It’s old news, but I have to post something here!
There’s good news for all of those people who don’t like the Resort theme of the current official game, Dragelet has decided to host his own game at http://www.starshiptraders.net
The games at this site will only be classic styled games (no Resorts in sight!) and all players have to take their ships through a ladder game before they make it to the full size mapped (currently running under the name ELF – Extended Last Frontier).
In an attempt to hinder cheating, the admins have added the ability to see what IP addresses players have been using. In principle this is a good idea, but in reality the determined cheaters out there will just learn to be more careful. It also makes it harder to run Indie/Spy ships, but not impossible.
The real bad news though is that the client port has been disabled. Even though there have been plenty of posts acknowledging that most bots work in telnet & http mode, the game administrators have decided that the biggest threat to the integrity of the games are client users?
There has been a big recruiting theme on the boards of both TLR & SST, and the radio logs of both games almost always seem to contain a reference to this new game.
My take on all of this? It’s kind of obvious, the current settings of TLR are a major hinderance, so a lot of players will be moving to the new game simply because it’s easier! The new game will also serve the task of being a training area for those players who haven’t been able to compete with the really skilled players that have been dominating the TLR universe!
I hope everyone enjoys the new game, and when they’re after a real challenge they just need to remember to visit ioresort.com!