Surprisingly enough there are still a few folks out there that are looking for an honest answer to an honest question about the game. But instead of using what time you spend on these forums giving the benefit of your expertise by responding to them you're reduced to looking for opportunities to comment about how much dumber everyone is than you recall.

Even if it's only a matter of explaining for the 100th time how to enable cheat mode, the difference in the motivation of someone trying to be helpful versus someone crying over spilt milk and sour grapes is pretty obvious. And claims made elsewhere about being a dime a dozen to the contrary, until you start acting more like the only person to have posted 1 million points in all three versions of the game instead of a common troll your opinion means less than zero. Fall of a GC2 Titan indeed.

Also even if your announcement that some folks have decided to take their ball and go home are correct then if that's their response to a little adversity then so be it. Contrast that to KP's leading by example by continuing to post ZYW's with minimal fanfare for which he should be commended. In the meantime I'm still shooting for a multi-million point game of my own. I never claimed to be fast, only thorough.

Hey everyone  .  Just checked in today to see how things were going.  The good news is that it looks like there is still a lot of creativity being put into the game, and the bad news has clearly been beaten to death already.  Hopefully things are good between KP and Mumblefratz, as you are both players I've got the utmost respect for as well as being pillars of the community going back years.  

An ironic thing:  As memory serves, the Kzinti first figured out the Strategy of a Thousand Names (now best known as the Galactic Swindle?), first discovered by Purge, from an AAR Mumblefratz posted in the general section of the Galactic Core, where the strategy was used but not described.  What I miss about this game was how even rivals were friendly and helped each other learn and develop their playing skills.  We competed, but we also collaborated and respected each other.  I hope that even as the game fades, that legacy will stay intact.

The intent of that post was indeed to give as much hint as possible to as many people as possible so that people could put two and two together and come up with four. I couldn't really expose everything directly because as I've said it was not mine to give in it's entirety even though I did in fact refine and extend the methodology significantly myself. But even then I was uncomfortable withholding something that made such a dramatic difference in potential scoring. Also DethAdder contributed quite a bit to the methodology and has never received appropriate credit. To the best of my knowledge it was DethAdder that came up with the modifications to the strategy required to get it to work in DA by adding trade fodder ships to the equation as well as discovering the requirement of having to let the state of war exist for a turn before performing the "swindle". KP just as clearly added his own twist to the strategy by adding the direct trading of tech for planets long before the final "swindle" was accomplished thus increasing player development.

I've always maintained that secrets really never stayed all that secret for all that long a period of time and I always viewed that as a good thing. Things that are kept in the dark for too long tend to rot and putrefy. There was always a balance between "empire secret" and a goodly amount of hints and outright discussion even if all it started out as was trying to sound out the other guy about how much of something they've figured out. I really doubt there's much that any one person is ultimately responsible for. There's always the germ of an idea that was supplied by someone else and extensions and improvements later added by many.

Also we were always able to openly discuss things that some folks felt might be on the edge in an open and mature way. I continually point out the initial discovery of the entire concept of ARC as something many people had reservations about and these concerns were addressed and treated as valid even by those that felt ARC was perfectly innocuous. Same with bugs like the planetary governor where a few folks wanted to take off and go with it but the bulk of the "community" quickly decided it was wrong and convinced pretty much everyone that it should not be used.

It was this ability to consider the concerns of any member of the community as potentially valid that we've seemed to have lost. If even I couldn't bring up a concern and have it reasonably and rationally discussed without essentially being shouted down, then who could?

Well, beyond a broadly accepted resolution to the Dread Lord AI issue, if anything positive has come from this unfortunate incident it may be a resurrection of the ability of individuals to speak up and be heard on such issues in the future.  I read the entire thread, and it did seem by the end of it that no one wanted to go through something like this again and also agreed there were alternate means of resolving such issues which could work in the future.

On another note, I suggested trading for planets to establish an early base before executing the strategy I couldn't describe but that was used in your AAR to KP in a PM back in the MVL when he asked for tips on MVL game speed.  I never knew that became an important theme, and of course KP deserves all credit for the success of the idea, since I never was any good at score grinding and in fact didn't keep playing too long after the demise of the MVL.  Glad to hear that idea was worth using though .