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The new tracker will support not only current versions of Bolo, but future versions as well and will provide, in addition to the information currently available:

• player handle (finally!)
• user-defined description of the game (up to 255 characters)
• ability to determine when a game is being quit, so that machine can be removed from the tracker immediately

Duke Bolofest Final Details. The following is Pins's announcement regarding the NC gathering friday march 14th through sunday march 16th.

attack_salad, berserkir, fish, grinch, guy and sbcm. are trekking in from the diverse northern wastelands of the continental us. from duke/unc black flag, jolo, max, pins and wintermute.
the schedule is to arrive at pins' house on friday. socialise swill beer and play appletalk bolo. saturday head out to public mac lab for some solid boloing with respites for more alcoholic indulgences (provided by our very own fount of beer.. jolo).

Duke Bolofest update. Fish and Guy made a last minute commitment to come, joining other confirmed Bolo diehards: SBCM, Will, and Berserkir, plus all the locals here (Max, Jolo, Wmute, Pins, Nutz, >, Flag). Will and Grinch want to come but need rides, and Blitz/Cat_Butt are still a maybe. The plan is tentatively arrrive Friday evening and gather at Pins's place for beers, story telling and mucho fun. Bring your computers and appletalk cables and we'll set up AT bolo. Saturday get together for breakfast, bolo hard, more beer and socialising sat night. On sunday whoever is left will decide what to do.

Duke Bolofest is getting down to the wire, anybody who is interested in joining us in NC this weekend for Bolo and beer etc. needs to contact Pins right away to make sure you don't get left out.

IBL limps along. The Middlebury boys are understandably reluctant to kill it off in spite of weak showings (essentially Sev and Lance have been keeping it afloat by rounding out 1 division with Ian and Krempic). If people are really interested in playing, they need to put in a showing tonight or else IBL is history... again.

3x3 Green Cup update. I'm thinking why not use Everard for the 3x3 Green Cup, with no time limits and no splitting of the map initially. Just like old times, yeehaw! There is no hard date for the GC, but I'm thinking definitely not this coming weekend due to the Duke Bolofest. Then I'm gone for the next 2 weekends, so unless somebody else wants to do it (and they would be MORE than welcome, I frankly don't have the time or the heart to keep this up anyway)... we're talking at the earliest April 6 or 7 (Sun/Mon).

I plan to resolve everything dealing with "Armoured Alliance" this year, because I want to move onto my next game ASAP. I am now able to devote 100% of my free time to working on this. (I'm doing all this in my free time, I don't do this for a living you know) "Armoured Alliance" had remained basically unchanged for about a year, but now things are moving again. I really want everyone to be able to play "Armoured Alliance"!

 235 Everard Island
 142 Crankcase
  54 Easter Island III
  49 Chew Toy 96
  39 Filled Chew Toy
  34 Chew Toy 3
  32 DH Oil Rig
  28 The Blobbo Gallery
  26 Skew Toy 2
  26 Chew Toy 4
  24 Chew Toy II
  23 Slugfest IV
  23 DH-Oil Rig �
  22 ddh oil rig
  22 chew toy 2
  18 Slugfest XXVIII
  16 Dream Soda V
  13 MOB Mini Pulp Bolo
  13 Grillfest VIII
  13 DH-Oil Rig v2
  12 ivan's tiny oasis
  12 bolo2
  12 Gothic Industrial
  12 Elliptical Slugdeath
  12 Cameron
  12 CT4
  11 Hamfeast V
  11 Fly Swatter II
  11 Chew Toy 2
  10 UCI Chew

"As of December last i lodged my resignation with ThoughtPort Authority Inc., and left their employ as of the 17th of January. Since that time i have not had access to usenet news (to be remedied soon), and only recently did our net connection and e-mail become available.

TPA had agreed to continue to host the Bolo materials and to allow the access necessary for the same, but withdrew admin access following my departure. Since then i have encouraged and persuaded the company to at least contact the other people responsible for maintaining the official materials (jolo, vert, Stuart) and arrange matters, which they have not done. I also asked if they intended to revise their initial decision to continue as host of the Bolo materials, but received no reply.

Thus the Official Bolo FTP Archive has been moved from ThoughtPort's service to a site at Duke. To my knowlege ThoughtPort has no further association with the development or support of Bolo, and the mail address <bolo-info@thoughtport.net> is no longer staffed." -bq

The FTP site is being set up as we speak, but it is a bit more difficult than the WWW site. All files are temporarily available via WWW at http://www.lgm.com/ftpbolo/. All recent submissions (since 12/96) to the FTP archive at TPA will be discarded - sorry. We are in the process of figuring out how to handle submissions to Duke. We'll keep everybody posted in the coming weeks. As far as commercialization of Bolo goes, this just means that TPA is now out of the loop, but I think everybody guessed as much when they failed to make any progress over the last 2 years. This does not exclude any other companies from pursuing commercialization. I'll shut up now before I get sued. :-)

The Lost Boys. Today we devote this column to tracking long lost Bolo players. Goob disappeared off the face of the earth after X'mas, turns out he is doing his internship at Intel. He drops by #bolo every now and then but he can't play Bolo. I heard from PolarBoy - he was there cheering Sol & Bitch on (hopefully from the sidelines, j/k PB) during Monday's Red Cup games. Now he's all psyched up to play too, and we have our first Green Cup 3x3 team already. Blitz is working in Dallas now, and he's probably going to come up for the NC Bolofest. Ulfilas is soon going to be Dr. Ulf, he's turning in his dissertation today! Did I forget anybody?

Swat: Sol and Bitch            Midbury: Krempic and Tzun
DiaMax: Diamond and Max        Mich: Severian and Hoov
MegaSam: MHz and Samhain       Duke: Wintermute and Nutz

FINAL SCORE:
Mich   134
Swat   116
Duke   103
MegaSam 92
DiaMax  32
Midbury  0

Addition/updates to Bolo Rolodex: Sol, Blitz, Diamond.

I identified a bug in the web counters on these pages which was slowing the server to a crawl. I have removed all counters for now - if you care, my access statistics are updated daily.

NC Bolofest marches on. This is from an email from Pins.

i just dropped a post onto rgb giving the weekend of the 14th as the rtp bolofest. at the moment bl and bers have expressed interest. attack salad wants to come but it would prob require him to greyhound. sbcm committed long time ago and nix is talking about maybe being able to use his frequent flyer miles to come.

Red Cup 2x2 Tournament: Official Rules & Regs.

Games will start 8 pm EST on Monday, March 3, and run continuously for 2 hrs or so. All games will be on the map "Crankcase" which is a medium-sized terrain map that allows for both of the major schools of play (rape vs. pillwar). By limiting it to one map we hopefully avoid a lot of whining and confusion. If you don't know the map, I suggest you get it and practice on it. All games will be strict tournament, with the teams splitting the map east/west.

We will most likely do a single elimination tournament (with a loser's bracket so you aren't dropped after only 1 loss). This of course depends on how many teams enter the Red Cup. If 8 teams play, we can finish the games in 3 rounds, which would be similar to the IBL playing time commitment. You have until March 2 11:59 pm EST to mail me with your official team roster.

Official teams now are:

Wmute & Nutz
Pins & Nix
MHz & Guy
People still looking for a partner: Samhain, Drad, BM, Chopin, Pins, Max, Diamond.

Contact each other directly please, I don't have time to play matchmaker. Everybody's email address is on the OBHP Bolo Rolodex.

The first week of IBL had mixed results. On Sunday 8 people showed up (the Middlebury Trio plus 5 other returning players from last season) and 2 low-lag divisions were formed. We even developed a kewl IRC script which allows the Middlebury guys to update the ratings/report web pages at Duke by remote. All was well. Then on Monday night nobody showed up. Hmmm. The fate of IBL is uncertain at this point? Anyway, Sunday's games came out like this:

------------------------------------------------------------

Div 1a1:  Drad Cat_butt Nutz Pins.  (Pins went 0-3.)

Game 1: Drad & Cat_butt > Nutz & Pins.
        Team A was favored by 197 points. By winning, each gained 25 points.
Game 2: Drad & Nutz > Cat_butt & Pins.
        Team A was favored by 145 points. By winning, each gained 31 points.
Game 3: Drad & Pins < Cat_butt & Nutz.
        Team A was favored by 41 points. By losing, each lost 58 points.

Overall point changes: Drad -1  Cat_butt +52  Nutz +64  Pins -115

------------------------------------------------------------

Div 1a2:  LordX Ian Krempic tzunami.  (LordX went 3-0.)

Game 1: LordX & Ian > Krempic & tzunami.
        Team A was favored by 427 points. By winning, each gained 8 points.
Game 2: LordX & Krempic > Ian & tzunami.
        Team A was favored by 425 points. By winning, each gained 8 points.
Game 3: LordX & tzunami > Ian & Krempic.
        Team A was favored by 319 points. By winning, each gained 14 points.

Overall point changes: LordX +30  Ian -14  Krempic -14  tzunami -2

------------------------------------------------------------

Internet Bolo League Spring '97 season starts up tonight, see the IBL home page for more details. Basically be there by 5:30 pm EST if you're a first timer, so that tzun can add you to our files and assign you an initial rating, etc. IBL vets can show up at 5:45.

Gold Cup (3x3) update: The only contenders so far are Diamond whose offer above applies to 3x3 also. Duke should be able to put together some sort of team from Max, Wmute, Nutz, >, Pins, and maybe even me. Where is everybody else?

Platinum Cup (1x1) update: Definitely in: Max, Nutz, > (beginning to see a pattern here? God to be a 2nd semester senior again!), and Beastmaster. Expressing strong interest: Lancelot, Scumbag, "a few other Europeans".

Pins is organizing a North Carolina Bolofest around Spring Break. The idea is to meet at Duke, play Bolo in Duke's public or radiology lab Mac clusters, drink beer (for those of us who are legal, of course), and otherwise have fun. Here is an announcement from Pins:

vert and palp are interested in coming down. sbcm has said he will rent van and pick up stragglers from chicago and umich and bring them hence. cat-butt and attack salad want to come and i don't know about any of the other boloers along the east coast. If we get enough momentum going who knows. the last bolofest in chicago had 14 people in same lab and it kicked ass.

spring break times this year are
duke : fri march 14th to mon march 24th
unc : march 6th to march 16th
uiuc : march 22nd to march 30th

I think the time period around the uiuc spring break works kinda best depending on who has exams. Tell me what times are best for you...

• 2x2 Red Cup
• 3x3 Gold Cup
• 1x1 Platinum Cup

If you are too young or wasted to recall, last summer and fall we had 2 separate tournaments, a 2x2 Red Cup (won by Team Princeton: Santa and Grinch) and a 3x3 Gold Cup (won by Team Michigan: Diamond, Severian, Hoov). Let's try to do one or both again! Games will hopefully commence in a few weeks, say early or mid-March.

Email me regarding possible 2- or 3-person teams you can field, and any date/time preferences (although please realize that we'll probably get N different preferences for N teams and some compromise will be necessary). People of all skill levels are welcome, as long as you know and respect the basic netiquette of Internet Bolo play on tournament maps. The only real requirement is that everybody be from the same site or at least have no intra-team lag (i.e. Drad is a de facto member of Team Aero and that's fine because he usually doesn't lag much even though he's halfway across the country).

Platinum Cup announcement:

... There can be only one!!!

It's about time we settle, once and for all, who the best 1x1 player is. In addition, the 1x1 has long been neglected, especially by IBL and PBL game formats. In many ways, 1x1 games are all about the best of strategy and tactics in exciting mano-a-mano confrontations.

There has never been a 1x1 tournament, at least not since I joined the game 4 years ago. There was an abortive attempt by vermillion several years ago, back when God, Ender, Gal, BL, and sluggo were household names, and Samhain and HB were still raw newbies. The problem is she disappeared halfway through the tournament and has yet to be heard from since.

Later sluggo pointed out: "Actually, there was a 1x1 tournament organized by jf (Jim Fieldhouse) from Miami of Ohio about a year or so before the Vermillion thingy. All games were played on Everard Island (since that was a map that everyone knew, hence being the most fair), with Snafu beating Smoke in the finals. Hence, since Snafu won the only 1x1 Bolo tournament ever held, he is obviously the greatest 1x1 player who has ever played the game."

After discussing it with Max & Samhain a bit, here are some tentative rules that makes sense to us. We envision a 2 round process. First everybody plays everybody else in a round robin. Players will meet on IRC #bolo at fixed dates/times over a period of about 2 weeks, and anybody can challenge anybody else; you cannot decline a challenge. Only wins count, so you are encouraged to play as many games as possible and to challenge better players (since losing doesn't hurt you). The challenged person gets to pick the map. For the 2nd round, the top 8 or 16 players (those with the most wins) will duke it out by single or double elimination.

• download Bolo binaries like aIndy & Internet Bolo Buddy
• Bolo Rolodex email registry
• updated, faster-loading Bolo Introduction
• substantially updated Bolo Hotlist with many new links.
• New Bolo Guides with the short and long rec.games.bolo FAQs and several other new guides!
• New Bolo Gallery featuring 2 IBL page exclusives - the complete works of sluggo and HB's psych papers, plus pictures from Bolostock III previously only available at vert's personal home page.

KevDog released Internet Bolo Buddy version 1.0 final! This pumped up Bolo Finder has many new features and is highly recommended for all Internet players.

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