>Some are obviously not still here, but, as far as those of
>you still here know, did you each know who was playing the
>others? That your trip consisted of all imm (or about to be
>imm in the case of Amberlea) players? Was there some plan?
>How did you find out, and when?

I didn't know any of the other guys were playing Empire at the time I decided to bring Istendil out of cold storage and start playing him a bunch again and get him into Empire, but by the time of the first Hell trip we took as a team I knew who was who.

Most of us had been down with other trips in the past. I want to say just about everyone but me (I wasn't able to play that day) had gone with the ~20-25 person Diku team that had gone down a few weeks previous. I don't think there was a goal so much as a general desire to get in there and see what we could manage.

As far as a plan goes... to some degree, I wanted to see what a smaller team could do. Prevailing wisdom at the time seemed to be to just bring as many people as you could; most hell groups were around 12 people or more. (I know that groups led by you and others around this time also bucked the trend.)

Amberlea was recruited as the most suitable bard at the time. That she would ask to imm somewhere down the road was unknown to me. In fact, she almost deleted in the wake of the stylish but tres brutal IC punishment Scarabaeus smacked her with after the trip for inadvertantly losing his tattoo for another.

Iomahk was my pick for a second warrior and was with us on the first run roughly as far as Moloch, then lost link and never got it back. As such I don't believe he's accounted for in the Hall of Fame.

There were a few other people I tried to rope in, but none of them were able to make my trip time.

>Similarly, did those of you who were there at the time know
>that Cador was Eriwal, that he coded up the wolverine and had
>it given to himself, and that at least a major part of the
>justification was that he didn't practice parry, or something
>like that?

I've gone into this to some degree in SMUG's giant post elsewhere on this thread; have a look at that and let me know if there are still questions.

>Other than when it was done to me, have you (the staff) ever
>deliberately screwed with a character's pfile, for whatever
>reason? Meaning false entries in the imm-only history, or
>reducing unseen stats so the player doesn't know he's been
>####ed, etc. One of the reasons I was told for why it was
>done to me that time was to flush out an imm who was
>supposedly telling tales outside of school, so certainly that
>could have happened again. Has it?

That was the only time I was aware of, and in that case your would-be empowering imm was informed that the 'bait' entry was bogus. Theoretically it shouldn't have had an effect on you. Theoretically.

>I've heard mixed responses as to whether there is a new
>version of the (PROB) tag that goes next to a char's name when
>an Imm does a "who" list, such that imms are either
>immediately aware of who the person is, or that they are more
>likely to check to see who it is. How about a difinitive
>answer. Meaning, when someone like me or some other
>less-than-favorite-son has a char, is it pretty immediately
>known to the staff, or at least some of the staff?

Nope! The "probation sites" system that Jullias developed years and years ago when we were first faced with the problem of, for example, not wanting to ban AOL yet knowing that historically a lot of cheating came from AOL in that era, still technically exists but generally isn't used anymore. I don't even notice the flags anymore, truth be told. Just one more thing my mind filters out.

There's no new version of anything like that.

>Was it true that Raisa (haven't thought of her in years, did
>you know I spoke to her on the phone several times?) got
>jumped up to being high level imm without going through the
>first few levels, because of her relationship with Cador?

As far as I know this isn't true. I remember her spending a particularly long time at the lowest imm levels because (her English being a lot better than my Danish, but still not the best) she had a hard time getting an idea through the approval process and then the actual area through that approval process. Yggdrasil had to be rewritten nearly from scratch several times before it made the cut. (Believe it or not.)

>Who
>else had that expedited process due to relationships with
>other imms?

In the first year of CF, a number of people were recruited to be imms and got to start as something higher than 51 just as a part of the process of first getting the game going. The only one of those people I can think of that's still around from that era is Yanoreth, and she's done just so much great work for CF over the years that that investment clearly paid off in CF's favor. I can't think of anyone who's gotten a free pass since.