From: rhodesia@wixer.cactus.org (Felix S. Gallo)
Subject: Re: Screaming at the Sun
Followup-To: rec.games.netrek
Organization: Real/Time Communications
Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 05:14:04 GMT

ZZnew guy keeps bringing up old news:
>	Perhaps it should be noted that one's perspective often tints one's
>veiw of the world.

Especially when school pride is on the line, eh?

>[I, Felix, write:]
>
>> We forfeited a game in which we got double-digit
>> packet loss.  
>
>What does double-digit mean?  I've had 11% loss on rwd4 on many
>occations, and been able to play.  This is not the same as a game with
>88% loss.  I've played in tourney games against this before, and I must
>> admit that it is really hard.

My musty memory seems to recall around 15% loss with repeated freezes,
UDP disconnects, and ghostbusts.  For me, the lag was probably equivalent
to around 3 reasonable updates per second; just under clueful playability.

Pings and traceroutes at the time verified that the lag just sucked, but
I didn't keep the info around.

>> During the course of the game, we received many renditions
>> of the "shut up and play" refrain as well as several examples of poor
>> sportsmanship (including ghostbusted-and-frozen-player scumming).
>
>	Having been in ghostbust games, I can attest to the fact that it's easy
>to kill a GBed player who without knowing it.  DarkHorse once took a
>last planet from GB during a ghostbust without knowing it.  By all
>accounts, yours and theirs, this was the case.

Well, no.  Were you around and reading rec.games.netrek during this time,
or are you just making guesses?  During one of our freezes during which
we had about five ships completely motionless at our planet, and during which
we were typing "ack, frozen completely, pause" to the ALL board, someone --
I originally accused Spaceman Spiff, but no, it was, I think, Exxon Valdez --
walked up into a cluster of five frozen cruisers, including myself, fired
eight scout torps at me, blew me up, walked back to Rom, refitted, and loaded
up with armies in an AS.  As I said at the time, you don't walk into five
cruisers in a scout unless you're sure they're not going to hurt you.  Given
the quantity of messages we had going, one just has to call this deliberate
or utterly clueless.  Nobody on TCP was clueless.

This is, however, ancient history, and everyone is prone to making questionable
decisions.  I'm not assigning any blame now, and am only bringing it up again
because of Hugh's incorrect postings.

>	At the end of the game, they cleaned up while you were gone, much as
>you did to TOFW.

True.  Nobody's faulting them for that.

>> He was met with scorn, derision and bullshit, including the famous "if you
>> don't shut up, you won't get a rematch from us" line.
>
>	Randy said, simply, that if you continued to flame him, that he would
>not play you.  You have said the same of TOFW.

Again, wrong.  Randy and others said that our getting a rematch was contingent
on us shutting up.  My posts re: Exodus have been personal in all cases, a gift
from me to him, and they've been more along the lines of "you're so stupid
that I wouldn't have fun playing you again."  A crucial difference, don't you
think?  In any case, as I've stated repeatedly, I've even wasted my time
trying to schedule a rematch with Exodus.  Three pieces of e-mail about it
have disappeared into the iastate void.  He says he's sent me e-mail just now
about a match, but I still haven't gotten it.  Everyone else's mail seems to
be arriving just fine.

>> I posted a slam,
>> everyone posted slams, we all posted slams.  There was certainly no
>> one-sidedness about it, and I stand behind every word I said at the time.
>
>	That your team all slammed Randy does NOT mean that there was no
>one-sidedness abouty it.  Only that you were noiseier.

No, not "my team," but "my team and their team."  And not "slammed Randy,"
but "slammed each other."

Hell, remember the Famous Red Shirt posting, in which Bert defiantly stated
that we were obviously liars, because he's able to play netrek from moriarty
all the time without lag -- neglecting briefly the fact that sixteen incoming
net connections are more than sixteen times worse than one?

>> This statement is also not true.  I personally don't want to play against
>> iastate because I feel that they* exhibited the same sort of poor
>> sportsmanship
>> which Team CP did.
>
>	The fact of the matter is that you don't want to play them because they
>were impolite.  CrackPot felt the same about you.  I will not try to
>argue that TOFW was polite, because the were certainly NOT.

Sure.  Remember not to equate "me" with "Hell's Bagels", though.  If the team
wants to waste the whiners again, it will, me or not.

>> I am, however, not my team's keeper.  As of this date,
>> three e-mails to Exodus about a rematch have apparently fallen in the isu
>> bit bucket.
>
>	I have written to you several times, and have never recieved a
>response.  Your own team-mates say that you rarely recieve mail.  It's
>quite possible that they HAVE sent you mail.

I usually don't respond to random e-mail.  I did get your mail, and the answer
is sure, if everyone else agrees.  I get about forty mail messages a day,
and have set up at least two alternate bounce sites since a debacle before
the iastate game.

>> Moreover, when they challenged us on the net, several of us
>> showed only to find that they hadn't even set up the server they said they
>> would, and that they weren't even there.
>
>	You stated that you would not come.  Therefore, they didn't either.  It

I stated that *I* would not come.  I'm not twelve other people.

>hardly seems fair to expect them to show for a game that you have
>publicly said you wouldn't show for.  What would you have said if their
>team had been waiting to play the half of your team that showwed up?  It
>would have been silly.

Silly?  No.  We'd have scummed ringers off bronco and whipped them anyway.

>	What does it meant that you could kill your team-mates over the lag?  I
>killed people in Austrailia.  This does not meant that the lag did not
>exist.

It means that the lag was playable enough that I could work with it, and
therefore that anyone could work with it, because I suck.

>	If some people had OK lag, and some were ghostbusted (Exodus has
>claimed that at times 4 people were out.) then it was not really
>non-important to the game.

The display was xhosted from one of the people who said he had horrible
lag.  It's worth mentioning again that many of the players on their
team said they had fine lag (Cthulhu and some others whose names I am
currently forgetting).

I believe that at most there were two actually ghostbusted individuals at
once.  I suspect that there were less.  The message logs indicate that
the ghostbusters definitely didn't strike four players at once.

>	I'm not trying to say that TOFW or CrackPot were *ALL* right.  I'm just
>trying to say that there are some interesting parallels.  There are.

Well, sure.  Hey, both games were also INL netrek games.  And all players
were male.  And we all used keyboards at the same time.  Wow.

>ZZnew guy
-- 
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Felix Sebastian Gallo                              rhodesia@wixer.cactus.org
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Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek