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2018-05-10 12:17

Didi

Registered: Nov 2011
Posts: 486

24h rules for First Releases & board list extension

Moved this topic to the forum because it does not only belong to a special release.

In this topic the 3 lists are different:

The rules for Jazzcats list (Vandalism News) is not very precise on that topic.
"The group uploading to the majority of official sites within 24 hours of the initial first release or NTSC/PAL import will receive the points."

The rule in Game Corner (even not released for a while) is very precise here:
"If more than one group uploads a first release or PAL/NTSC import of the same game within 24 hours, the group which has its release available for download as first on the majority of official sites will get the points."
That's why we have an uneven amount of release boards.

The Propaganda List (lately published in Attitude #18) is precise as well, but different:
"You need to be first on all three boards to win the race. In other words: Make sure you spread your warez."

As an example the current release of "Hyperzap". The Facts:
* Uploaded first on Reflections by Laxity. Half hour later for Fairlight (by hedning/GP on behalf).
* Uploaded first ot Antidote by Laxity. Half hour later for Fairlight (by hedning/GP on behalf).
* The Hidden was unreachable. 15 hours later The Hidden was back. Uploaded first for Fairlight (by hedning/GP on behalf). 2 hours later by Laxity. Both within 24 hours to first upload by Laxity on Reflections.

Winner by list (by my understanding):
Vandalism News: Laxity. After Fairlight upload on The Hidden: Fairlight.
Game Corner: Laxity. First on 2 of 3 boards = majority. Point.
Proapaganda List: Laxity. After Fairlight upload on The Hidden: Fairlight.

This is a special situation. It is not uncommon that one or more boards is unreachable. But it is uncommon that it is back within the 24 timeframe and someone takes the chance to win the race ca. 20 hours after the first upload.

Best interpretation in terms of "winning a race" is in my opinion the rule of Game Corner (not just because it is mine).

And I would like to extend the list of counted boards by RapidFire which proved to be very reliable. To get an un uneven amount we would need a 5th one. My eye is on Raveolution or Frozen Floppy but none of them has proved the needed stability and availability yet. Until they do, I would opt for RapidFire as a fallback to count if situation is not clear due to unreachability of others.

This is my point to be discussed. Let's start...

2018-05-10 14:22

E$G

Registered: Dec 2007
Posts: 839

<Post edited by E$G on 10/5-2018 22:05>

I'll bring my not so humble opinion on bbs nowadays.
BBS are born to distribuite commercial c64 software and if credited to assign points on the game in the game of the release for points rush.
Obviously not all but just 3 selected to be the best, running on real hardware so for the few real cracking group around is not enough hard to get originals and provide it with a decent crack and test but must be u/l to this 3 bbs as fast as possible to avoid the other groups do it before than you. 3 in a row it's the magic number to get the points. 2 or less it's not enough.
http://csdb.dk/crackstandards.php
It happened many times that not all 3 bbs were online so messages, calls and ring to the doorbell occurred to let the game (and the group) to reach the final target.
But if something goes wrong what it happens? It happens what Didi exactly write about it.
So the problems are 2. There is no a sync with the rulez of the 1st release points. There are no rulez about when the bbs is not reachable!
In soccer game to avoid the referee judge in Italy was introduced the var (Video Assistant Referee), the referee anyway is the one who judge.
What we can do in the scene?
1) sync the rulez, there must be only one.
The one proposed used by Didi seems to be the best to avoid most of the probs.
2) To have 5 bbs on a count of 3 active will limit the problems.

I'm against this system and my propose is totally different, do the release here on csdb and since is commercial delete the link.
csdb is always on, and take care of the exact hour of release.
The game must be immediately u/l and no modification must be done, the link must be deleted, and the moderators will be the judges of the release.
Then if you wish you can deliver it to the bbs, that will do the work like in the past as couriers.
But if you prefere to lose time, that you can dedicate to a better release and lose the rush for futiles happening it's up to you.
Until a suspect will give food for your mind.
What you will think about when during a u/l the line will fall down. Bad luck or something weird happened?

2018-05-10 14:54

hedning

Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 4720

I once made the mistake that Jazzcat with "majority of boards" meant that one had to be first on 2 out of 3 boards, which made sense to me. It was, however, not the case - which I learned the hard way. Jazzcat told me that you had to be first having your release on all boards. To align our Propa rules with that, we tried to be more precise in our rules.

So our intent with the Propa rules was indeed to align them and make them compatible with Jazzcat's The List (and Game Corner! I was not aware that the rules were that much different.)

This is, however, a bad place to discuss the rules, as we will have a lot of annoying comments from people that do not like the cracking scene these days and that will only whine and troll, and it will give air to even more debates with Bacchus, I am sure. His view is, as you know, to cut the connection between the boards and the first release race, and have some modern alternative - no active group support that except FLT.

And I am fine with the three boards that are first release boards now. 3 is good. 5 is just too much, and I would promote Frozen Floppy if we had that discussion, as it has a good uptime, and new stable hw. I also like RapidFire, but I like even more the fact that not every board is a Laxity/Excess or whatever group's bbs. Right now we have one Triad/Ons board, one ATL/GP board and one Excess/Laxity/Ons board. All major groups seems evened out.

2018-05-10 15:14

hedning

Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 4720

Conclusion: I want to keep it to the 3 boards that we have today, and I want the Propa rules to be aligned with Game Corner and Jazzcat's List when it comes to how to upload stuff. Thus: I am positive in changing the Propa rules to what Game Corner has, if Jazzcat agrees with that. Otherwise we will keep on aligning our rules to the upload rules from JC:s List. Seems you have to have a discussion with JC, and I am sure he want that to be discussed in a mail communication between all active groups, and not here.

2018-05-10 15:16

Seven

Registered: Jan 2002
Posts: 202

I have no horse in this race, but since we're spitballing here...

I propose we delete all the crack nonsense from CSDb and you guys build your own warez site where you can implement whatever funny rules you can come up with. That way you can replace binaries, include a versioning system, delete fucked up releases, implement an automatic scoring system, or whatever functions you've been asking for from Perff for a decade but have never received because CSDb is not the scene.

On a side note: Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that this is over a release that would've barely passed as a game preview 20 years ago?

2018-05-10 16:22

hedning

Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 4720

So it begins.

2018-05-10 16:23

TheRyk

Registered: Mar 2009
Posts: 2218

Though MYD cracking department seems pretty dead, we do have some cracks in the pipe for 2018, mostly jewel oldies, but also some with firstie potential.

But the BBS stuff frustrated us too much some years ago (pretty much same story: counting board unavailable until other group who runs the BSS had their release ready -> zero points for us), we've just given up the whole statwanking for good.

Call me lame, but I daresay the whole firstie-determination-by-x-of-y-BBSes (some of which count no matter how unreliable they are, some of which don't count) stuff is a pain in the ass and not really encouraging to get into firstie race again.

Don't get me wrong, my opinion is only about BBSes for first release "points", so I don't say BBSes are obsolete, e.g. they're cool as source for warez and it always feels nostalgic in a cool way to enter them.

2018-05-10 16:25

Didi

Registered: Nov 2011
Posts: 486

@Seven: You may go a few more years back to have these just accepted as preview. 1998 was not that golden anymore. ;)

@hedning: Will check that up with Jazzcat. I agree that the current 3 boards are well divided among the groups and Antidote is OK as well since it changed port.
If I remember correctly some old mags also had a fallback for the case there are problems with the boards. Propaganda and Vandalism accepts CSDb as fallback. I'd opt for other boards as such.

2018-05-10 16:28

Shine

Registered: Jul 2012
Posts: 346

The most important property for a 1st release implementation is: Availability

If this is not possible for some reasons, it's not the best way!

2018-05-10 17:46

Tim
Account closed

Registered: Mar 2002
Posts: 467

My personal 5 cents..

Good point, glad it is raised.

First of all 3 makes no sense to me, it never has.. in theory it puts the important vote swing to the board that was down, which seems a reward rather then a reprimand (no upload) for being down, as well as placing the decision in the hands of the team running that board.

With the lack of any truly independent boards, that's a big no-no for me, because we all like to compete and we all like to find the edges at times.

Do we need more boards? Yes.. 2017 was terrible, more then a handful of moments where only 2 or 1 was available and that's being polite.

Also, I would like to see all serious contenders in the game have a seat on the table, which means we still have some teams without a HQ on the points list. If we don't expand the amount of boards, perhaps evening up the playing field should mean each bbs should at least carry X amount of teams.

Another reason why I'd prefer 5, because who wants to be forced to run a team to have at least X amount if there's no natural love..

So for several reasons I would prefer 5 too, but agree naming a fifth at current is still an issue.. set a fixed minimum monthly call rate, monitor for 6 months and if qualified use 5.

Till then, we can very easily go on now with 4, there is no question if Rapid Fire qualifies, it's proven itself not only in availability, but also in identical or higher active user count compared to the boards we already use, even actively working with hardware vendors of wifi modems to bring in new users.. that alone should have earned it the spotlight by now imho!

Which brings to mind to use a server disk set-ups as a visual example;

A raid-5 is a very nice simple server disk set-up consisting of 3 disks, and it is VERY common these days to have a hot-spare.

Considering the fall-out we've had of disks in 2017, it could have been used as an official hot-spare backup counting as the third board, a role CSDB clearly does not want to have and in my opinion shouldn't have either.

Using Rapid Fire as a hot spare/backup until the time a 5th fitting board proves itself would work just fine, solving this release problem, several other lingering issues, as well as have a clear path for a 5th board to get it's ass into shape and make the effort/investment to hit the bar or higher.

2018-05-10 19:13

lA-sTYLe

Registered: Sep 2003
Posts: 63

Allright Boys, since this attacks me as Sysop of the Hidden and People kept asking if i would take down the BBS to gain advantages for any GP prefered Group i wanna clear u some things.

1) I never even thought a single second of taking the BBS down to make the BBS not reachable. And i also wont do that in the Future.

2) Holy Moses and me did a lot of improvements to the Cyborg BBS which runs on the Hidden. One thing we wanted is that the Date and Time will be adjusted EACH call to have it as most time accurate than possible to see who uploaded something with correct timestamp. Not ANY other BBS running nowadays serves that.

3) After changing my provider to ftth i have to deal with ipv6 Ip changes out of the sudden. Once this ip changes i have to adjust the port forwarder in my router manually. If the IP changes in a bad timeframe i even cant react, nor i notice myself , UNTIL Yesterday ! David Jacoby and me worked out a BBS uptime script which Pings the BBS every 6 Hours now, and if BBS isnt reachable, i will recieve an Email that notices me to check the BBS.

4) In the Past i got mails or FB messages from Groups to upload Release x after i rebooted the BBS. And also this time the involved groups know how to reach me elsewhere, so i dont know why it didnt happen this time, but there was enough time to moan instead just dropping a mail within 5 secs.

5) I got messaged by Hedning that the BBS wasnt reachable on tuesday 22.46 CET but i was in bed as i had to get up at 3.00 am and didnt want to get up to fix this. At that time i even didnt know that there was a race for something was going on.

I also could prove that with chat screenshot if you ping me via whatsapp or fb or mail. Just in case

...

We are doing as much as we can to reduce downtime and also add modern things to have a fair competition with 100% accurate time documentation. What do you think why we are doing this ?

As final Result, All those who complain that the hidden wasnt reachable should punch theirselve right into the Face. You send my your release Back in the past, why didnt you do this time ?

just fuck off, really

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