A Tale in the Desert, Tale 3 Beta 2 starting today, May 5th

[Trippy]

http://www.atitd.com/

[Signe]

I know.  I know.  I know.  For some reason, Teppy sends me three of every email.     I'm not sure if that's love or hate.

[Akkori]

**crosses fingers**

[Yegolev]

The picture leads me to think there will be sexy dames...?

[Mesozoic]

The picture leads me to think there will be sexy dames...?

In practical terms, this means digging mines to extract cobalt for processing eyeshadow.

[Yoru]

I fell for that the last two times, Teppy. I shall not flax2crush nor brix2win again.

... well, maybe after E3.

Maybe.

[Yegolev]

Someone should cowboy up.  I'm playing with Seed, after all.

[Signe]

I logged in and chose my area and immediately bumped into Slyfiend, Numtini and others.  How strange and, yet, not strange.   

[Mesozoic]

I stopped home for lunch and downloaded it.  If I can get any computer time this weekend I'll be on.

[Xanthippe]

I'm game to try it.  I didn't try Tale 2.  I recall Tale 1 making my hands sore with all the mousework.

[Signe]

Unfortunately, I forgot how to do anything.   

[Viin]

I'll login and see what it's like, never played it before either.

[stray]

Still looks as ghetto as ever.

I might update when I stop breaking blades and learn how to flax.

Personally, I think it's a good game to get ideas from. Not necessarily one to play.

[addryc]

I logged in and chose my area and immediately bumped into Slyfiend, Numtini and others.  How strange and, yet, not strange.   

Which area? :) I seem to recall trying out Tale 2 with them last time!  Nothing like spending hours jogging from place to place... May download it as I'm in the mood for casual-afk gaming :P

[Signe]

Seven Lakes.

[schild]

Is there any chance, for those who played Tale 2, that this revision will be more fun, less tedium? I'm in a crafty mood.

[Nebu]

If you love Excel and writing detailed macro scripts, this is the game for you. 

Yes, I'm serious.

[Yoru]

Is there any chance, for those who played Tale 2, that this revision will be more fun, less tedium? I'm in a crafty mood.

Not really.. T2 was comparable in grindiness to T1 for similar tech periods. The basic mechanics of gathering resources will still involve mashing the gather grass button, clicking on trees, etc., I'm guessing.

[Xanthippe]

Seven Lakes south or Seven Lakes west?

There are 0 people there now apparently.

[Signe]

I'll go look.

I still don't know.  My coords are 1641,1857 when I logged.  Go to your menu and click on friends list and add Signe.  I aasumed you're using Xanthippe so I added that name to my friends.  You've been offline an hour.  Numtini is still online, however, so you could ask her.  All I know is I'm somewhere around those wee blue lakes that are in a circle, near all the Uni's and stuff.  I can't seem to bring up the box that lets me tele to a new area anymore.

[Xanthippe]

Ok, thanks, back from my Cinco de Mayo margaritas and on my way to more, I think.  At least if I can get the spouse to go buy mix.

Margaritas go with making flax, don't they?

[Trippy]

Okay I'm trying out this game for the first time. You can add "Trippy" if you like. I'm currently working through the "tutorial" tasks.

[Xanthippe]

What exactly is Beta 2, anyway?  When does this go live, and when it does go live, do our toons poof?

Is there any arrow key movement or is it all point and click?

I'm playing as Xanthippe, feel free to add me as a friend. 

Surely I'll figure out how to rot flax today.  My flax fields look like crazy quilts.

[Numtini]

You rot flax by using the skill menu when you're next to water, it makes a little buoy and when the flag turns white it's rotten.

Just point and click.

And yes, as far as i know, everything goes poof and they do a bit of rescrambling of resources and such.

[Slyfeind]

It goes live in about three weeks. And probably by now, you know there's no autorun or arrow keys for movement. POINT-N-CLICK YAY!

[Tale]

I've been to the desert.

[Calantus]

ATiTD make hand go ouchy.

Seriously I didn't mind the tedium so much, you can do other shit while semi-afk and it's the kinda game I don't feel compelled to play for hours at a time all the time, but you have to click so damn much. It's like UO crafting only with nothing to kill inbetween. Teppy really should realise that the game is all about puzzles, statistics, and politics/community. Get rid of all the clickly crap plz.

[Signe]

I'm not crazy about the constant window click fest, either.  One thing I do when I'm making things like boards (one of the more tedious clicking event) is pin the menu in a comfy place.  The text in the box disappears after you make the item but you can still click the empty text box and it works.  Also, I always use the explorer's map when I travel.  The general purpose map generally has no purpose.

[Xanthippe]

There's a TAB = mouse click feature, so if the mouse is over something I can hit the TAB key to act as a mouse click.

There's a offline task feature, so Xanthippe should have collected grass all night. 

The community in ATiTD is very helpful and friendly.  I forgot how pleasant that can be.

Play2Craft ftw

[Akkori]

I joined up to see if there were any improvements to the kind of game I would play, but I havent seen any yet. As a matter of fact, the only sign that this is not version 2 is that there are different avatars. Granted, I am level 0, and only about 80% of the way to "citizen"... but you'd think that many of the chnages to a game would be in the early parts, where the most people would be exposed to them. I have seen nothing new at all yet. Nothing. **oops, okay, there IS one new thing. Everyone gets one free Jug they can use to carry water**

What do I want? I want offline vendors. I want personal chariots, mules, or horses. How about a hand-drawn or animal-drawn cart I can load stuff up in, since its hard to carry large amounts of stuff for long distances. I want GRASS and STRAW to have less weight AND bulk than friggin sand. I want a 50% increase in the amount of slate we find. I want to be able to "harvest" grass in a set area instead of having to run in a grid pattern and click the dang "gather" button every 4 seconds. I want to be able to build furniture we can USE. I want to be able to decorate a compound. And I want to see some hard caps on the number of skills a character can learn, based on their complexity.

It seems that ATitD is mostly just a game for big Guilds to have an informal competition on who can "research" the most stuff. I still think the game could be great. I love the music, and can accept the basic graphics. I think the pace is fine. I like the exploration part (except for the sheer boredom of running everywhere real slow). I think the skill tree's are great, and the political aspect is awesome. All in all its a good game.... but there are just some things that keep me form jumping in with both feet. If I could only pick one "I want"? Personal, player-built, transportation. RUnning around is REALLY boring.

**edit** I am AkkoriTep, btw....

[Yoru]

I have to agree. I jumped in for a few hours to see what had changed. Took me about 3 hours to go from total noob to 'found a nice spot, built a compound'. The only things I'd seen changed from the last time I played (which was the first 2 months of T2) was that there was now a 'goal' window when you started a test and that there were now 'levels' locking you out of upper-tier stuff (although most of this upper tier stuff has yet to be unlocked in the beta).

At its base, no matter how much I want to believe otherwise, the core activity is running around grinding up piles of resources. If previous Tales are any indicator, once more stuff has been unlocked (unlocking being the primary reason for resource-grinding) there can be some interesting subsystems to play with - but playing with them will tend to have a grinding component to it. Cabbage for beetles, charcoal for metals, etc.

 Getting set up will be a week or so of building up; less if you and some friends team up, which is primarily how I was able to stand multiple months of the previous tales. A good diversion now and then, but I wouldn't, personally, make it my gaming mainstay (again).

[Slyfeind]

Offline vendors will never happen, because of course they want trade to be personal. As for advanced personal transportation (aside from the chariot stops), check out the end of the trailer.... (clickzor!)

(For those not wanting to download and watch it, we get blimps somehow.)

[Akkori]

Vendors to sell stuff when we are not online is the only way casual players NOT in a guild will be able to make effective use of their time. Well, that or letting us get to where we are going faster than running around on foot . And even then, you better have some saved up travel time or you'll wait at the chariot stops for several minutes too. ONE WAY! And even worse, casual players cant boost their stats (either perm or temp) because they dont have the *time* to grind up cooking, or to do the quests that result in boosts. So our carrying capacity is really limited.... Hmm... Karnak to the Red Sea to get 4 sheep? 4 hours or so. Blech

[Yoru]

Way back in T1, I had an 'offline trade system' set up with regular trading partners that I knew I could trust. We agreed on a central location and each built a stashable-by-public chest there. Trades were arranged and negotiated via chats, which persist when you're offline thankfully. To fulfill a trade, one person stashes their goods in the other person's chest and then the other person reciprocates using the first party's stashable chest. Both parties retrieve the goods.

[Xanthippe]

I'm really enjoying this more than I enjoyed Tale 1 (didn't play Tale 2), and my hands don't hurt.  Still noobing along, so I don't know how to do much.  I heard that you can use macros as long as you are not afk?  Now that would be neat.