news of December 2000
Is there something the C&C community should know?
Mail it to MacMark@t-online.de and let's all read it here!
[2000-12-27]
WChat down before Christmas

Me and some other warriors returned from our Christmas shopping on 2000-12-22 and wanted to relax a little bit by playing some nice CnC matches, but what did we see: WChat was down. I mailed Gavin and Ted at Westwood (check for details about Westwood email addresses my links page) and asked what's wrong:

    From: "Snyder, Gavin" <gsnyder@westwood.com> To: "'MacMark@t-online.de'" <MacMark@t-online.de> Cc: VirtualTed <VirtualTed@westwood.com> Subject: RE: wchat falsely claims password wrong Date: Fri, 22 Dec 2000 14:33:27 -0800
    MIME-Version: 1.0

    All chat servers are down right now.

    Gavin

    -----Original Message-----
    From: MacMark@t-online.de [mailto:MacMark@t-online.de] Sent: Friday, December 22, 2000 2:17 PM
    To: Snyder, Gavin
    Cc: VirtualTed
    Subject: wchat falsely claims password wrong


    Hi Gavin and Ted,

    WChat says "wrong password" when I try to login now. It worked some hours ago, but not yet anymore.
    Is the server under update process?

    Regards,
    MacMark

Not much later they fixed WChat and currently it's working again and hopefully for a longer time ;)

[2000-12-19]
Official link from Westwood

I asked Ted about a link from Westwood to this site. They're updating one section after the other and he wrote:

    Hi Markus,

    We're almost there. We are planning to link you in the C&C Universe site
    when it goes up next month.

    -VT

Well, I can't wait to see that :-)

[2000-12-19]
The WChat editor (by o0oXziBito0o)

As an addition to Edited channel names:

    The only things you can do on the wchat editor is change the name of the channel and start game w/out acception. I know it is pretty cheap, but you can't have different settings on there, it is just that they are changing the settings really fast then hitting the start game w/out acception on the program. I have it on my page, I didn't try it out, but I looked into the program, and there weren't any other options there. just wanted to let you in on the info....

[2000-12-10]
ACnDC fakes other players

It's not enough for him to be the top cheater of WChat. No, he even wants to make others look as bad as him. As stated in earlier news he uses lookalike names of formerly champs to play some foolish games with us. But that wasn't fun enough for him.

Recently he made the name "akabiink" and feigns to be "AkaBlink" who's a well known player today. He uses these lookalikes to cover his dirty behaviour respectively to make some well known good players look bad.

Unfortunately for him this site takes a close look at all cheaters. We're watching You ;-)

[2000-12-03]
ACnDC plays under 3 names again

In addition to yesterday's news Oldschool rip offs this: After having played "Patmckula" I'm sure it's ACnDC. His playing and his talking is 100% ACnDC. ACnDC had announced that he will have even more fun this month than he had last month (breaking the rules).

I know that fool (ACnDC) long enough to know about his mentally sickness. His greatest problem is the lack of reputation in the CnC community. Now he made similar names like the old big ones used. "patmckula" refers to Oompah's real life name, "pieman" refers to Pieman1 and "rqueim" refers to Rquiem. How silly can one be?

[2000-12-03]
edited channel names

Some of my readers have been fast in answering to yesterday's article New names for cheater channels. It looks like there's an explanation for it which I dislike very much:

This came from Sundown46:

    X-Originating-IP: [64.208.70.122]
    From: "Brett Hine" <sundown46@hotmail.com> To: MacMark@t-online.de
    Subject: got some news for ya
    Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 19:08:34 -0500
    Mime-Version: 1.0
    X-OriginalArrivalTime: 03 Dec 2000 00:08:34.0324 (UTC) FILETIME=[2D329D40:01C05CBD]

    [..]
    Ok, I got news for ya now. You were saying there were some strange game channels on ww. Well, I was interested in this, because they usually said so and so= aborter. I was interested, becasue someone (nkoblast) threatened to "force me to abort" so I was wondering..."Maybe the people in those channels force people to abort and then publicize them as cheaters." You said that those channels are like that to brand them as cheaters, but the name of the channel and the people in the channel are not the same. I know that awinforme and madagentt were making these channels. they can do this by having a ww editor. they can change the name of their games to something like aflaaen=aborter or whatever. so the people in the channel aren't necessarily the cheaters, they have just played the cheaters and they posted the cheaters' names on their game channel. So thats the inside scoop on those. Also, another thing that some people can do with their ww editors, is change the settings without people knowing it. for instance, if the setting read like 12/3/9999 in the game channel, the actual settings can be like 5/7/9999 in the game!!! So just keep an eye out for this too.

    Sundown46

This came from Okplayer:

    X-Originating-IP: [24.50.219.32]
    Reply-To: n64god_@hotmail.com
    From: "David M." <n64god_@hotmail.com>
    To: Macmark@t-online.de
    Subject: Hey
    Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 21:25:50 -0500
    Mime-Version: 1.0
    X-OriginalArrivalTime: 03 Dec 2000 02:25:50.0765 (UTC) FILETIME=[5A7FC5D0:01C05CD0]

    Hey Mac, this is Okplayer...I haven't been playing for a while because I decided to take a break but I just recently went to your site and read the article about "New Names for Cheater Channels". I would just like to say that what you said about it is wrong. Someone made a patch for Westwood Online that let's you make the name of your channel whatever you want it to be. So far, I have heard that it is legal by Westwood rules to use it so there is nothing wrong with it. Thanks.

This came from oRciOnm:

    From: "Merryle Filkin" <merryle@bigpond.com.au> To: <MacMark@t-online.de>
    Subject:
    Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2000 12:28:53 -0800
    MIME-Version: 1.0
    X-Priority: 3

    From <mailto:Orcionm@hotmail.com>Orcionm@hotmail.com ok

    That name=cheater thing you are talking about is a cnc bot and it has been around for ages mac ;)

    oRciOnm

So it seems this editing of game channels became quite popular now. I never saw it before although I play on WChat since years. I can confirm that the channel owner wasn't the same name as his channel in such cases recently. I thought that happend in another way: Sometimes if a game doesn't connect, the guest remains in the hosted channel alone and another person can enter it instead of the original owner. As long as someone is in that channel it would carry the old (wrong) name. So I guessed the branded cheater left and some other guy was still there in.

I cannot imagine that modified game channels are legal. I'm still curious what Ted will say about it.

[2000-12-02]
upgrades at Westwood

In the middle of November it looked like the ladder was down. I wrote:

    Hello ladder team,

    this is MacMark again :)))

    Looks like the ladder is down. Searching for an entry gives an error. Just in case You didn't already notice ;)

    Regards,
    MacMark

The answer was now:

    Our servers have been undergoing some upgrades lately. All of these servers are fully operational at this time. Thank you for your patience.

    --Westwood Contest Coordination Staff

[2000-12-02]
Oldschool rip offs

Once upon a time we had some good (really good) players here on CnC. In December we got some guys pretending to be them. Question from a reader:

    Hey Mac, Aranand here. Is Pieman and Requiem back? I saw the names on the ladder but I still wasn't sure. Please let me know what you think.
    Later - Aranand

My answer:

    No, these names are rip-offs.

    The original names were "Pieman1" and "Rquiem". The rip offs today are "Pieman" and "Rqueim". See the difference?

    Regards,
    MacMark

[2000-12-02]
New names for cheater channels

I sent a mail to Ted a few seconds ago:

    Hi Ted,

    some guys have strange game channel names. Their game isn't called name's_game. Instead it's called name=aborter or name=cheater. A new strike of the ladder team against cheaters? If so: Congratulations, great move!

    Regards,
    MacMark

It looks like every cheater get's his suitable attribute for his game channel. So if You're a known cheater/aborter or whatever, well at least a non-honest person, then Your game channel's name will never be the same again, hehe.

More on this as soon as information becomes available.

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