been lurking, decided to register ;)

[GrimFinger]

And Stars of the Dark Well? What do you remember about it?

[NotQuiteANewbie]

And Stars of the Dark Well? What do you remember about it?

Very little actually.

It was a space mining/trading/research/shipbuilding game.

The political climate of the game seemed to be dominated by a handful of mega-alliances that basically controlled about everything.

I agreed to join the Nexus Research (NX) faction as they seemed the least warlike, although there was some sort of border skirmish going on with another faction at the time I joined the game. As part of the deal they were going to provide me with a better ship; however I would have had to spend several turns traveling to one of their main shipyards to take control of it.

The general idea was I would stay away from the front and just start hauling resources around to free up more experienced players with more forces so they could go to the conflict zone.

I gave up playing before I ever even got to the shipyard. Just did not seem to click with me, and being essentially "forced" to join a faction so soon, before I had a chance to find my footing, left a bad taste in my mouth.

Yeah sure I could have stayed unaligned and been considered "pirate vermin" by all the alliances. That was not really much of a choice at all though.

The universe seemed too full of big powers, without enough places that newbies could have gone off to do their own thing.

[ixnay]

I also even tried to design my own PBM at one point about 1995 or so, but I stopped work after realizing I would never be able to have time to do hand-moderation of more than a handful of players, and my programming skills were not up to the task of automating it - mainly I needed to know how to get a database to keep track of everything without inputting changes by hand (some kind of batch input). (Being limited to some BASIC, Visual BASIC, and a little bit of C that I could barely make work.) (Subsequently I learned some COBOL, DOS batch programming, HTML, and Java, but I really don't remember much of anything from lack of use for almost 15 years. These days can barely edit my own webpages I created years ago without looking up how. I ended up going into hardware repair instead of programming.)

Heh, I think just about everyone who's ever played a PBM game has toyed with the idea of setting up their own. This was cited, in issue #2 p.46 of S&D, as one of the causes of PBM Malaise. (Yes, this was in the now-infamous Mica Goldstone reprint.) "...Many players have looked at the results they have got from the game they are playing, and thought that it must be easy money to run a game."

In other words, all these upstart moderators were part of the problem.

I don't really agree. That's like saying the Beatles diminished rock and roll by making it look like any fool with a drum kit could start a band. Well, yeah. Most of them sucked but some great ones arose thanks to their inspiration. And I daresay the entire industry took inspiration from Rick Loomis' pioneering work in 1970!

I have a project on the back-burner myself. It's not that I lack the skills or the vision -- I lack the time. I may have to cut one or another of my other side-projects (which are all equally back-burnered) to get it back on track. Grim's partner-in-crime Mark Wardell had also blogged at length on his own PBM project, which appears to still be under construction.

All of which only highlights the dedication, hard-work, and design-chops displayed by those moderators who do actually carry a project through to production -- and magazine editors as well! This is such a tiny branch of gaming, but the depth of content and design is astounding...