Tabula Rasa

Happy New year, here's a Feedback Friday for you!

Living on Foreas or Arieki is a battle for survival at the best of times, but with the new year, the AFS High Commandment wishes all of you fighting out there a year of discovery and salvation, a year when we will be given the opportunity to harden our stance against the evil brought upon us by the Bane, a year when technological innovations will allow us to do more than just survive, a year when we will be able to find the time to stop fighting for a little while and enjoy the company of one another. But perhaps this goes beyond the scope of a mere wish, perhaps this is a premonition, that of a better future…

Update 1.4
We are kicking off 2008 with the new 1.4 patch which includes several new features. Here’s a sneak peak at a few of the 1.4 patch notes before it goes to the Public Test Server.

New Features:
Hybrids – Mix a dash of human with a sprinkle of alien, and see what comes out of the oven. (More details to come soon…)
Hide Helmet Option – Now you can show off that lovely helmet hair, and/or your new hybrid’s Alien face.
Attribute Changes – Your Body, Mind, and Spirit were overhauled over the Holiday break. With these changes comes an Ability and Attribute respec. See Paul’s post for details.

Important Bug Fixes:
Your mission log should no longer reset when you log out.
Mires Improvements (see below).
The staff animation was changed (see this post for reference).

Mires Performance Issues
The Mires performance issues should be resolved with the next update (1.4). In the last few updates we included a number of large technology improvements for Mires; however, its performance is still not in line with our desired numbers. For example, the creature count on Mires is only slightly higher than desired, but due to the large scale, warzone-like design of the map, there were four times as many creatures in combat as any other map. Mires also contains many locations where both friendly and enemy drop ships were appearing literally within meters of each other. To guarantee that the performance of Mires is on par with other maps for the next update, we’ve made some changes to the design of Mires that greatly improves the performance without making the map significantly different.

Gold Selling/Advertising
We are aware of current issues involving “credit/gold” sellers and advertising in the chat channel. We have already made several improvements to crack down on these players and are currently working on other options to prevent them from disrupting game play. Please be advised that buying or selling in game credits, as well as in-game advertising, is against the Tabula Rasa User Agreement and will lead to a banned account. When encountering these players, use the /ignore command.

Chat Channels
On the subject of chatting, there has been some confusion on each chat channel’s main purpose. Here’s a quick overview:

General (English, French, and German) – Local and Area messages. Be polite as possible when speaking in these channels. As a guideline, its best to keep the following “hot” topics out of General Chat to avoid arguments: politics, religion, “nerf” discussions, and of course, Chuck Norris. If any other channel can apply to your topics, please state it in that particular channel.
New Player – Get help with the basics of Tabula Rasa. Great place to ask questions about lower level content such as Wilderness or Divide. If you are not sure where to ask your question, ask here!
LFG – Find a group for an instance or other types of missions on your map. Also great for clan recruiting.
Trade – Quick shout outs for selling or buying items.

PTS Contest
We appreciate those that help us test out newly released content on PTS before it goes to live. As a thank you, we plan to have a contest soon where players can obtain black armor dye for their character, just by logging in to help test 1.4 once it’s released to PTS! More to come on this contest in the upcoming days…

Hybrids?!!! What level do you need to be? What exactly are they? New race? Where are the PAUs? Oh ya, and finally some Mires improvements and a crackdown on www.agamegold.com

I'm so happy to see Mires finally getting a lag fix. The attribute changes will also be very nice and I am very curious to see how the new playable race (Hybrids) turn out.

I am looking forward to getting my disc in the mail. wish I next day aired it instead of going cheap. I like seeing things added to a game. I like things being fixed even more. Any know where I can see a screen shot of the new race? I have seen only one alien race in game that was friendly. The green tree-hugging skinny ones. I cant imagine a mix between them and humans will be an attractive humanoid to look at.

It's good to know that the gold sellers are being looked into. The hybrids will be interesting, the game does need far better character creation and I'm very glad to see that they have taken notice.

The bug fixes will be welcomed by all. I am currently playing in mires and the lag can get annoying. But they have done such a good job on that zone, by this I mean its really fun to play, it was a shame to see the lag spoil it.

Good job, they're adding new content so fast, i just hope they balance the Tier 4 classes, some are more useless than other and does anyone know about those Hybrids?

Will my hybrid have an alien face and a human body? Can i have tentacles as legs and human torso and head? And im really lookin' forward to seeing the new staff animation

To answer the PAUs : They are Personal Armored Units, basically a robot suit or a mech you see at CPs or i don't know what else

I honestly dont give a <rodent's behind> what anyone says about this game or its developers, but they are really listening to the community.

The Helmet graphic option is the thing i have wanted from the start and it really makes me happy they are putting that in.

Also the Hybrids make me feel lik they want to make their game different from the usual WoW or Guild Wars Clone out there.

Serious bang up job guys,

Also mires love is amazing., i needed some haha

-Jive

<modedit>

I feel glad to see these changes made, but also sad that they were not implemented during winter break to possibly allow more time for players to enjoy the additions! Nonetheless, this is positive - and definitely not too late.

Im glad to see the hybrids and the stat changes coming,and of course the bug fixes.The stat changes are great,and will really allow for some true builds to start coming through.

The hide helm option is something that was also really needed.Im looking forward to returning to TR at some point.

So now we finally have a reason to play after we hit 30.

I kinda wonder what the Hybrids will bring to the picture, and if we will ever get a reason to play 40+