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3rd year anniversary & merry xmas ! 15 December 2005
This post is dedicated to the 3 years anniversary to mark the same of Stephen working on this games. In this post you will see comments and ranting from Stephen and a couple other players. Feel free to email to me your ranting at info[a]gamestotal.com (replace [a] with @).
2005-12-24 : Fluffy
I joined Galactic Conquest a while ago when i was 15 , i was very childish at 1st broke alot of rules , anoyed everyone ( your usual 15 year old [x] who found the filter amusing ) , made myself many enemies including the guides and moderaters ^^
soon after joining i found the RealTime server and joined up under the name of Gollum ( had just finished reading the books ) because it looked more apealing to me, after joining RT realised i liked the game so much and was spending more time on the game than i did most other things. after joining realtime i let all my other empires on the other servers die, none of them were fast enough for me, even today i repeatedly make acounts on the other server then forget about them.
A short while after joining realtime i met a guy named rarehunter on the chat who like me caused a riot when he was online, who knows how many rules i broke back then xD * blames Rarehunter for encouraging him * it took a few months to really figure that i was addicted to this game and so i decided for a fresh start , ide made a name for myself by being an [x] and decided i would behave and just be like the rest of the players, afteral i had decided i liked this game and would be with it for a while , a
very long while xD
after a few weeks of my new empire most players apeared to like me , i could talk in the chat and they were all friendly with me and i didnt break any rules till soon after this a certain " Guide " told everyone my old empire name for his own amusement , since then i learnt they can record your IP ect... sooooo i figured it was impossible to change your past on this game & changed name back to Gollum and went back to the old ways of anoying you all and even today although ive had many name changes everyone still knows me to be Gollum * thank you again guides *
soon after me turning 16 a guy named Overdrive gave me a paid acount for nothing ( very kind and thanks again if your still out there =D ) yet thanks to him ive been buying month paid acounts repeatedly since * kicks Overdrive for giving him the bug * with this paid acount i decided seems everybody already hated me and found me anoying Marauder would be suitable for me , how glad i am i made that choice :)
i loved the race so much that even if im another race i will change to maru for a few days just for fun and something to do ( yes my life is completely absorbed by spacefed )...
after the long thrilling start of my empire i got into a few personal problems and fell critically ill at the same time leaving spacefed for a while , losing all my original school friends ( and my life in general ) and ended up in a hospital bed for a month. when i got out of hospital i know had alot of time on my hands and nothing to spend it on , and so i came back to spacefed, after a day or two of coming back the game was updated and the chat had been completely destroyed, during the chat being dead i was having a coversation with a guy and acsidently triggered the filter in a general conversation that added one to
many to my record earning perminent suspension ...
after being suspended the urge to make a new acount and come back just to spite everyone kinda kicked in and so here i am still spending around 10 hours or so a day on spacefed.
although in less than a month of me writing this i will turn 18 ( my 3rd birthday ill spend on spacefed ) i still at times act childish and anoying , i personally think ive grown up alot and have made many many friends within the game, now that ive left school 6th form , and only do 1 night a week in college you could say that spacefed has become my life.
i eat, sleep and play spacefed then change race about 4 times a week xD (and actually move every now and then.) so stephen your game hasnt just affected my life its become it , enjoy my depressing rant o.O'
- Fluffy
Certain words updated by Stephen to [x]
2005-12-20 : Pandy
I was asked to play by a friend in Tasmania, the little island state under the big mass of the rest of Australia. I said to him No! He said Yes give it a go. I said Nope, not. He insisted, and that is pretty much how the game has gone for me since I began, lol.
I loved it, GC to begin with, made friends online to add to my list of real life friends, was told by a few to play ultra and fast ... and guess what I said No! 3ug3n3 was the biggest pusher of the game for me to play ultra and fast and I caved eventually and actually enjoy fast and ultra more than RT. Could have something to do with me being a different race there (marauder), and much slower paced so gives me time to do other things more.
Which brings me to my next NO!, lol Jaxvier and Foxkids asked me in December 2004 to start playing UC (before the current version began) and join their fed KoD, I was hesitant said no a few times, said I play on enough servers as it is, by this time I placed all GC servers. They said Yes! .. and again I caved in .. but you know I loved that as well, though it was a little slow in the lower planet count and pr and wasn't that interesting until I got a little higher up.
So I end up starting on what then was known as fast and normal (hourly and daily now) as well to try out the different races there without it affecting my real time empire and not having to change that. Then the new UC started, changed name updated to what is now called Unification Wars, so completely different that I admit I stay in VM for the first 2 months insisting I'd never play it.
Now though I do pay it a lot, actually enjoy the different things to do 9heresy to all GC players hearing this they'll scream that heresy). Yes occasionally I still get annoyed with it, but we all do with any game don't we? I find now I actually bought ecoupons (paid account) on UC this year for the first time, prior to this confining my purchases to a a efw 6 months paids on GC and some months paid at a time for real time and 2 turn based servers (the gold package deal) also for GC,
and I have to say it's a much different game yes, and hard when you aren't paid (still not on daily and hourly) but having paid on real time is lovely, actually being able to see everyone in range when out of dp on the rankings does make attacking a much simpler and cleaner affair.
My next no! Asked during a interview on the community site http://sfinterviews.jexiste.fr/index.php3 prior to March 2005 was the question have you ever thought about being a game guide (at this stage I was on chat answering a lot of questions) I'd been asked the same questions by a dozen or so players as well and each time I said no! Well guess what, in Mar/Apr there was another guide intake and guess who applied at the insistence of some fed mates on some of the servers I played on and some few players on the chat. Seriously didn't think I'd get it. Well I did. I worked hard to help others and still do, I love being a guide on the game its nice to be able to smooth others game play as much as possible.
Though the biggest thing I've got from this game, the thing I'll cherish above all else, is a strong sense of community and having made friends from countries all over the world, all of whom I hold very dear to me.
I scrimped and saved for a year from dec 04 to Nov 05 and paid my way to visit three of these friends, ShadowGlade a past Guide who hasn't really been playing much lately (*Pandy kicks Shadow), Lothor who most of you would know as a past Admin and who now plays and attacks me every chance he gets (Grr lothor :P) .. hmm not that I ever attack hmm oh no, I'm totally innocent there (finally wiped him a couple of times woo hoo!) and Tregelen also a past Admin and a dear friend.
This game which I at first refused to play has opened my horizons and given me the urge to actually go out there and enjoy life while I'm still sort of young, visiting different countries and making my way in the world.
For that I've got to thank Stephen for providing a place to get lost in, drowned ineven in the clicking of necessity (one more research level, just one more then bed), for pooh bear his wife for having the idea for the chat in the first place (Stephen says it was her idea) and to all in the community good and bad (and to the bad you aren't all bad, give up the rep *pokes Rarehunter and gollum*) you make the game a community , like any other frustrating at times, but mostly supportive, caring and kind.
Thanks to you all.
- pandy
2005-12-15 : Stephen
As of today it is officially 3 years since I have first started working on this site. This news posting is dedicated to all the players who have helped out in many ways from offering suggestions, complains, their time, admin, guide, tips, math, donation and the list goes on. Thank you again to all players we have today what we have now and to the fact that we are still here today.
Since its the 3rd year anniversary combined with xmas, I am giving everyone some nice gifts :)
GC > +10 Pcc, +20 Btc
UC > +15 pcc, +20 Btc
So I hope the gift is sufficient for you to read my ranting :)
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Ranting
As a disclaimer, this post has a lot of ranting and grunting so you can ignore this if you don't wish to read it. This post will contain my personal views and my comments and those who actually finish reading it will definitely understand me more. So I hope you guys will continue to read on.
I was bored out my mind back in the year 2002 because there weren't any games to play except 3rd person shooters like counter strike. Well don't get me wrong there, I personally have nothing against counter strike its just boring. I have personally played counter strike for sometime and its always the same thing, buy gun, run, kill people and end up getting killed, start again. Of course there is the occasional 2 campers that wait for each other, with everyone in the game yelling at both of them not to waste time.
I have played many games and I personally prefer games that allow me to interact with other players, especially in a strategy environment. Among some of my favorites includes Risk (board game). Risk is a strategy board game that allows human players to fight against one another. That got me thinking if only there were more players (one of the reason for Ancient worlds)… and if only it was a space game. I like master of orion 1 and 2, now the only problem with master of orion is the AI is terrible.
I tried to search for such a game but alas, unable to find one so I ended up making one, the first game titled Galactic Conquest. I started around the 15th December 2002 on that game.
Before working on Galactic Conquest I did tried making some games before, there is a ton of other games that I have created but never made it close to beta, mainly because they didn't catch my attention. There was a game based on space trading, and another RPG game trying to emulate MUD, a medieval "Romance of the Three Kingdom" clone and some others.
The last game I worked on was the space trading game, it's a game very similar to 3700AD which players buy and sell stuff, and however in this game the players can only trade. There wasn't any purpose in the game at all other than trading, so when the game was up for beta I gave up after playing the game (died of boredom).
When I was working on Galactic Conquest I used back part of the code from the trading game as reference along with part of the code from "Online BBS" project which I have previously done as well and decided to go for an all out war , as a direct opposite from the trading game.
The game took roughly 3 months to do, mainly because I had a full time job and I only worked on the game whenever I had the free time. The code references from both the projects I mentioned earlier did helped out a lot, not to mention the library codes that I have personally collected for the last 4 years did speed development time up drastically.
Now I am not a graphics person not do I know anything about graphics, so that part really took a heck of a lot of time, for me to design the page layouts and all that. To cut a long story short (lol, its long enough) the beta was finished on 13th of February 2003. I took a day off, brought Pooh out (which I also happened to be married to now) for Valentines Day and did the upload on the 15th.
Since the essence of the game is multiplayer, I invited all my online friends to join me, and we did have some great fun. GC back then was nothing like GC now, it's just pure fighting.
Somehow my online friends (and physical ones) invited their friends and it basically snowballed. We went from 100 page views in February to 20,000 in April in the same year.
GC beta was officially over in 1st June 2004, and the RT server (back then known as AO or Always Online) came in on the 3rd of July. Now I understand that there have been some set backs like server errors, bugs and so on and some players do argue that it should never be called a finished product until all the bugs are fixed. I would like to say that all other software and games are the same. If you look at the Diablo 1, it took them 3 years after the game is officially out of beta to iron out and rebalanced the game to a point that a "majority" or most of the known errors or bugs have been resolved. This doesn't include the 1-2 years beta they were having. This applies the same for all software as well, that is why we have tons of patches and all that.
Now enough of GC, lets get to UC.
Universal Conquest was the real name for UC hence the code UC. It was meant to be on a larger scale compared to GC and as a newbie version of GC where newbies can play before migrating to GC. UC is also meant to be a strip down simpler version of GC and at the same time less stressful plus something that GC can never be. I have personally seen players who can't beat to lose C3s, so UC is a game to escape from losing one's C3.
Since there was a number of confusion between both the games because they share almost the same name, we eventually changed the name from Universal Conquest to Unifications. Now for a short period of time there was continued confusion so we added "War" to it, and it ended up as Unification Wars. Since most of the players then are already used to the term UC, it sort of stuck with us until today.
UC was officially uploaded on the 29th July 2003. It has gone through several updates always remaining behind the shadow of GC all this time, until in the year 2005, I've decided enough is enough. UC is a game and should not be hidden behind the shadow of GC, so I started working on UC to make it different from GC while at the same time trying to maintain the original goal, which is a simpler and less stressful version of GC. In the beginning I was met with great opposition as most of the people who play UC at that time were in fact people who play in GC and they wanted UC to remain the same.
The truth is, things did not go that well mainly because I am really bad in explaining stuff so about 90% of everyone who were playing UC left (they were playing GC so I assumed they should still be around). It was really hard on my end and the fact that there isn't any one supporting me made it worst. In the end I closed my email, chat and what ever stuff I got and started working on UC away fro the angry mob. It took sometime to slowly changed UC to what it is today, updates after updates and not to mention there are countless bugs that needed to be cleared.
I would like to thank the great number of players who have stood by, those who have joined UC in the mist of the change (or before) and have shown great patience for sticking around during the ups and downs.
Eventually players started to come back slowly and new ones joined and started to offer their support once again. We had tons of suggestions, tips, help and so much more to UC that has molded UC to what it is today.
Now the sad part is, ever since I have started working on this, I have yet to find time to go on a holiday. Each time I am away to a wedding or something the server always acts up (seriously!), so this really had me worried about going on a real vacation. I've been married for sometime now and have yet to go on a honeymoon (gah!). So the bad news is I am planning to bring Pooh sometime next year for a long delayed honeymoon and I seriously hope that the servers will behave themselves while I am away. What you guys can do ? Start collecting lucky charms because they may come in handy while I am away… (just kidding).
Anyhow I will continue to work on all the games here, and to dedicate as much time as I can to bring you increase the fun factor in all our games. One of the biggest rewards that I have received from doing all this, from all the late sleepless nights is to watch everyone play and have fun. You can say I like being a Sysop (term from the BBS era)… that I can look down from my Pc to see everyone having a great time playing games, chatting with one another, making new friends and to touch everyone's life in a small way in hopes that one day in the future they would remember the fun they had while playing in my game, the friends they made and so much more. I have personally met tons of friends via my BBS and some of my closest friends are those whom I met as well, so I would like to share my great experiences in life to everyone else out there, may they meet their future husband/wives, best friends and friends on our game.
If you did happen to meet someone, or somehow our game has touched your lives, do let us know and I would personally be very grateful and happy to hear that. Share your touching moments and experiences playing our game to info{a}gamestotal.com (replace {a} with @)
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