ATITD beta begins.

[Signe]

From an email:

Are you ready to unlock the secrets of this next Tale in the
Desert? Just wait until you see what we have in store...
  A special early Beta of A Tale in the Desert II will begin on
Tuesday, August 10 at 12:00 Noon EST (GMT-0500). This beta will be
open to all with an open (paid) account on ATITD, and also to
FilePlanet subscribers. ATITD players can retrieve a key using their
avatar's Utility menu, and FilePlanet subscribers should receive
their keys by email starting at noon.
  A Tale in the Desert II's open beta will begin on Friday, August
13 at 12:00 Noon EST (GMT-0500). Although no key is required to get
into the open beta, if you do have one from FilePlanet (even a free
one), there's a cool little bonus to pick up in the game. Did anyone
see a man dressed in a funny green hat?

On the Nile,
Teppy (Pharaoh)

[Pig Destroyer]

I received the same email.  I was pretty much waiting to reactivate my account until the second telling started anyway.  I guess early beta is close enough :D

[Signe]

It's a bit loopy right now, but ever so much more colourful.  It goes down from time to time, but I kinda sorta know what I'm doing, almost.  I'm Signe in the game, so whoever decides to fiddle with it, let me know where you set up and maybe we can create an empire and acquire some slaves before the interest wears off.  :)  I make a mean brick rack.

[Rasix]

And I just canceled a month ago.  Motherfucker.

[Righ]

Download the client. Type in your name. It will ask if you want to rejoin. Say yes. Use the utility menu to get a beta key.

[MrHat]

But can you be a pirate?

[Righ]

Certainly. Perhaps not in the traditional sense, and you'll look like most of the other citizens of Egypt, but the scope is there for a modicum of piratical behaviour and speaking to people in a hackneyed parody of eighteenth century nautical jargon.

[MrHat]

hackneyed parody of eighteenth century nautical jargon.

Yaaaarrrrrr.

[Nebu]

Have any of you tried the beta?  I can't seem to find the will to.

Also, I mentioned to a couple of other people in PM's that what I perceive as the best part of atitd is the early tech race.  Not because it's a bunch of catasses macroing their way to fame and glory, but because people often work together to figure out how Teppy has recoded certain new tech schemes.  

For this reason (and the fact that I'm looking for a semi-social time-suck), eGenesis will probably get my money and time for at least a couple of months early on.  I'll play from the onset to see what has changed and to try and figure out his new algorithms.  If you guys are interested in playing again, we can probably coordinate something.

[Rasix]

I'm in the beta currently.  Just got my fileplanet key yesterday due to the fact that I cancelled my ATiTD account a bit ago.  

Early impressions:

The land seems to have changed quite a bit.  All major areas seem to have all uni's and schools lumped into one area.  This is a very good change as having to run for 30 minutes to your closest UArch was never a good time.   This may have a lot of people building near the major learning areas.  I think I'll still try to live out in the boonies if I play final.

Travel seems a lot better.  You do run twice as fast on roads, but this simply seems to make traveling on anything else feel like running through caramel.   There are also chariot point where you can use stored travel time to port to an area or during a certain time window travel there for free (great idea).

I don't like the new compound stuff.  It makes the land pretty bland with just a sea of huge fucking buildings.  These really need to be made more rustic looking from the start and quite a bit shorter. Editing the blueprints for the camp seems pretty interesting, I already customized mine a little.  People are going to need to plan theirs a bit better than I've been seeing as almost none of the noobs gave themselves any room for expansion.

There's some annoyances that are a pain to deal with:
There still aren't many trees in Egypt and most only give like 4-5 wood.
Flaxxing with OE is pure hell.  Hooray 1 flax per plant.
I'm not exactly sure how pottery is ever going to take off.  You need flystones, which need medium stones, which need a rock saw, which needs a decent amount of flint, which you get from digging clay, which needs water, which needs clay jugs, which are made from pottery.  I feel sorry for the poor sap that has to dig clay one a time to get enough flint for rock saw construction.  Well, it happened in the first telling, so I'm sure it won't be too much of a hassle for the die hard catasses.

Another bit, Teppy doesn't seem to have tweaked the recipes that much. Which means some of my major gripes with the more ridiculous requirements and ingredients are still going to be there.  I'm also starting to wonder if he changed the game fundamentally enough for this to be worth playing.  All of the intiation tests seem to be the same..

Anyhow, I've got a small camp going at -1294, 5332 in VoK if anyone wants to join up with me. Perhaps we could get materials together for a guild hall.  Just if you come by, I ask that you not build with a mind for expansion.  Ie, don't throw down your compound 2" from mine :) I'd like to find a better spot for final, but this one will do and it's out of ear shot from most of the beta clientel.

[CassandraR]

I been playing the beta for a couple days now. I really like the compound setup myself. I mostly play soloish so having my own little building where I can put all my buildings without worrying about anyone else building in my land is great. Though I can agree they could look better. My biggest gripe is my kilns keep decaying. I run forever to get enough slit to make firebricks then my box kiln to make them collapses before I have enough. Enough to make a person cry.

[Krakrok]

So who's got a torrent of the ATITD2 client. 817b/s from the main site just isn't working for me.

[Zetleft]

So I'm in and am really liking this game.  It's got a ton of small details to it that is a little staggering from a new players point of view.  Got a nice little beach front property with enough room for expansion I think, just couldn't find a isolated spot near many trees though.

[Nebu]

I started playing atitd shortly after release and continued to about the 6 month point.  I loved the game initially as it seemed like a fresh departure from the common mmog grind.  The game was social, building oriented, and filled with people I considered more interesting.  I recently went back to revisit the game and found that it just couldn't hold my interest.  I now have a beta key and find little motivation to actually use it.  Here are a few things that drove me away:

1) Cliques.  The game is full of cliques... you know, the high school prom queen variety.  If you aren't in the "in-crowd" it's tough to accomplish the things that you want to in game.  This will be even tougher in this telling as the inner circle has a very strong awareness of the game accompanied by a mastery that goes all the way back to the beta of telling 1.

2) Chores.  There's no avoiding the massive click-fest that this game brings to the table.  Macros are rampant and abundant... not to become uber, but to complete the day-to-day tasks required for advancement of your compound.  I can remember many times when I would log on just to feed livestock or harvest grapes at odd hours.  This made it seem more like a commitment and less like a game.

3) Haves vs Have-nots.  See #1 also for this... There are scarce resources that become the stepping stones to new technology.  There will be a small group of people that will control these resources early in the game thus relegating the rest of the players to a subervient class (i.e. if you want the rare resource I have, you're going to pay!).  Though this is common in mmogs, it seems even moreso in atitd.  Once the scarce resources have been found and hoarded, it's difficult to keep up with those that have them.  

I applaud Andrew Tepper for making a left turn in the mmog design world.  Without siginificant changes in the second telling, I just see it as a slightly revamped version of the first... and I've been there, done that.

To summarize for you folks with short attention spans:
1) Just like life
2) Just like every other mmog
3) Just like life

[Drubear]

I've also joined the Beta (along with my partner) and we're having a hoot. Not sure how much more planting OE flax and missing the weeding cycles I can take, but roaming around is lotsa fun.

I can certainly see where others might get "locked out" of the tech tree (flint I got, but those medium stones are rare as hen's teeth) but hopefully not being in the "in crowd" won't be so bad.

I would like to mention that Pharoah was on last night (wow, he even gave out his cell # >>in game<< !! Never seen that done before...) and responding to a question/request for someone's "offensive" name to be changed. He stated that it would never be his intention to do anything about that situation - which seemed like a very bad idea in my mind. Seemed like a better solution would be to give everyone a "good" (i.e. in-game likely) name and then let you pick a surname later on. We'll see. Some griefing is possible, but it seems amazing to me that a game with only ~1k players has d00d's/griefers ... oh the humanity!

As it's my first time in this game, it still has a lot of shiney for me so would likely hold my interest for a while at least.

I'm also based near Karnak (don't have the coords) and am Mathir in game. Have a fair number of firebricks (wanted to get Salvage Skill) and 3 true kilns if you need some firing. I and my partner setup camp near a stand of vegetation (palm, palmetto, date and yucca) so we seem to be geared for some pottery/carpentry. Rotting flax is getting old as it's a hike to the water, but it's not so bad.

[Yoru]

I joined the beta last night, mostly because I'm interested in seeing if eGenesis has significantly improved the concentration of power, the terrible grind to stay even a few steps behind the Joneses, and the travel times. I felt pretty burned out on ATITD when I left a year ago, primarily due to mounting chores left over as my small guild slowly collapsed in on itself; work that seems trivial to six people rapidly becomes tiresome for two. (Actually, the big mistake that probably accelerated the burnout was folding our small guild into a large guild of uber-catasses whom I simply couldn't keep up with; in retrospect, it would've been better to capitalize on the large number of advanced and maintenance-free buildings we'd accumulated and tear down the excessive-upkeep buildings in favor of trade.)

As for the gameplay, I've found it essentially unchanged aside from the compound system (which seems poised to cause all sorts of trouble for soloers who get beyond newbie buildings and don't want to live near a public camp) and moderately increased running speeds on roads. Offroad travel is, reportedly, 90% of what the travel speed in ATITD1 was. I've not really bothered paying attention to the tech race yet, so I can't comment as to whether that's grindalicious or not.

When more systems are unlocked, I hope to find some significant changes to the core production sectors; I've read that mining is being given an overhaul (i.e. not using a fixed ore map any more), so hopefully finding an ordinary iron ore vein won't be a weeklong endeavor for anyone that can't run around the desert for twelve hours. If more of the basic production industries can be made more rapidly accessible to the general population, then hopefully an economy will develop outside the elite circles. (On the other hand, maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be released. Who knows?)

[schild]

For those who care, the following email was sent to the eGenesis mailing list.

Citizens of Egypt,

  A Tale in the Desert II's beta has been fantastic! The number of
new players has been overwhelming, and we have added 12 new servers
to keep up. We've broken previous beta records daily, with 949
people online at once Thursday night. We're running an open beta
now, so if you'd like to visit Ancient Egypt today, welcome. I'm
writing to give a status report, and make a few announcements.
  The lag problems that most people were experiencing have been
fixed. There were two components to this lag: the slow-passing-time
was caused by the servers communicating inefficiently with each
other. The stalling and bursting of time was caused by dropped UDP
packets. It was the unexpected observation by a player, that running
around prevented much of the lag, which led us to discover this.
Switching to a TCP protocol fixed it.
  After some tuning, the new mining/metallurgy/anvil system seems to
be working well. Anvils are a new approach to quality-based
crafting: you start with a hunk of metal, and must pound it with
various shaped hammers into as close an approximation to the target
shape as possible. A physics system simulates the effect of each
blow on the metal. It's the player's skill, not the character's that
matters!
  Today at 5:00PM EST (GMT-0500) I'll be unlocking the clothing
system for avatars. This will allow many new customizations to each
character model.
  It's been a bit of an open secret, which I'll officially announce
now: The Macintosh client for A Tale in the Desert is now in alpha
testing. We're trying for a 3-platform release for Tale 2, but there
are still enough things remaining on the Mac port so that I can't
quite promise it.
  We're going to have a couple of pre-order packages available for
Tale 2, which can be ordered within the beta, starting later today.
(Active Tale 1 players won't need to do anything special to reserve
their character name.)
 
    For $49.95+Shipping:
      3 months of A Tale in the Desert II
      An ATITD T-Shirt
      Reserved character name
      Access to the 6 Tale 1 Avatar models (updated versions)
      Choice of: a Medium Stone, a Sheep, Special Compound colors
      "Sandstorm" Assortment of fireworks
     
    For $89+Shipping:
      6 Months of A Tale in the Desert II
      An ATITD T-Shirt
      Reserved character name
      Access to the 6 Tale 1 Avatar models (updated versions)
      One Medium Stone
      One Sheep
      Special Compound colors
      "Wrath of Ra" Assortment of Fireworks
 
  The client can be downloaded from:
 
    http://game.atitd.com/atitd2.exe         (Windows)
    http://game.atitd.com/eClient-linux.run  (Linux)
   
  The official IRC channel is:

    irc.stratics.com port 6667 channel #atitd
   
On the Nile,
Teppy

Important to note is this may be the only game ever where a sheep and a medium stone mean something. For those of you in the beta, mind reporting how it's been going?

[Nebu]

Important to note is this may be the only game ever where a sheep and a medium stone mean something. For those of you in the beta, mind reporting how it's been going?

Well, I could think of a game that might benefit from a free goat at release... but that's another story altogether.