The ARENA is Open From: srt@aero.org (Scott Turner) Date: Mon, 31 Jan 1994 18:29:28 +0000 "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat." Theodore Roosevelt INTRODUCTION The Arena is open again. To those of you who played in Arena previously, welcome back. A summary of changes since the last Arena is noted below. To those of you who have not played Arena before, welcome. I hope you'll enjoy playing Arena. WHAT IS ARENA? Arena is a computer-moderated, play-by-mail game of gladatorial combat. To play, you send orders to "arena@sun-dimas.aero.org" commanding your gladiators. Once a day the orders are collected and battles between the gladiators occur. After the battles, you are sent mail with descriptions of the fights your characters were in and other Arena news. WHAT ARE THE RULES? HOW DO I JOIN? The rules for the current version of Arena follow in a second posting. Read them carefully before sending in any orders. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I NEED TO KNOW? * Your site needs to generate proper mail headers. If it doesn't, Arena won't be able to send mail back to you. If you send in orders and never receive a reply, this may be the problem. * I strive to fix bugs in Arena as rapidly as possible. However, I do not try to "repair" any problems those bugs might have caused. If you're gladiator loses a battle because of a bug I'm sorry, but don't ask me to replay the battle or anything of that sort. * I'm always interested in suggestions on how to improve Arena, and in fact I have vague plans to do an improved version "real soon now". But Arena is my game, and I'll do with it as I will. If you think I'm being a stupid idiot, please don't play the game. * If you post to rec.games.pbm concerning Arena, please put "ARENA" in your subject header. This lets me quickly find the messages I need to read, and allows the readers of rec.games.pbm who aren't interested in Arena to ignore those messages. * The code to Arena is not available, so please don't ask for it. (Or at least make a serious monetary offer if you're really interested.) CONCLUSION Enjoy yourself. Don't get too hyped up about Arena. I wrote it in a week as a fun experiment. It isn't the greatest game in the world, but it's free and easy to play. -- Scott T. Referenced By Up