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I also played Gemstone IV (and Gemstone III before it). The GMs were very good at recognizing good roleplaying, and I never heard any complaints about GM favoritism or anything along those lines. I also share your concern -- when Gemstone III was linked up with the Zone, they offered a free trial which drastically increased the number of players for a few months -- during these times, the RP got pretty bad at times, but soon the "1337" newbs left and things settled back down. My guess is that they got tired of the slow advancement and the lack of graphics.

Ever consider thinking before posting? Microsoft has owned www.zone.com for YEARS now and they only charge for 'premium' games, like Asheron's Call. For online retail game matching (ala Battle.net), NO CHARGE! Never has been.

Blondie24 is a PC program that plays checkers (draughts) at an internationally recognised expert level. The clever thing is that Blondie24 taught itself to play via Evolutionary Neural Networks. The programmers just coded in the rules for moving, then unleashed it on itself for six months, selecting the winner of each tournament to breed the next generation. OK, I am simplifying but you can read about it in the book. Because the programmers are such crappy checkers players they tested Blondie24 by playing the program against humans on Microsoft's game site. Blondie24's rating puts the program in the top 5% of players. Note that there is another program, Chinook, that is the current man-machine world champion checkers program, but chinook was programmed using human expert knowledge and plays using brute force. Blondie24 has NO human knowledge about the game programmed in.

I don't think stockholders would care much for MS's games if it came to that.

But you need a PassPort to play MS's games!

The site I was refering to above is http://stats.zone.com. This is clearly an MSN site but it's running Linux not freebsd as I had stated previously.

There's also a new expansion out for Asheron's Call. Dark Majesty was released a month or so ago, and offers a whole new play area, populated with new content. It retails for around $20, does NOT require the original game to play (it's included in the price of the expansion) and includes the first month free (usually $10). The real selling point for me is the monthly content updates... it keeps my interest going and gets me wasting way too much time on this game!

There's also a new expansion out for Asheron's Call. Dark Majesty was released a month or so ago, and offers a whole new play area, populated with new content. It retails for around $20, does NOT require the original game to play (it's included in the price of the expansion) and includes the first month free (usually $10). The real selling point for me is the monthly content updates... it keeps my interest going and gets me wasting way too much time on this game!

A quick glance through Netcraft's Most requested sites over the last 30 days shows that part of Microsoft's Zone website stats.zone.com runs on Linux using Apache/1.3.9 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.2.2.

Love it!

http://www.orangesmoothie.org/downloads/beta/osp-q uake3-0.99v3.zip

by unzipping it in your Q3 directory, with file paths preserved. Then, install

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/win32/q3po intrelease_129h_beta.exe

by running the executable and telling it where your Q3 directory is. Then, if you want to view the demos really easily, install

http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/index.pl?downl oad=http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/download/g eekplay-29-1.0b1.zip

by running the installer from any directory and telling it where your Q3 directory is.

Then, all you have to do is download the "demo" files from

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/s coreboard_0_0.html

By clicking on the "stats:1" link, and then scroll down, and download one of the demo files, like the file

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/d emos/fatal1ty-vs-ZeRo4-pro-q3tourney4-(ZeRo4)-g1v2 _1.dm_66.zip

for instance. Be sure to note that there are two files for every match - one from each person's point of view. Getting the file from the winner is more fun! Then, all you have to do is unzip the dm_66 file, and then double-click the dm_66 file in order to view it.

Note that these instructions worked for me, and are not necessarily going to work for you! All of this of course on a Win box.

http://www.orangesmoothie.org/downloads/beta/osp-q uake3-0.99v3.zip

by unzipping it in your Q3 directory, with file paths preserved. Then, install

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/quake3/win32/q3po intrelease_129h_beta.exe

by running the executable and telling it where your Q3 directory is. Then, if you want to view the demos really easily, install

http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/index.pl?downl oad=http://www.geekboys.org/geekplay-29/download/g eekplay-29-1.0b1.zip

by running the installer from any directory and telling it where your Q3 directory is.

Then, all you have to do is download the "demo" files from

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/s coreboard_0_0.html

By clicking on the "stats:1" link, and then scroll down, and download one of the demo files, like the file

http://stats1.zone.com/tournaments/QuakeCon-2001/d emos/fatal1ty-vs-ZeRo4-pro-q3tourney4-(ZeRo4)-g1v2 _1.dm_66.zip

for instance. Be sure to note that there are two files for every match - one from each person's point of view. Getting the file from the winner is more fun! Then, all you have to do is unzip the dm_66 file, and then double-click the dm_66 file in order to view it.

Note that these instructions worked for me, and are not necessarily going to work for you! All of this of course on a Win box.

For anyone who couldn't figure out, it was breaking because of an extra "/", go here

"7.1.21. run programs or servers that provide network services to others through the Services which includes, but is not limited to, web hosting, multi-user interactive forums, game servers..." Does this mean I can't play http://www.zone.com/boggle?
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--

Allegiance Timeline

2058
As Longstreet and his Bio confederates flee from Earth, GigaCorp scout ships discover Helium3 - an ideal fuel for fusion reactors - in the Sol system asteroid belt. scientists successfully extract He3 from asteroids and use it as fuel. Once this fuel "refining" process is perfected, GigaCorp begins to mobilize for long-term, widespread exploitation of He3 resources.

2063
Longstreet dies at age 95; age is not the cause of death, however. Prolonged exposure to radiation and zero-g ultimately caused Longstreet's demise.

2071
The Siege of Leonov begins. GigaCorp and Crimson Group (the principal GigaCorp rival) discover a large He3 deposit on the moon. Security forces from both factions dig in and attempt to secure the site. Within 14 hours, the firefight begins. Neither side backs off, though the siege is little more than a standoff.

In response to the weeks of fighting on the moon, the UN orders a Peacekeeping Coalition (composed largely of United States Marines) into space to defuse the situation. Within weeks, the Coalition forces decimate the corporate factions warring at Leonov.

Allegiance Timeline

2058
As Longstreet and his Bio confederates flee from Earth, GigaCorp scout ships discover Helium3 - an ideal fuel for fusion reactors - in the Sol system asteroid belt. scientists successfully extract He3 from asteroids and use it as fuel. Once this fuel "refining" process is perfected, GigaCorp begins to mobilize for long-term, widespread exploitation of He3 resources.

2063
Longstreet dies at age 95; age is not the cause of death, however. Prolonged exposure to radiation and zero-g ultimately caused Longstreet's demise.

2071
The Siege of Leonov begins. GigaCorp and Crimson Group (the principal GigaCorp rival) discover a large He3 deposit on the moon. Security forces from both factions dig in and attempt to secure the site. Within 14 hours, the firefight begins. Neither side backs off, though the siege is little more than a standoff.

In response to the weeks of fighting on the moon, the UN orders a Peacekeeping Coalition (composed largely of United States Marines) into space to defuse the situation. Within weeks, the Coalition forces decimate the corporate factions warring at Leonov.

I was only involved in a small allegiance for a while so I'm not sure how well I'll be able to answer this. I don't really think it would be possible for a system like this to prevent or really lessen the problems you mention. There are still plenty of people out there powerleveling in areas where they can kill high level enemies and not get hurt, camping for special items, using bugs to duplicate items or use quarrels with a bow, etc. Turbine however has been working to lessen those problems. For example they have changed the landscape of some of the powerleveling areas they know about so now the monsters can fight back, made some of the new items have a limit on how many or how often you can obtain them and other tweaks like that. So far it seems to be working good other than really upsetting the people who enjoyed exploiting it.

It seems the major draw of the allegiances though is mainly to provide a group of people to draw upon for help, adventuring partners and advice. From what I have experienced of it and have seen, it seems to work pretty well. It could use some more changes though so it's easy for a monarch to communicate to the rest of the monarchy and to find out the names of the members. With a large monarchy though you can get quite powerful. The way it works is you get experience points from your vassels which can be quite substantial in a large monarchy. The best part is the experience points are basically free ones, you don't lose any portion of your experience at all. Also in the latest event some of the monarchs have been rewarded with a very nice weapon if they can pass a test. A few of the highest ranking ones have received a challenge to run the guantlet. From what I understand they get transported to an area filled with high level monsters and if they can run through and make it to the end in a set time they are rewarded with a Shadow Claw.

If you'd like more insight into the system, try here and read the interviews with top monarchs. I'm not sure if this was any help answering your question or not, but I hope it helps. I'll quit my rambling for now so I can get some sleep. :)

• Irina was the unofficial team leader from move 10 onwards. The world played her recommendations for 41 consecutive moves until move 51, when ballot-stuffing was first alleged.
  This makes the case for ballot-stuffing on moves 51 and 52 quite strong. See Martin Sims' thoughts on moves 51 & 52.
• Kasparov was reading the World Team's analysis on the BBS.

Ross Amann notes that

• "Democracy is not served by vote fraud in any election... Clearly, if MSN were running the world's elections, things would be a lot neater!" referring to Microsoft's deletion of votes for 59...Qe1.

• There was vote stuffing on move 56, even after non-Windows voting had been disabled. The 187 votes stuffed for a queen give-away move added to 4.75% of the vote.
  The difference between the top two votes on moves 51 and 52 was less than 5%; there are two examples of individuals stuffing over 4% of the vote, making it quite likely that the game was influenced by an individual in the critical moves 51 & 52.
  (Microsoft claims the contrary in a carefully worded statement - "never any significant ballot-stuffing until move 59". So 5% is not significant when the vote differences are less than that?).
  
• Finally, the game did not have any problems until move 51. Microsoft did very well for the vast majority of the game - however, it became obvious after move 51 that ballot-stuffing was occurring (despite Microsoft denials) and that Microsoft was unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

The endgame FAQ

After The World resigned, Kasparov announced a 25-move forced mate after move 62 (read: the world would've lost on or before move 87, no matter what it did). You can see the page here, and it has a bit of commentary with Kasparov's analysis.

The game can be seen here.

I have a dreamcast, you can use any service provider you want (sega doesn't have one) It comes with software to install att worldnet but you don't have to and they walk you through setting up via any provider. Sega OWNS HEAT and this is where we may end up seeing game matching. But like M$ zone the play is primarily free.