize that you cannot say "in the next version, which will
be released in two weeks from Tuesday, you'll have XXX." Hell,
even vague "soon" messages will generate megabytes of impatient
"when!" posts . . . but I think a lot more people are willing
to flamelessly wait for new stuff, and would like to know
what's being worked on. Perhaps a part of the sentiment that
"the guys at ICI are lacking vision for the future of WarBirds"
is that the players aren't as much in on that vision as they
could be.
Yoss 8X (Patiently waiting for 1.09, and whatever
it will bring)
Jeff Walkup
Stephen W. Evans wrote:
> Anyway back to the MAIN topic at hand.... We COULD monitor connection quality
> from the host. It was decided earlier that this would be a Bad Thing in that
> disconnnecting people who happen to suffer a temporary network latency would
> be horribly unfair.
I understand it's a hard thing. Getting disco'd sucks no matter what,
and would be worse if it was forced on you by the host - BUT, speaking
of "fairness", it's a lot more fair to the dozens of *other* players
online if someone with a lousy connection gets booted. And you don't
necessarily have to "boot" them right away, you could start with a
warning message, and then move on to grounding them (returning them to
the tower), then if it stays bad, booting them altogether.
I'm talking about a general connection-quality requirement here, not
(only) about warp-inducers ... those @#$@#% should be round up and shot
IMO. ;)
You could run some kind of monitor program (let's call him "Mr.
Bandwidth" <G>) that evaluates your connection when you first log in,
and perhaps while in-flight as well. Mr. B could politely tell you "I'm
sorry your connection is too bad to play right now..." Perhaps, you
could even set up an additional Arena where connect-quality it not
monitored, so people with bad connects could still play (and pay ;).
I'm just frustrated here, because I caved in and got a CRIS account, to
the tune of an extra $20/mo (yeah I know I save .25/hr, that means about
4hrs per day every day a month to break even, I don't play quite *that*
much! ;) So here *I* am with this great (expensive) connection, but
then I'm forced to play with other people who have lousy connections.
-- Jeff "Walk" <jwa...@crl.com>
Michael Carney
David Staines (dsta...@concentric.net) wrote:
: Sorry bullseye... I'm still not convinced this is warp on demand.
: I just don't think that it is more than a handful of people.
: -Thunder, out
Agreed Thun, methinks when ICI does squash the methods of intentional
warping, there are going to be alot of people who won't believe they have
fixed it. Simply because they have gotten used to accusing (or at least
thinking) that any player who warps from a position of disadvantage to
a position of advantage is cheating. The simple fact is, the majority
of (honest) warps that take place will be from a position of disadvantage.
Also (honest) warpers will be smooth untill engaged, then they will start
to warp. (Because smoothing code can handle poor connects if pilot is
flying straight and level, but when pilot starts to evade a bogey...)
But in closing, lemme state that if anybody is caught cheating I am all
for banning the dweebs and posting their handle and email address. BUT
BE DAMN SURE THEY WERE CHEATING, because if you are wrong, you owe the
pilot something that cannot be given.
Regards,
Michael Carney aka duck
Greg Cisko
In article <7187cc$7300.30@NEWS>, tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) writes:
>IMHO, ICI has lost their way with WarBirds. Now don't get all spooled up yet,
>hear me out. The -wf- incident, and the current fallout, is pretty compelling
>proof that the ICI staff is NOT devoting a great deal of time to WB these
>days. In fact, Pyro practically admitted that on the ICI BBS, saying in effect
>that some short term (his words) delays on Warbirds because of things like
>Planetary Raiders will have long term benefits to all ICI's products. Well,
>I'm feeling kinda cheated by that...I remember all the cool things that were
>discussed and even demo'd during beta (Remember the 'Big Secret'? When was the
The 'Big Secret'? OH MY GAWD!!!! That was so *long* ago, I was still flying
regularly :-) I remember the digitized speech very vividly. It was, & would
have been very cool. BTW, I agree completely with everything smut said, and
cut all that stuff to save space.
About wf??? I do think it was a knee-jerk reaction in pulling it. Without
putting enough time to understand the whole deal (like kat said). I also
know a bit about how much of a cluster *F* the comms are. I was a CO for
the 317th for a time. The most difficult part of coordinating flights was
communicating properly. I read Killers comments about the "fog of war". I
just do not agree that the way it is now (which is really not much different
from what it was back then) is more realistic. Typing alot and flying is not
very realistic. Also if you can choose to use it or not, I don't see what the
big deal is? Maybe ICI is worried about copywrite issues or something. That
really is about the only thing that makes sense to me.
jaguar
"I'll be back" <to be spoken with an Austrian accent>
>Smut
>
MJes...@aol.com
tom...@mail.ameritel.net (CJ Martin) wrote:
>
>It is my contention that these 'other projects' are adversely affecting the
>support for WarBirds,
>and it seems that even within ICI, one hand does not
>know what the other is doing.
>
^^^^^
In my experience, this can be one of the symptoms of a small skilled team
working long hours on a difficult subject. When there are 30 things to do
and 10 team members, everybody does 5 things. No time to keep up more than
periferaly with the other 25. I worked this way on a flight test recently.
Now <sigh>, it's just 2 of us left in a holding mode and every time a problem
comes up the first thing I wish is that XX or YY was still here because
they were the expert on a particular bit of trivia. The subgroup leaders
are the only ones with an overall view... but guess who's busiest? ;)
- Matt
WB: para
JG14
P.S. - Having more meetings doesn't help ;)
David Staines
Sorry bullseye... I'm still not convinced this is warp on demand. One
thing that is common is that you pinged the aircraft a few times then it
warped. I wonder if it is possible that upon occasion, when a part of
an aircraft is destroyed, if it is causing some kind of warping
problem. I have seen this very thing happen also. I was flying and
everything was smooth, then I started encountering the same problem.
The plane would warp whenever I started to ping him repeatedly. I got
pretty pissed, but found that this was happening with the next 10 or so
different planes I engaged. I believe this to be something of a bug for
the most-part. I just wish ICI would acknowledge it and do something
Trips
Lephturn (Sean Conrad) wrote:
>
> ke...@cris.com (Bullseye) wrote:
>
> >Once during the second engagement with FOX8, he seemed to have some
> >kind of SUPER ENGINE. I was behind at about 10-11, and all the
> >sudden, he started accellerating. I was at 275 kts or so, and he
> >opened up the range at about the same rate as closure would be if we
> >were in a head-on pass. AND SMOOTH...NOT WARPING. He kept this going
> >far too long for it to be a warp.
>
> Well, I sometimes have a bad connect. I can tell you one affect the
> smoothing code has is this exact the behavior you are describing.
> When I see warps, alot of the time thats exactly what they look like.
> Sounds to me like a bad connect. The only guys I start to wonder
> about are the ones that just instantly vanish for a few secs at a
> time.
>
> From what you are describing, Fox8 may just have had a bad connect.
>
> speaks english?
>
> Sean P. Conrad <Lephturn> http://fox.nstn.ca/~spconrad/lephturn.html
> spco...@enviroclean.ca Leph in WB <F'ing Pigs>
Thanks Leph,
And I'll add this... if it was simply a bad connect, FOX8 might not ever have seen
your messages, and that could be the explanation for his failure to respond... or for
that matter he could have seen them and tried to respond, but his responses got lost
on the way... (I can't begin to count the times my radio transmissions vanished
without a trace, and i KNOW I'm not cheating...
Fact is, I can easily tell you a hundred ways to induce a warp on demand involving no
hardware mods or software hacks. At the moment, there's little we can do to prevent
it. Don't think we're denying its existence here, we're not... it does exist, and
there are undoubtedly some that will resort to it in the arena. We ARE trying to come
up with solutions, but it's not going to be an easy thing.
At the moment, I don't think publicly crucifying players is the answer... While I
won't deny the possibility that FOX8 could have induced warps on demand, I can't
possibly offer proof that he did or didn't.
Late last night I was asked by a player in all earnestness if I knew anything about a
Gold named MILI who was reputed to be flying a hacked F6F... I set him straight, but
it pointed out to me that if someone like MILI could come under suspicion then the
paranoia level is just getting out of hand.
No one here at ICI is taking the cheating issue lightly... but this witch hunt
atmosphere is not going to solve anything... If you suspect a player of cheating, let
us know who and when... we'll do our level best to get to the bottom of it.
Thanks,
Trips
Sean Long
py...@cris.com wrote:
> There are also the limits of this medium. It's very easy to miscontrue
> a post when both parties may not be in that much disagreement at all.
> Even what I consider obvious jokes always goes over someone's head.
>
> -Pyro
You're kidding, right?
hehe
eagl