Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: April 22, 2018

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WHY THE FUTURES LIST IS NOT ALWAYS RANDOMISED

by Hazed

One bug that was reported turns out not to be a bug at all, just a feature.

The bug report said:

“It seems there is a bug going on that has eliminated the randomization of the available futures list between days and exchanges. It used to be that there would be a new random list of available futures in each exchange every day. Now it seems that the list of available futures persists in some exchanges so that the same exact futures are available every day. Also it seems that the list of available futures is the same in other exchanges as well so that some exchanges have the same available futures as 1 or 2 or more other exchanges and stay that way for days/weeks/months or forever.”

After Alan discussed this with the player and looked at some examples, he concluded that this is not a bug, it’s an unexpected consequence. The futures generated for a planet are not actually ‘random’, they are a function of the current state of the exchange. Since there are many exchanges in Fed DataSpace that are maxed out, it would make sense that they would generate identical futures.

So case closed on this one.

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