Trade Wars: Dealing with Psychopaths

A few articles back I mentioned how certain players, (term used loosely) of Trade Wars are locked off servers. Most of the guys who run servers also play. And they want lots of people to play. They want to have the number one server with the most popular games. This gives them “Street Cred” as it is called. It also allows them to entice advertisers to their sites. Hits are very important. Sysops and Admins like to see lots of hits. When they see game (C) on BlueLobster opened May 17 with 4 players, on May 18 there were 13 players, they feel good. But, if by May 30 there are three listed, the other 10 dissolved for non attendance, they might take a glance and discover the last time three of the four logged on was a week ago. Characters have an “expiry” date; some seven days, some 14 days, meaning if you don’t log on, your character ceases to exist. When they notice that there is only one player, they’ll read the logs. When they see that Dsar is clearing the Universe of players, as if the Server is his personal property, they rebang.

Now, let me make this clear, a player has more than one “life”. Your character can be killed any number of times, (check the specs), when players aren’t taking advantage of this, it means they don’t care. They don’t care because there’s Bluelobster, there’s Hardgalaxy, there’s Blueninja, and three dozen more servers with many different games on each. Hence, you don’t need an IQ of 160 to appreciate that people don’t want to play where Dsar is. The Sysop/Admin realises that to have a popular game, Dsar needs to be banned. They get his IP address and they lock him out. When he telnets, he can’t make the connection assumes the Server is down. He’ll go somewhere else.

As most Sysops/Admins participate in Fora, they’ve given his particulars, so that others might lock out his IP address as well. There’s always a way for you to contact a sysop, if you care enough. Unfortunately, most players don’t even bother. If you join a game and meet a psychopath, inform the Sysop. He’ll appreciate it.