Official News page 4

THE GROUNDHOG BUG-HUNTER

by Hazed

In order to find a bug in the game, you'd need to be familiar with how it works - at least, you'd think that was the case. Turns out that a tiny bit of half-remembered, incorrect knowledge can be just as useful. Proof is that this week, a Groundhog managed to find a bug, and report it to us in such a way that we were able to verify it and fix it.

Groundhog Dawc wasn't a brand new player - he was a returning player from the old GEnie days, back when you had to pay a large hourly rate to play Fed. He was delighted to find that Fed DataSpace still existed, and set out to explore, with a few faint memories of having to bribe somebody to get started in the game.

So he wandered into the customs shed and tried to bribe the manager, who was only too pleased to take his one and only slithy tove and give him a customs exemption permit. Now, if you know anything about the game, you'd think this would be a big problem - without that slithy tove, how would young Dawc manage to bribe the clerk to get his ship permit?

It turned out not to be a problem. The clerk was so stupid he issued the permit, and said thank you for the slithy tove, even though Dawc didn't have one to hand over. Whoops!

Rather than sorting out the clerk, so that he would actually check if the Groundhog actually possessed the slithy he was attempting to offer as a bribe, I decided to fix the manager of the customs shed instead, so he will no longer take the slithy from newbods. After all, what possible interest would customs have in somebody who didn't own a ship?

I then turned my attention to Gallaghers, and persuaded them that selling anything to Groundhogs was not a good idea. Their security scan now won't even let newbods in the door. So there's no way for a Groundhog to spend their slithy now, except by proffering it as a bribe to the right person.

So thanks to Dawc, for spotting this bug. He's been given a reward for his bug-hunting - why not ask him to show it to you sometime?

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