[crossfire] Unban me

[Brendan Lally]

On 10/10/05, Vernon T Rhyne <
     trhyne at mit.edu
     > wrote:
>
      <laughs>  That hasn't, and will never be the case.  Rule enforcement at all
     >
      levels is by whim and mood, as with most clique-managed open-source
     >
      communities.
     
Try as with all stable communities anywhere in the world.

The nature of rules is such that to have them enforced uniformly would
be unjust. because rules only describe concepts, not individual
circumstances.

This is why court systems the world over allow for extenuating
circumstances. (and why politicians who distrust their local judicary
and try to make the response to such  calls formalised in law create
the loophole-filled laws that blight most nations in the world today)

>
       It's undoubtedly a major reason that the wordlwide crossfire
     >
      player count is in the hundreds (or less), rather than thousands or more.
     
I suspect there are five more noticable reasons for the lack of players.

1) mediocre performance on slow/laggy network connections (crossfire
was designed for playing on an internal university network, and has
never really been properly optimised to cope with modem connections,
that up until only a couple of years ago were very common)

2) a historical lack of stability. - less of an issue in stable server
releases, though the metalforge and cat2 servers sometimes find rather
more bugs than might be preferred (that is, however, the nature of CVS
code).

3) difficulty in setting up clients - until comparitively recently
this required some interesting playing with telnet, and windows client
support is a fairly new (and under exposed) thing - I've had a small
go at helping in this respect myself (look at the posts about
autopackage from last month)

4) High initial learning curve to play the game - partially this is an
artifact of the way existing clients are created, partially this is a
map/item issue (the god-given initial items are an interesting detail
for a newbie who accidentally drops something).

5) lack of information about the project. - there are some steps being
taken to deal with that. (
     http://www.gamesites200.com/mpog/vote.php?id=2197
      is one of them)

>
      I grant that I'm a largely outside observer, but the general politics of
     >
      crossfire ensured I'd never step inside.
     
I have not seen any noticable intrusion of politics in the project
itself, arguably on the metalforge server such a thing can be
observed, but metalforge != crossfire

With all of the problems and issues that have arisen since I joined
the project, I have never seen anything but a desire to find the best
or most useful technical solution to the problem at hand,