GameSlice: One of the most talked about features of T2 is the community oriented front end to the game that will make interaction with fellow T2 players much easier.  Web browsing, messaging systems, forums, and chat rooms should all serve to keep people from having to leave the game just to keep in touch with clan mates.  The focus of this system will be a unique ID that comes with each retail copy of the game which will help police T2 players who cause trouble (e.g. server administrators can ban a specific game ID).  Have you been studying the implementations of other CD Key games such as Half-Life and Quake 3 while developing your system? What are you going to do differently to avoid the problems these games encountered with CD Keys?

Dave: I haven't been studying other folks' games for this…however, I'm familiar with many of the issues, and a lot of it is common sense. Quake had an issue where they had one authentication server for all games and when it went down no one could play. We'll profit from their pain and prevent that from happening. 

I do want to point out that this is not merely a "policing" change to the game. Having an authentication code allows us to give players an identity in the game. There was a common issue in Tribes 1 where players would "smurf" into other tribes and games. While you can still create aliases in T2 and play games anonymously, the authentication server prevents you from joining multiple tribes at once and playing covert agent against a tribe that you join. It also lets players accumulate some personal statistics and history as they play. For instance, we might track total minutes played, or the history of tribes joined, or other stats.

GameSlice: One of the neat features Tribes 2 will have is a translation module for different languages. So, for example, if Bill in Kentucky sends a communication that he is guarding the base, Zdravko over in the Ukraine will be able to read the message in his native tongue.  Can you tell us more about your efforts to make Tribes 2 borderless?

Dave: Well…we probably won't ship with Ukrainian translations, but the major languages that we'll have localized will be available like this.