Things have been pretty dead around here lately, what with the summer holidays and all the Ambrosia folks' attention on Nova, but this birthday thing is comming up awful soon... and it's in danger of being ignored!! If we really want this tournament to go off, we need to get organizing right now: send out announcement to the mail list, work out an alternate plan in case the tracker goes down... stuff like that. I'd be happy to do any amount of this work, if people will only tell me what needs be done.

Asides from that, we need to be playing some more! At least, I do... I've hardly played at all since that last tounrmanet debacle. But as I understand it, neither has anyone else. I know some folks were talking about getting tired of the game, but I thought that most of us weren't... and now I find that, after a break, I'm quite ready to get back to it!

One big problem we have is the split between 1.0.2 and 1.0.3: the testers, who in most cases are the more frequent players, are more likely to be on .3 (when they're on at all), so everyone else, dropping into .2, sees no one there and gets discouraged. And in .3 there aren't enough players for any real games either. The horrible negative reenforcement loop this starts up means that nobody is really even looking into the tracker these days. And then, even worse, that in turn means that noone is dooing any testing; so at this rate .3 will never be released!! I have no idea what we can do with this: is there anything in particular we could be testing, that would be helpful? Is pop-pop even being worked on at all? (I undestand entirely that Nova had priority these last couple weeks).

So in general, I don't mean to accuse anyone or chide anyone at all; just to say, I think it's time to wake up the pop-pop community again! One year of pop-pop, and a Windows version coming out with 1.0.3 (perhaps)... what a time of pregnant promise! So let's get going... and, what can I do to help?

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I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was a shepherd, and a tender of sycamores.
(url="http://"http://squibix.net/")squibix web(/url) - (url="http://"http://squibix.net/pop/")squibix pop-pop page(/url)

Yes you're right, the botched 1.0.3 testing and the collapse of the tracker in the last tourney has certainly had some impact on Pop-Pop addiction -World wide! I am up for this Thursday's tourney (7.oo GMT). I am sure we can get enough players. The biggest worry, I think, is that damn tracker. As previously mentioned, I think everyone should download the latest version of (url="http://"http://www.gameranger.com/")GameRanger(/url) incase the tracker decides to go pear again.

Perhaps we should set about hosting the tourney via GameRanger from the very start? This way, if the tracker does go pear, we don't have the problem of telling everyone to switch to GameRanger. Hosting games and communicating in the same environment would also be very useful -and funny!

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Originally posted by SHOES:
...botched 1.0.3 testing...

I wouldn't really say 'botched'; it was just, a problem came up that no one anticipated, and Ambrosia's attention was diverted by Nova so things have just sort of been stagnating.. or at least that's how things look to me. Hopefully that won't be the case much longer!

And I've just downloaded GR and signed up and all, so I'm ready if we choose to go that route. Of course, I don't have any idea how to use said program, but it doesn't look too terribly complicated...

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I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was a shepherd, and a tender of sycamores.
(url="http://"http://squibix.net/")squibix web(/url)

I take back everything I said about the tracker. It worked perfectly in today's tourney. How could I have ever doubted it.

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