This article was spotted in the Dallas Morning News:
HiTech Creations, Inc. Release Slows Down Internet Local Flight Simulator Company releases new game, bogging down Internet throughout Northeast Texas
07/03/2002
By: BUSTER HYMEN / Dallas Morning News
HiTech Creations, Inc., a Internet based flight simulation company from Grapevine, TX that produces the popular online game, Aces High released a new version of the game today, causing Internet access to be slowed all over Texas and throughout the Southern United States.
The game is what is known in the industry as a MMOG, or massively multiplayer online game. These games are increasingly popular as more and more homes gain access to high speed Internet connections. Thousands of geeks, nerds, and dweebs from all over the world play this game 24 hours a day. The game allows you to fly in a simulation of World War II fighters, bombers, and even ground vehicles and boats.
The latest version, known as 1.10, was released amidst much hype and has been well received by the fans of this popular genre. The mad scramble to download the latest version has resulted in Internet connections all over the area being slowed to a crawl. Ping rates to local servers were in the 5000 m/s range for most of the day, even for people using T3 cable lines.
HTC founder, Dale "HiTech" Addink released the following statement: "This relese represints meny weaks of hard work bye the staf at HiTech Creatiosn. we are very prod of our eforts and we are alredy hard at work on 1.11 wich will be relese in two weeks". sic
Some local players werent as happy with the latest effort. One player we spoke to told us he had been whining for the entire two weeks he has been playing for the inclusion of a number of planes. This player, known as "Monkeyturd" (not his real name) told us, "I havent asked for much, I only wanted certain historically significant aircraft to be included and these simple requests have been completely ignored by HTC. It would be extremely simple for them to add the following planes to the planeset: the Ki-84, B-29, F-8f, F-86, Fokker Dr-1, Spirit of St. Louis, F-22, Concorde, C-141A (the short model before they added the fuselage extension), Cessna 172, UFOs, and the Goodyear Blimp. Because HTC refuses to listen to their player base and obviously sits around doing nothing all day other than drinking beer and surfing the web, I will be forced to cancel my subscription now that my free two weeks are up. Other players noted that Monkeyturd is full of monkey s***. Htcisnmbr1 (not his real name) had this to say, "Monkeyturd is cancelling because he doesnt have a real job, we dont need him anyways. Besides he was never a real Ace pilot because he always flew with combat trim on. Besides the UFO (N1k1) was modelled a long time ago in Aces High."
Other local citizens expressed grave concerns that regular releases such as this, slowing down the Internet could have grave repercussions for the economy. Doug "Pyro" Balmos, the producer of Aces High, had this to say about these concerns, "We invite all that are concerned about this subject to post on our UBB so we can ban them."
Internet service was expected to be back to normal by as early as tomorrow evening with ping rates expected to reach as high as 3000 m/s by then.
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