2002-09-04 - 11:53 p.m.

Planetarion: Mercury & Solace, The Final Glory

Longtime readers of this diary probably groaned in pain after seeing the title for this entry. "He's not going to talk about Planetarion AGAIN is he?" Well, yes I am, but I think I can promise you that this will be the last time.

Yesterday's entry seemed kind of scatterbrained, and for good reason - I think I am still recovering from the tournament over the weekend. Here's an example of how badly my brain is working. While I was looking through the hundred-odd game scores from the open section of the tournament, I was irritated to notice that none of GM Joel Benjamin's games were in the pile. This was annoying because prior to this Joel has been very good about turning in his games. Some grandmasters are very secretive about their game scores, but Joel has always been very forthcoming. I was complaining to myself about how as a many-time state champion he should have more respect for the history of the tournament, and so on. Well early today I discovered that I had all of his games but one. They must have all wound up on the bottom of the pile, and I must have missed them when I flipped through them earlier. Where was my mind at?

Anyway, very early today something happened that sort of sent the day off at a right angle to how I'd intended.

Not long after I woke up, I got an Instant Message request from a name I vaguely recognized. It turned out to be one of my old Planetarion galaxymates, and he filled me in on what was happened with the galaxy.

First, a bit of an explanation. Planetarion is an online space-warfare game where everyone has a planet, and the universe is divided up into galaxies (25 or 15 planets) and clusters (25 galaxies). It's a pretty simple game, but what made it interesting for me were the people and the alliance politics. I played the game for more than a year, going from the second season through the sixth. There were some pretty intense situations, like here, or here, or here, or here.

Ironically, Lily is the one who introduced me to the game, but at the end of round six, she'd had enough. It had been an incredibly grueling round for me too, so I decided to take a break as well.

However, I still kept monitoring how my old galaxy was doing. We had been named "Mercury & Solace" after a techno song by an act named "BT." Regardless of where we got the same from, it's still a cool name. There are some Planetarion statistical tools that show what's going on in the universe that you can access without actually having a planet. I noticed that M&S was doing very well - during the entire round they seemed to be in the top five.

To my surprise, when I checked the universe after I got back from Kerhonkson, Mercury and Solace was galaxy #1. When last I checked they seemed to be permanently mired at #4 or #5. What had happened?

Anyway, Britannia filled me in on what had been happening with the galaxy. I mentioned to him that I hadn't been in any of the galaxy IRC channels because I couldn't seem to get them to work. The explanation for this was simple: the Planetarion creators had changed the network! Britannia gave me the new network's address and in just a few minutes I was back in the old galaxy channel.

I was astonished: the old galaxy room was full of people, some of whom I recognized as old enemies. What was going on here??

In my absence, the new super-successful Mercury & Solace picked up a lot of fans. And little by little I pieced together what was happening. Over the last several days the galaxies at the top had been taken out as part of a war between Fury and a former ally called Virus. I wondered why it had taken Fury so long to stab Virus - as near as I could tell they were almost totally useless as an alliance.

At a key juncture the main enemies of M&S from last round, the traitor galaxy of 1:23 (also called Spacetransen, after a German Star Trek parody), defended M&S and launched a counterattack against their attackers, essentially cementing their position as #1 galaxy. This is in spite of the fact that early in this round Cocky and Brittania had arranged the ruin of Spacetransen by repeatedly organizing attacks on them, as revenge for the previous round.

Sound like a soap opera, doesn't it? Well hang on, it only gets worse.

It was now a two-way race for the #1 spot and I guess Spacetransen figured that they'd rather support the rascals they knew rather than the rascals they didn't know.

The reason Britannia contacted me was that round 7 was coming to an end, and Mercury & Solace was finishing up its best round ever. However, in a bitter twist of fate, they were not going to finish first, but second.

On the final day of round 7, Mercury & Solace had woken up to find that two of their members had been deleted for cheating. This knocked their score down enough so that the #2 galaxy passed them in the final hours of the round. Were they angry about this? You bet!

Planetarion has a number of rules that you have to agree to in order to get a planet, and among them are the fact that it's illegal to play more than one planet, and it's illegal to trade planets with someone else. Frankly, I think it's bullshit. It's your planet, you paid for it, why can't you give it to someone else, so long as this person is not playing another planet?

That's the thing about Planetarion - it's almost impossible to play it and NOT cheat. The fact that the game requires so much dedication and it runs 24/7 practically FORCES people to bend and break the rules, which seem almost impossible to fairly enforce, by the way. What happened is that one of the M&S galaxy mates decided to quit early in the round because he was a father with young children and wanted to spend more time with them. Rather than just have a hole in the galaxy, his planet was given to another experienced player who was unhappy in his current galaxy. Ordinarily this would have caused no comment, but the Galactic Commander of the #2 galaxy found out about it and reported it to the creators, who after investigating all the planets in the galaxy decided to shut down two planets in the final hours of the game.

The second planet that was shut down was long time galaxy member Wolfman, who I've mentioned before. The reason for shutting down his planet was even stupider: he had an illegal phone number on his entry form. Wolfen is an individualistic guy who values his privacy. He has an unlisted phone number, and he wanted to keep it that way, so on the application under "phone number" he put "none of your beeswax." This was enough to get his planet deleted.

What was even more galling was that the new #1 galaxy had cheated too, and it was obvious. They, also, had replaced a player who had dropped out earlier in the game. More serious was the fact that there was obviously some account sharing going on.

One of the galaxy members in the new #1 galaxy was a former M&S galaxy member named Phoenix. She was asked to leave the M&S at the end of round five because she was a poor player, and she annoyed the heck out of everyone. This round, however, her planet was in the top 25. Had she suddenly shown an aptitude for the game? Most certainly not: she was far too fickle and dim to run a planet that well. Obviously someone else was running it for her, most likely her boyfriend who was also in that galaxy.

So M&S got screwed out of finishing the round as the #1 galaxy in Planetarion by the tattle-tale GC of the winning galaxy. When I mentioned it to Lily later she had what was probably the proper reaction to this news: "So what? It's just a stupid game!"

Still, it was good to spend most of the day hanging out with my old galaxy mates. And actually I think it helped me to get my work done. Today I was doing the last games from the Open section of the New York State Championship, and since I'd lazily put all of the ones with the poorest handwriting at the bottom of the pile, that meant that every single one was a headache. However, by alternating working on the games with chatting online with my old galaxy-mates, I was able to decipher every gamescore but one. You need to have kind of a Zen mentality to decode crappy scoresheets since often the REAL move looks nothing like what was scribbled on the sheet. It an art!

And it was nice to see all the Mercury and Solace people one last time. Even the old Galactic Commander, Sharon, popped up in the chat room briefly. She seemed as unbalanced as ever, mentioning that she and her anger-challenged husband Johnny had gotten divorced, then remarried! It seemed to me a supreme act of stupidity for them to get back together after managing to escape each other, but perhaps this is best for mankind in general - at least by staying together they are making TWO people miserable instead of four!

Sharon was also boldly talking in the channel about how she'd enjoyed having cyber-sex with a couple of the male members of the galaxy. This was Mercury & Solace's dirty little secret, and it was part of the reason that there was so much personal animosity at the end of round four. But Sharon just blurted it out right there in the public channel. Everyone ignored her.

I was glad to be there at the end when Cocky was interviewed by the creators in their public channel in front of hundreds of PA players as the Galactic Commander of the #2 galaxy. Cocky was his usual saucy self, as this following IRC snippet indicates:

[18:31] =Spinner= Hi chris, is yoru GC around?
[18:31] =Spinner= ah
[18:31] *** Zeus sets mode: +v Cocky
[18:31] =Spinner= there he is
[18:31] * [MS]Chris points at Cocky
[18:31] =Cocky= im gc of 12:13 :]
[18:31] =Spinner= So, hows it hanging Cocky
[18:31] =Cocky= long, loose, and floppy
[18:31] =BrV-Zokum= *snigger*

In some ways I felt like a proud poppa, watching my children win an award. Of course it occurred to me that they had their best round ever WITHOUT me, so maybe I wasn't as indispensable as I thought!

However, it was also a bittersweet moment as well, because the occasion marked the end of Mercury & Solace, and the end of Planetarion itself. The next round, round eight, is going to be the final round of Planetarion. In that final round players will be placed in galaxies randomly, so the remaining members of Mercury & Solace will be scattered all over the universe. Cocky was trying to get me to play next round, but without Mercury & Solace being in one galaxy, I don't see the point.

Planetarion is fun, but it's also very frustrating and hugely time-consuming. Soon, it will be only a memory, and then it will be forgotten. My priorities have shifted, and I have to move on.