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| Improvement Idea: Better Security |
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Posted by: Ramblurr - 03-18-2011, 09:37 PM - Forum: Far Horizons: The Awakening
- Replies (5)
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The Problem
Currently in Far Horizons there is no security mechanisms to prevent a malicious player from spoofing another player. It is rather trivial to send out an email with a forged "From" header. This means a malicious person could potentially submit orders for a player.
This is because the current game engine associates only the email address with a particular species.
Sure, you might say this isn't a big deal, because someone else is unlikely to know enough about a player's position to submit orders that work unless he/she has the turn reports.
This is correct, however I am not worried about a malicious user submitting incorrect production or research orders. Rather, an effective attack would be to send in blank orders or orders with syntax errors right before the deadline. Since only the most recent orders are used, this would override whatever the original orders were. Not good!
Potential Solution
Riffing off PBEM Diplomacy, my idea is to make each player have a password. The player would then have to include this password in every orders submission like so:
Code: SIGNON Species Name, Password
START COMBAT
; Place combat orders here.
END
... and so on
With this model the Species Name, Password combination would be associated with the position, rather than the email address.
This provides a simple and effective way of guarding against spoofed orders. Of course it is not foolproof, if a malicious user figures out the password, then all is lost, but that goes for any security system that uses a password.
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?
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| Computer Moderation: The Bane of the Play By Mail Industry |
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Posted by: GrimFinger - 03-17-2011, 05:43 PM - Forum: Editorials
- Replies (13)
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SuperNova had a lot of StarMaster in it. It was a computer assisted game rather than computer moderated. We still had lots of sheets of paper describing what the player was up to in their special actions, etc. The problem just became getting (and paying) good GMs and keeping the continuity from turn to turn since a different person might deal with each turn that got sent in from a position. Once hundreds (or maybe a thousand?) of people were in the games it was impossible to keep the true flavor of 'special' actions going and thus Victory was destined to be a computer moderated game since we had seen the writing on the wall for scaling games for larger amounts of customers.
Terry - Former programmer of Play By Mail games
Computer moderation was great for reducing errors, or so it has been said. But, in the bid to enhance efficiency, by removing the human element in moderating play by mail games, the Sword of Damocles fell - piercing through the heart of the PBM industry, and dealing a mortal blow that postal gaming has been wounded by, ever since.
Abandoning the warmth of human imagination for the cold efficiency of machine programming, commercial PBM companies led the way into the future - a bleak, desolate, and famine-stricken PBM landscape. Welcome to PBM Hell!
Paying homage to the gods of profit, efficiency was the key in this pilgrimage to the Mecca of the Future. Except, somewhere along the way, play by mail bore the brunt of efficiency's gore. Efficiency slew the beast of the PBM Hydra. As it turned out, the heads of that Hydra belonged to the many thousands of PBM die-hard players. Efficiency prevailed across the industry, and play by mail gaming was never quite the same, again.
PBM had been terminated! As it turns out, it was an inside job.
It's a shame that PBM games couldn't have remained hand-moderated, with the customer service end of things becoming as efficient as the code. But, such is life in the PBM lane.
Automating things via the code had such obvious advantages for play by mail games, for sure - though in hindsight, the question might be asked, advantages for whom?
And what of this "true flavor" of special actions? Maybe that's where the problem with the PBM industry lies. Maybe it just ran out of flavor. Do you like to eat meals that have less flavor or more flavor? I know, I know, it's rocket science, apparently, but you can probably figure out what I'm getting at.
And if you can't, well let me lay it bare for you. Full automation achieved at the cost of reduced flavor has not been such a good deal for the PBM industry, after all. For short term game, the Old Guard killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. Oh, they automated the goose, all right, but the goose was never asked what it thought about what they had in store for it.
And now you know the story of play by mail's El Dorado. It was deep fried in the vat of automation. PBM's goose was cooked!
Play by mail hasn't tasted the same, since.
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| Victory |
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Posted by: Victory - 03-16-2011, 10:45 PM - Forum: New to the site? Introduce Yourself
- Replies (36)
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Hey,
I just stumbled across this site and thought it was interesting and brought back some old memories.
I programmed the game Victory! The Battle for Europe for Rolling Thunder Games back in the 1990s as well as being an owner there for almost ten years. I had a lot of fun memories of game designing, attending conventions, frantic deadlines, talking on the phone with players, writing newsletters, etc. It was a good time for quite a while.
I started off playing StarMaster back in 1981 and still have all those papers in a box somewhere. Ended up working at Rolling Thunder in 1987 and leaving there while the design sessions for SuperNova Rise of the The Empire were underway back in 1997.
It is hard to believe how much things have changed in the industry and how fast time goes by. I was sad to hear about Dave Webber passing and happy to see Carol is still running Flagship.
Thanks for hosting this site and archiving some of information about the classic games.
Terry
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| PBM News Blurb - March 14th, 2011 |
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Posted by: GrimFinger - 03-14-2011, 02:33 PM - Forum: News & Announcements
- Replies (4)
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Flying Buffalo, Inc.
Rick Loomis, the owner and PBM moderator of Flying Buffalo, Inc, has granted permission for an article of his that was originally published in Flying Buffalo Quarterly issue # 48, way back in the year 1983, and which was published again in Flying Buffalo Quarterly issue # 79 sixteen years later in the year 1979, to be re-published on the PlayByMail.Net website. The title of this article is, "The History of Play-by-Mail and Flying Buffalo," and it can be found here. Our thanks go out to Rick Loomis for allowing us to bring this worthwhile article to our readership.
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Binary Elysium
Over at his blog, Computer Science and Philosophy student Casey, who also goes by the moniker Ramblurr in play by mail circles, has posted a blog entry titled, "PBM is dead! Long live PBM!" It's definitely worth checking out - one of the very best PBM related articles authored in recent years, that I have come across. What is the major hurdle facing those who want to bring PBM into the second decade of the 21st century? Check out Casey's blog, and find out for yourself!
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The Road of Kings
Over at Lloyd Barron's website, The Road of Kings, site user Santa Claus is trying to organize a special game of Hyborian War that he has titled, "Santa Claus' Grand and Magnificent Tourney of Hyborian War." Santa will be playing the kingdom of Hyperborea in this game. If you think that you might be interested in getting in on this organized game of Hyborian War, be sure to drop by. Tell old Santa that PlayByMail.Net sent ya!
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Play By E-Mail
Over at the home of Starfleet Warlord, a Strategic Campaign in the High Arena, Paul Franz has a number of old Star Fleet Warlord News newsletters archived. They are definitely work exploring, and they range from the June 1993 issue (Issue # 1) through to the Late 1998 issue (Issue # 15).
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Rolling Thunder Games
Russ Norris of Rolling Thunder Games has asked me to limit my postings on the Rolling Thunder Forums to past/inactive games, after I posted there asking if anyone there had played Far Horizons before, and pointing out that it was being resurrected. Russ felt that Far Horizons sounds like a potential competitor, and they would rather not give any advertising mention to current or potentially future competitors on their forums, if they can avoid it. It's their forums, of course, so I will refrain from trying to generate a renewed interest in play by mail games on the Rolling Thunder Forums. It does, however, qualify as play by mail related news, which we do post about on our forums here on PlayByMail.Net. We leave it to our readership to decide for themselves whether this approach to avoiding or fending off competition is actually likely to work.
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Agema Publications Forum
There doesn't seem to be much activity, of late, over on the Agema forums. One interesting pearl of a discussion, brief though it may be, that I happened upon during a recent visit to that site was a discussion on proposal by Count de Monet for a Victorian Science Fiction Colonial game, along the lines of Glory of Kings.
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PBM Gamer
The Mad Scientist of PBM, Mark Wardell, appears to be trapped in suspended animation, for no life is stirring on that site or its forums, at present.
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Fate of a Nation
In the game Fate of a Nation, a new continent was recently opened for game play. Peter, the site administrator there, announced this event here.
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KJC Games
In the KJC Games forums, site user Dave No Mates At All is still wondering, after waiting several months, why no KJC Games representative has responded to his initial inquiry posted in their forums, back on October 30th, 2010. By and large, the KJC Games forums show only sparse signs of life, of late, with recent history being that forum postings there are few and far between.
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Strategy Guild
A trip to the Strategy Guild forums revealed that those forums have become a ghost town, with no new forum postings posted since July 31st, 2010.
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Starweb Email Discussion Group
If you're interested in giving Starweb a try, then this site is the equivalent of a gold mine, in the form of old articles that should elevate your ability to do well in the game.
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| The History of Play-by-Mail and Flying Buffalo [By: Rick Loomis] |
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Posted by: GrimFinger - 03-13-2011, 09:31 PM - Forum: Games
- Replies (1)
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The History of Play-by-Mail and Flying Buffalo
By: Rick Loomis
Reprinted from FBQ#48 (June 1983)
[Anything in this kind of bracket was added in 1999]
I often get requests from reporters, new customers, and others for information on how play-by-mail got started, what it is, and so on. I decided the easiest thing to do would be to write an article for FBQ. Quite a few of our readers have only been with us a little while and don’t know anything about our history. And then I can printup extra copies of this issue and give it to people who ask for an interview!
When I first got interested in play-by-mail, the only things going on were the two player games such as chess or pbm Stalingrad, and Diplomacy. Diplomacy was the only multiplayer game with a referee that was being regularly moderated, and no one was doing it as a business. It was mostly college students with access to a mimeograph, typing up game moves
and fanzines on weekends and after school.
This was back in 1970, long before there was any such thing as a personal computer. I had invented a multi-player game called Nuclear Destruction which was a little different from Diplomacy in that it had hidden movement. Thus, the moderator had to send different information to each player (for pbm Diplomacy, the referee makes a copy of everyone’s moves and results and sens the same information to all the players.) I wanted to test my game, so in January of 1970 I started sending postcards to people who I knew might be interested in pbm. I got their names from the pbm ads section in the back of The General magazine [published by The Avalon Hill Game Company]. These were people who were interested in two player pbm games, and I figured they would likely be interested in my kind of game.
I was right. I offered to moderate my game for them, in return for just a stamped self-addressed envelope each turn, and I soon had several dozen players. Eventually I changed that to ten cents per turn (this was when postage was 8 cents). I was making an enormous profit of 2 cents per turn processed, and I still remember the twit who sent me an anonymous
postcard saying he wasn’t going to play my game because I was just “trying to make a profit off of wargamers”! [What does he think The Avalon Hill Game Company and other wargame companies are trying to do?]
At this time I was serving in the US Army with tough duty in Honolulu, Hawaii. All this gaming kept my mailbox full of letters, which was the primary purpose back then. But soon I had over 200 players in my game, and it was becoming difficult to keep up. So I asked my friend Steve MacGregor to write a computer program for me which would run the Nuclear Destruction game. We rented time on a Control Data computer which was near the Fort.
This was when the name of the company came about. Most of the game companies, clubs, organizations, or magazines which I knew about either had the word “Simulations” or some kind of German word in their title, representing the interest among adolescent male wargamers in WWII Germany (Panzerfaust magazine, International Kriegspiel Society, games called Kriegspiel, Panzerblitz, and Blitzkrieg, etc.) I considered naming my company something like “SImulated Simulations, Inc” or “Kriegblitzpanzerspiel Inc” but instead decided to get something more distinctive. I actually coined the “Flying
Buffalo” title as the name of the stamp and coin shop I was going to start when I got out of the army. (From Flying Eagle pennies and Buffalo nickels - Rick’s Coin Shop is so boring!) Steve and I started using that name for fun, but soon discovered that it made us very distinctive. When I went to the computer center to pick up our run for the day, the clerk at the window didn’t have to go look us up to see whether it had been done yet. He knew as soon as I mentioned our name whether it was done, and where it was.
Somewhere in here, one of my players asked me if I would mind if he started running a few games of his own. I couldn’t see any reason why not, so I told him it was ok. Soon Ed J. was running 5 or 6 games, and he even started up an elaborate “tournament”. Unfortunately Ed soon became “busy” and stopped answering letters from his customers. A lot of people complained to me and all I could get out of Ed was that he would “take care of it soon”. Eventually I offered to finish all his games for him, but even then I didn’t get all of the material from his games (current positions, players’ addresses, etc) until I actually drove to San Francisco and picked them up. This took place over a period of a year or two, and at the end of it I was back home in Arizona.
This may seem like a minor event, but it is indicative of a deeper problem. At least two years after this was all over, I received a letter from someone who had read one of my ads for Nuclear Destruction, and he asked me “Do you have anything
to do with a Mr Ed J from San Francisco? One of my friends sent him $3 two years ago and never got an answer”. He also was advertising a game called Nuclear Destruction.”
I can see a lot of potential customers getting ripped off by someone else, and then assuming that all pbm companies are the same. Unfortunately, it is very easy to get in over your head in pbm. Anyone with a little imagination can come up with a game (or a description of a game!) that sounds exciting, and anyone with a little money can buy a full color advertisement in some slick magazine. Unfortunately, neither of these characteristics (imagination or money) necessarily has anything to do with whether you have the determination, energy, time, and responsibility to give your customers what they expect and deserve.
It sounds so easy: get a personal computer, write a program to run your game, put an ad in a few magazines, then sit back and let your computer do all the work while you bank a few extra bucks each week. Unfortunately there are so many problems that are not initially apparent: program bugs, equipment breakdowns, answering rules questions, answering complaints, [see the letter to the editor in this issue of FBQ] opening letters, entering moves into the computer, correcting mistakes [both mistakes that YOU made, and mistakes that the customer made], moves that arrive late, moves that have unreadable game numbers or return addresses, keeping track of how much money everyone owes, deciding what to do about someone who hasn’t paid the money he owes but is still sending in game turns [here at FBI we “write off” $2000 to $4000 a year in accounts of people who were allowed to go ‘a little bit’ negative, and then ended up quitting without ever paying us], handling bounced checks, and on and on. It is easy for a newcomer to get swamped, and then there is a tendancy to put everything off.
There is plenty of room for lots of competition. There are millions of potential customers out there, and no one company is going to satisfy all of them [or even get in touch with all of them]. I just hope that not too many people are put off by the ones who drop out. I have seen at least a hunded people start up some kind of pbm service, and the vast majority of them have quickly disappeared. [At this point the number is more like 500]. Enough editorializing, back to the story.
In 1972 Steve & I got out of the army. We pooled our savings and made a down payment on a $14,000 computer (for you computer freaks, it had 4K (!!!) of core memory, a teletype for input and printing, and a high-speed paper tape reader and punch for mass storage.) [Yes, paper tape for storage. Each game was saved on a paper tape, which was rolled up and hung on a nail on the wall. We started this long before there was such thing as a floppy disk drive.] This was a Raytheon 704, which we still use for some of the games (it is a real heavy duty model). WE have since added 24K of memory, a Centronics printer for output, and a CRT for input. But it still uses paper tape for mass storage. [This article was written in 1983. In 1985 when we moved to our current location, we were still using the Raytheon 704 for a few games. Now, however the remains of the faithful 704 computer are sitting in the back yard with weeds growing up through the frame.]
We rented a small three room house in downdown Scottsdale. Steve lived there while I lived with my grandparents. The only income we had other than what Flying Buffalo brought in was the GI-BIll money I was getting for going to school part-time. [I eventually got my bachelors degree in accounting at Arizona State University]. We gradually got bigger and bigger, adding more games, more employees, more equipment, and more space. We moved five times in five years (each time to a bigger location) before we got to our present spot. Right now we have been in this location for just over 2 1/2 years. We have 4000 quare feet of space, 21 employees, 5 computers, and over 3000 customers. [When the lease expired at that location two years later, I purchased an old farmhouse in Scottsdale. Now we only have about 2000 square feet of
space, and some storage space, but I own the building. I also sold off the retail store part of the company when we moved in 1985, which cut down on the number of employees and space needed. We still have 5 computers, all of which are more
modern, and the latest of course has more memory and disk space than all of the old ones combined.]
A lot of things have happened over the years. Some of the ones that stand out in my memory are the couple who met while playing Battle Plan and eventually got married; the fellow who wrote and asked to be dropped from all his games, and then called on the phone frantically asking us to ignore his letter since “I decided to get a divorce instead!”; “Iron Man” Lane Marinello (who got his name from playing in 20 games of Nuclear Destruction simultaneously) who won a game of ND by
telling the other players that he was dying of cancer (he wasn’t); having our vice president [David Sleight] commit suicide for reasons unknown; having Avalon Hill refuse to accept one of our advertisements because they thought we were stealing time on some university computer (this was long before it was common for people to own their own computers); [I must be the first person in the world to actually buy a computer specifically to play games with it!] having my grandmother keep asking me when I was going to ‘quit playing games and get a job”; having a part break on the teletype that “never breaks” and then finding out that there are no spare parts anywhere in the State of Arizona because “it never breaks” and having to fly a spare part in from Dallas; and meeting my British agent for the first time and finding out that he is also a Methodist, a Conservative, and a Barry Goldwater fan! [That’s Chris Harvey - it turns out he is also a Clint Eastwood fan and a Mason. There is a story about why he is the reason I joined the Masons, which you are welcome to ask me if you see me at a convention.]
One of the big goals I have had in mind for FBI (by the way, the acronym was an accident) [but it’s so much fun, I got
personallized license plates with “FBI”] is to finish, program, and then play “The Game”. I designed the first version of “The Game” way back in high school. This is a multi-player, hidden movement wargame which is both tactical and strategic, including production and research. Players move individual divisions made up of infantry, armor, and artillery; they have three or four different types of aircraft, eight or nine different types of ships including submarines, aircraft carriers and merchant ships; they have factories for various kinds of units; multiple kinds of research’; and the map (either squares or hexes - it has been both) is at least 80 x 100. Over the years I have moderated or played in several different versions, but it was always obvious that thee was no way this game could be properly played without a computer keeping track of all the paperwork. We still have plans to run this game, and someday we will announce it. I know not everyone is interested in this kind of game, and it will be expensive to play. But boy, will it be fun! [Unfortunately we still haven’t had time nor money to program this game. It is MY ideal game, but I realize that only a small minority of game
players will have the interest and time to play a game this complicated. So it remains a dream while we continue with the
day-to-day work of running a business. If I ever get a few dollars ahead, I will make a serious effort to finish getting this game programmed.]
I think I should point out to all our customers what my philosophy of gaming actually is. It is important that you know
what you are getting into. No matter how careful we are, problems will come up. WE cannot please everyone, and not every mistake or error can be corrected to everyone’s satisfaction. I believe very strongly in moderator non-interference. One
reason why all of our games (except TTT) [TTT was a solitaire role playing game run by hand - don’t ask about it - we don’t offer it anymore] are completely computer-run is so that there is no way the referee can be biased, either for or against you. You may not like the results, but you have the same chance as any other player.
[A lengthy addition here: elsewhere in the issue was a letter to the editor from a customer who said he received a message from an enemy threatening him by claiming that he (the enemy) was a friend of Rick Loomis, and if the victim didn’t do what he wanted, he would make sure that the computer at Flying Buffalo would screw up his turns in the future. It should be obvious on the face of it, but no one who would say such a thing is a friend of mine; and if he was, he would no longer be. No non-employee is allowed access to our computers, and the game data [except for Covert Operations] is not kept on computers that have modems. Some employees do occasionally play in games (for instance I like to play in Anonymous Starweb games and the Anonymous Partners Challenge WWBP game), but they are carefully watched and their game is kept segregated. In the 29 year history of Flying Buffalo, only one employee was ever caught cheating in a game, and he was immediately fired and banned from all games. If an employee ever made this kind of threat he would also be fired immediately. This is only a game to you, but it is my daily bread.]
The only time we run into problems (other than people who refuse to believe that we don’t interfere with the results) is
in error corrections. Some people knock me when I refuse to change a company policy. Again, this is an attempt to be evenhanded. If I can anticipate most of the possible problems, and make a decision about what will be done before the problem comes up, I cannot be swayed by who the person is or how persuasive he or she is.
An example is missed turns. We receive something like 200 to 300 turns a day. Some of them are going to be late. If the game has not yet been run when your turn arrives, we will include your turn. We don’t like missed turns either; it spoils
some of the fun. But if it arrives after the turn has been run, or if it never arrives, you have missed the turn and there is nothing that can be done about it. Once a turn has been run, that’s it. Anyone who has missed the turn, has indeed missed the turn.
There is only once exception. If we later discover that your turn did indeed arrive on time (i.e. on or before the due date) but it failed to get processed due to some error on our part (such as being filed with the wrong game), we will run the turn over again and mail corrected turns to all the players at our expense. We admit that it occasionally happens, and we are not afraid to correct it. But if your turn completely disappears and we have no trace of it, or if it arrives late, you are stuck with the result.
[Actually there is one other exception. If it is a private game, or if every other player in the game agrees to have us run the turn over and include your orders, we will do it. As someone once angrily pointed out - that is not much of an exception; of course his enemy doesn’t want us to run the turn over again. And of course that is the point. If we run the turn over again to help you out, we are hurting your enemy, and he is a paying customer too.]
We cannot “do just your builds and loads” just because “my allies will kill me.” A player may swear that he mailed his turn eight days before the due date, and it is a vitally important turn. but if we have no record of it, there is just nothing we can do. I may believe you, but do you really want me to believe your enemy when he says he mailed the turn in plenty of time and would I please do his move for him? After he has seen the results of the turn and discovered that you are backstabbing him? And remember, we have over 3000 customers, and they all want their next move processed and mailed as quickly as possible. We cannot afford to wait for you. You have to be responsible for making sure your turn gets here on time. It’s not because we don’t care. We do care when someone misses the turn, and it makes us very unhappy. But we can not do anything about it. When I first started I tried to wait until all the turns were in. I even phoned people whose turns weren’t here. But even when I was only running five games, that didn’t work. [When this kind of problem comes up, someone always pipes up with “What about ‘The Customer is Always Right?’ “ That may work well for a department store or a gas station. But our business is a competition between you and other customers. If your problem is just between you and me, we’ll do all we can to help you out. But if fixing your problem means giving a disadvantage to another customer, we can’t do it. Remember, some players go to great lengths to make sure they never miss a turn. If we allow other people to go back and make up a missed turn, then we are treating these people unfairly. You can always call us on the due date and ask us whether your turn has been received. If you send your turn by email, we always send a receipt back by return email. And you can sign up for our “Phone Alert” system where we call you if your turn is missing.]
There I go editorializing again. I suppose I should give a description of the peple who process your game turns for you.
Most of the people who work here are gamers of one kind or another. Joe Formichella stops by the post office on his way to work five days a week and picks up the mail. (I usually pick it up on Saturdays and Sundays; yes your mail is delivered even on holidays). He is the one who opens the envelopes, sorts out the turns, and passes the mail to the various people concerned. [After the move to the current location, Chuck Gaydos picks up the mail every day on his way to work, 7 days a week. However the post office doesn’t usually put much (if any) mail in the po box on sundays or holidays anymore. We check, but there’s seldom anything there. We do of course receive email and faxes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.]
After the due date has passed, or if all the game turns are in, one of the typists takes the game out and runs it through
one of the computers. Wayne West is the day shift, Lee Russell is evenings, and Terry Riseden is night shift. [Wayne and Terry have moved on to other jobs - Lee is still with us. Now the game typists are Lee, Chuck, Jason Sato and Bob LaGrange]
After the game is run, it is passed to the billing computer where we print out your name & address and the little piece of paper that says “you have $2.50 left in your account”. From there it goes to the checking desk where either Lee or
Chuck Gaydos checks over the game for obvious errors, billing problems, etc, and inserts standbys if necessary. Chuck is the computer room supervisor.
From checking, the game goes to Allen Nordendale, who sorts out all the papers and stuffs them into the proper envelopes, then runs them through the postage meter. I usually drop them in the mailbox at the main post office when I go home in the evening. [Allen has also gone on to other jobs. Currently the “stuffer” is either Lisa Walker or Charlotte Walker, or occasionally Jimmie Walker. Jimmie is also the “shipping room” person who packs up orders for our card games & role playing games and gets them ready for UPS.]
Steve MacGregor is still the computer programmer. He spends most of his time making little adjustments to the old programs or writing new ones. One of his main projects right now is making a new version of the Starweb program so we can
run it on a newer, more portable computer. This will allow us to run Starweb games at various conventions, and do other
exciting things that we can’t do with the current version (such as Starweb by phone). [Steve no longer works here full time. He has a day job elsewhere, but still makes program corrections evenings. Chuck does most of the programming now. We did get Starweb programmed for IBM Clone computers and now I can run it on a laptop at a convention. And of course now
we can send and receive turns for all the games by modem over the internet.]
And we mustn’t forget Felicia Radzio. She works in the mailroom, and she is the one who processes all your payments, new game requests, and orders for merchandise. [Felicia has also moved on, and Lee now does most of the mailroom stuff.]
This article is also supposed to be a history of play-bymail so I should mention some of my competitors (those who are still alive and those who are long gone). I can briefly mention the former customer who got infuriated when I had to post a large price increase on all my games. He dropped out of his games and promised to “destroy” me in “the marketplace” by
showing me how a pbm company should really be run. He called his “The Little Company”, promised no price increases for the life of the game, a free newsletter to all players, and if any game turn was processed more than three days after the
due date, it would be completely free. Within three months I was receiving letters from people who had sent him $1 for rules and had never heard any response. I don’t know of anyone who ever played a turn of his game, although there were supposedly a few.
I suppose the most notorious of the “disappearing pbm companies” was Lords of Valetia. This was announced via a flyer and then a full page ad in Strategy and Tactics magazine. It was a hand-run, fantasy role-playing game announced just as D&D was getting popular. I understand that he immediately got 1000 players and was swamped. Unfortunately, it was run by one college student, entirely by hand. There was a long delay and then another group announced they had taken it over. They actually ran several turns for many people. (Mike Stackpole says he got five or six turns). Then they ran into trouble also, and a fellow named Elmer Hinton, who called himself “Gamemasters Publishers Association” offered to take it over. They eagerly handed it over to him, and he published several newsletters and took out many full page ads in magazines like The Space Gamer and The Dragon. Unfortunately I’m not sure whether anyone actually got any turns from Elmer. He was going to put the whole thing on a computer, and had lots of other grandiose plans that never quite got anywhere. [I believe Elmer “bought” the game from its second set of owners by promising to honor the money owed to current customers,
and then chastized those customers for expecting him to keep his promise and give them the turns due them. He didn’t realize what he was promising, and it was ‘unreasonable’ of them to expect him to keep his promise. I don’t think Elmer ever intended to defraud anyone, but he certainly had a lot of gall. And if he had spent as much time processing turns as he did explaining to everyone why he wasn’t processing any turns, he might have had a decent game.]
Sadly there have been several people who advertised a marvelous game and accepted startup fees so that they could use the money thus received to buy a computer so they could program the game so they could run the turns they had contracted to run when they accepted the money in the first place. But there are other companies out there who seem to be doing a decent job. One of the earlier ones is Conflict Interaction Associates (their acronym is deliberate). They have a game called Pellic Quest, which is mostly Starweb with a few additions (they asked permission and pay me a small royalty.) They seem to have been successful by limiting the size of their operation. They decide how many games they can run and will not accept more customers after the games have been filled.
Another one is called Superior Simulations. This fellow has a very elaborate, very complicated space game called Empyrean Challenge. If you play this game, your turn can be a stack of paper half an inch thick! The game is expensive, and I am told that there are a lot of errors in the computer program. One player told me that every time he received a turn, he had to spend a half hour on the phone with the gamemaster, getting all his errors corrected. It sounds like a great game if the guy can just get all the bugs out.
Of course I have to mention Schubel & Son. At the moment, they appear to be my biggest competition. I’ll start by admitting that several people have told me that their Tribes of Crane and Starmaster games are a lot of fun. I don’t want to sound like a “sour grapes” competitor, but I am going to list some of the things that I consider disadvantages. If you can live with the disadvantages, then you might really enjoy their games.
Most of their games are what is called “computerassisted”. This means that although a computer is keeping track of various details, a human gamemaster actually processes your turn. An advantage of this is that you can do anything you can think of on your turn, something that just isn’t possible with a completely computerized game. Unfortunately this also means that the results of your turn are highly dependent on which gamemaster processes your turn THIS time. S&S does not assign you a gamemaster - whenever your turn comes in it is processed by whichever gamemaster is ready for it. This avoids the problem of a gamemaster being slow or getting sick or quitting, but it can create all kinds of headaches for players when different gamemasters interpret various orders differently.
Their games are also more expensive (actually I think a hand-run game has to be). At first glance the turn fees are about the same. But in order to play one of the big games, you have to pay extra for “extra actions”. You don’t have to do “extra actions” but you’ll never get anywhere in the game if you don’t. And each one costs an extra turn fee. I had one fellow explain to me that he spends $50 a month on his Starmaster game (well, that explains how they can afford all that advertising). In addition, if you want to attack anyone, you have to pay extra for a battle turn. That seems reasonable to me. But the person being attacked also has to pay extra for a battle turn. That seems unreasonable to me, but apparently they have a lot of customers who are going along with it. This gives rise to the apparently often-used tactic of multiple attacks. The idea is to get several players together to all attack one guy, not to defeat him in battle, but to force him to pay for multiple battle reports (each one is charged separately of course). If it is done properly, he will get tired of paying out all that money and will drop out of the game.
Not all of the S&S games are computer-assisted though. They do have some that are completely computer-run like ours. They have a mark-sense card reader for input. I am somewhat amused by their advertisements that Catacombs of Chaos has “easy to read room descriptions in full text with no codes to decipher” (as if the secret of “F10 means Fleet Ten” is difficult to decipher), but at the same time in order to send in your move, you have to decipher a computer card and put pencil marks in the right places. Ah, well.
There are many differences of opinion on what makes a good game or what is a fair price to charge. At least S&S are well established and have been there for several years. If you like their kind of games, you can at least expect to receive game turns on a regular basis.
There is now a lot of competition in the field and a lot of games to choose from. If you don’t like what you’ve seen so far, look around. Just be careful how much money you send anyone in advance. I don’t think any of the guys who have
disappeared really set out to deliberately cheat anyone. But nevertheless, people sent them money and didn’t get it back.
[All of the above companies have, since this was written, gone out of business. Some of their games were bought by other companies and some were not, and some of those other companies have since disappeared also. Please don’t ask me about where you can play any of the above mentioned games, as I don’t know. Currently our biggest competitor seems to be Midnight Games of California. They have a very popular fantasy role playing game. There is also GSI in Florida who runs a Middle Earth licensed fantasy game, and several smaller companies still around. With the growth of the internet, pbm eems to have shrunk and a lot of companies dropped out of the business in the last 4 or 5 years.]
In July will be the annual Origins convention. This year it will be in Detroit, and I have arranged for a “play-by-mail”
booth. Many different pbm companies will have flyers or catalogs available free at that booth. If you can, you might
consider going to Origins this year and meeting some of the people involved in pbm. Flying Buffalo will have its own booth too, and I will definitely be there (there is an ad for Origins elsewhere in the issue). I am aware of at least 25 other pbm companies (other than those mentioned above) who have been invited to participate in the the pbm booth. I apologize for not being able to mention them all in this article, and I hope a lot of my readers will visit us all in Detroit.
[This year, and for at least the next few years, Origins will be in Columbus Ohio. Flying Buffalo always has a booth there, and usually there are at least 3 or 4 other pbm companies there also.]
NOTE: Permission to publish this article on the PlayByMail.Net website from Flying Buffalo Quarterly # 79
was granted by Rick Loomis, owner and PBM moderator of Flying Buffalo, Inc.. on March 13th, 2011.
Click here to visit the Flying Buffalo website.
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Posted by: Ramblurr - 03-11-2011, 08:15 PM - Forum: Far Horizons: The Awakening
- Replies (21)
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Grim's editorial about GUIs convinced me that to wait for the development of the game client to finish before running a game is unnecessary. Though, we may disagree in particulars, Grim and I both agree that imagination and a text medium are core components of PBM. Moreover, we agree that PBM can make a come back.
So, without further ado, I am announcing the first game of Far Horizons: The Awakening.
Far Horizons: The Awakening
Galaxy Alpha
The beginning is now. Having successfully tested a faster-than-light interstellar drive, you are among the first of a new lineage of lifeforms with the potential to explore and claim for your own the wonders and mysteries of the galaxy.
You now stand poised on the edge of a precipice. The dangers of ahead are many. The rewards are great, the penalty for failure is oblivion. Will you set your sights on the far horizon? Will you reach out to the stars and claim themfor your own?
Be careful... there others out there in the black.
Details+Signups | Game Manual
Note: I haven't canceled or paused the game client application. It is still in development, but there is no reason to put off hosting a game until it is finished.
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