weekend-wrapup
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Tabula Rasa's Friday Night Fights gets an upgrade
In this week's Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa, we get a few tidbits from within the community at large. Friday Nights Fights is still going strong, with this weekend's winner being Glass on his fifth FnF championship! Plus, the FnF ringleaders have announced some changes to the regular matches to help liven things up a bit. A new match type called the Gut Check pits the final winner against 6 of the previously-defeated competitors, who form a squad to take down the final contestant one at a time. This week, Glass made it through two fighters before finally being taken down by the third.Also, be sure to check out a new video compiled by Kaczmanchoy which showcases all of the weapons in Tabula Rasa. However, the video goodness doesn't stop there as Chae compiled some footage of his lottery event from last Friday.
Tabula Rasa weekend roundup
The Tabula Rasa Friday Night Fights were, according to the Weekend Wrapup, more sparsely attended than usual because of the holiday, but the competition was still tight. Slamscape and Embers rose through the ranks in their respective brackets before they met each other in battle. After a fierce battle, Slamscape claimed the title of Friday Night Fight champion. Slamscape and his partner, Bethel, then faced Embers and Grier in the Final Challenge, but lost. Next week, the competitors will once again face Glass, Tabula Rasa's only four time championship winner, and soon to be, perhaps, it's first five time winner.Community manager April "CuppaJo" Burba is leaving the Tabula Rasa team for another position at NCsoft, and to give her a memorable farewell, they threw her a dance party. The images from the dance party are so disturbing, they will be branded into your brain forever. Look at them at your own peril.
Healthy dose of Tabula Rasa community in this Weekend Wrapup
In this week's installment of Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa, the hardcore community shines through yet again. First off, there's mention of the PlanetTR Tavern Roleplayers group who usually gets together to crash the tavern in Foreas Base, but this time they've moved on to the C.E.L.L.A.R. arena. Included in this community update are some screenshots of their good times. We also get word of the very latest episode of TabulaCast, where the hosts John and Matt discuss all the latest TR news on and off the Public Test Server. Their discussion continues as they report on their experiences with Project Immersion and read some listener email.Finally, there's the results of this weekend's Friday Night Fights, where the largest purse in TR history was awarded: One million credits! Congratulations goes out to Glass for winning it all!
TR's Weekend Wrapup proves the community is stronger than ever
One look at the most recent Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa and you'll see that the TR community is flourishing as strong as ever. Amid concerns from many early-adopters of the game, these community-run events seem to be popping up everywhere. PlanetTR's Hottest Armor Contest - The top seven winners of this glorified beauty contest are showcased and praised in the PlanetTR forums. Friday Night Fights - The FnF for May 16th will be the first time it will be done in the C.E.L.L.A.R., which is the brand new boxing ring still on the Public Test Server. So yes, this means the FnF itself will be on the test server as well. It's still not too late to sign up for this, but even if you don't participate in the fighting this week, it will certainly be worth watching! It's Raining Bane - This dev-supported event is basically a giant collection of players running around the Torden Mires killing stuff. Sounds great to us! PvP Singles Tournament - Sponsored by the Warlords of Exodus clan, this PvP tournament seems to be a well-organized event with some rare purple items as prizes, courtesy of the GMs.
6 month veteran rewards unveiled for Tabula Rasa
The Tabula Rasa weekend wrap-up offers the usual community news and Friday Night Fights review. But this was a special weekend for the men and women of the AFS: it's been just about six months since the game launched. (Hey, that means Massively is about half a year old too.) A new monthly milestone for an NCsoft game can mean only one thing: new veteran rewards! The six-month vet rewards are ladled atop the three-month Kirin mask, and the hilarious 1-month /jumpforjoy emote. These newest rewards are downright goofy. Dedicated players will be getting access to three dance emotes (YMCA, breakdancing, and ballet), as well as a handful of costume props. These props include a green beret, a pair of brass Knuckles and (no, we're not kidding) a General British mask. Those Destination Games folks sure love their fictional military leader.
Tabula Rasa goes green, unofficially
Another Monday, and another Weekend Wrapup from the Tabula Rasa community team. This week, in addition to highlighting the usual slew of events, like this weekend's Friday Night Fights winners and the new Tabulacast, they also featured two new pieces of fan fiction which actually prove to be of surprisingly good quality. As always, they (and we!) encourage you to send in some of your own original material. The Tabula Rasa universe is still not nearly as fleshed out as it could be, so every bit of writing can have the affect of changing people's view of the game world.And of course, there's always St. Patrick's Day. While the AFS does not formally celebrate this day of Irish pride (who cares who is Irish when a race of alien jerkoffs are trying to commit xenocide?), the GMs will be making appearances at random across all four servers today to deliver green dye as a sort of unofficial holiday goodie. Granted, green isn't quite as rare a color as white or black these days, but who are we to look a gift horse in the mouth? And remember, if you're looking to truly maximize your green for the day - think Forean.
All your base announcements are belong to us
If you've ever taken a character to at least level 10 in Tabula Rasa, chances are you've found your way to Foreas Base in The Divide. Assuming you actually had your sound turned on, you've probably heard a couple of the base announcements that have amused players since the game's release. (And if you haven't, they've conveniently uploaded them to their website for your listening pleasure.) In a world of lore largely devoted to the burdensome task of preserving the human race in the face of a a tireless alien foe, the Foreas Base announcements are one of the true bright spots in the game, with their dry humor and frequent Christopher Walken impressions.That's why we were so excited to see the announcement of a new contest in this week's Weekend Wrapup. The Tabula Rasa Base Announcement Contest, as its known, calls for players to come up with the most witty, amusing base announcement they can think of, and record it for the Destination Games team's to judge. All announcements are required to be under fifty words in length, devoid of copyrighted material or phrases, and preferably PG-13. Submissions will be judged based on originality, creativity, quality, and presentation. Grammar counts! The winner will get their announcement recorded and put in the game, while runners up will get some free Tabula Rasa swag. Not a bad deal if you ask me.
TR's epic Blind Race finally sees winners
We reported on it last weekend, and on Saturday it finally came to fruition. Certainly fetching the honors as one of the more... bizarre in-game events we've ever heard of, for Tabula Rasa or any other game, the gregarious lot on the Planet TR forums put together the first ever Blind Race. Racers were tasked with running a marathon race through a series of predetermined check-points with their monitors turned off. Guided by the voice of a coaching partner, they had to navigate the oft-treacherous landscape of the Wilderness, the Divide, and the Plains. With the buff to enemy mobs in patch 1.4, it's difficult even making that run when you have all your senses about you, so even more kudos to Andriss and Mcloseky for their victory!In a sadder bit of news, the DG crew rescinded an announcement in a previous community update. Due to some complication on which they didn't care to elaborate, PvP safe zones will likely not make it into patch 1.5 as expected. It's still in the pipeline, we are assured, just not for a little while. I can live with that, as long as they're using the resources to address some of the other, more easily-fixed problems with the game.
More Tabula Rasa tidbits to string you along
You really have to admire the work that MMO community management teams do. Not only are they the front line of defense against player angst and rage in moments of crisis, but they're also the spin-doctors and craftsmen who take tiny tidbits of information and turn them into news. Take the Tabula Rasa community team for instance. It's pretty clear that Destination Games is plunking away at the 1.4 patch, trying to ready it up for public consumption on the PTR sometime in the next two weeks. They've already dropped the big news about Sanctus Grotto on Friday, and we figured that was all we'd get to preview of 1.4 before the patch notes came out. But oh no! On a slow news day, they've revealed two new nuggets of information to keep us coming back.They've announced that they're changing the way ammo works for Machine Guns, Leech Guns, Polarity Guns, and Propellant Guns so that they can now take lower quality ammunition. This is going to mean big monetary savings for players that have, until now, been largely left to bankruptcy by their boom-sticks. Spies and Guardians, the game's two melee classes, have enjoyed an unfair advantage in this respect, as their weapons don't have prohibitive maintenance costs comparable to ammo. It's nothing as big as an end-game instance, but it's still worth noting.And in a completely unrelated note, they're also putting in /sit and /laydown emotes. Cool, I guess?
Tabula Rasa patch this week, attributes not part of respec
In case you missed the Weekend Wrap-up post by the impeccable community staff over on Tabula Rasa's official website, here's the scoop. The long awaited 1.3 patch will be hitting the live servers this week, heralding in some of the big change we've been talk about for weeks, including the Rage nerf, Military Surpluses, the itemization changes, and perhaps even the completely non-denominational Festive Seasonal Holiday Observance Flora. The only downside is that the promised respec will not apply to attributes. So you can reset all your ability points governing which skills you can use, but your attributes won't get another look until 1.4.As excited as we are to see all these changes, perhaps more exciting is the rapid pace that Destination Games is setting for getting their content from the test servers onto the live servers. We reported on the changes to the build on the PTR only a week ago, and already they're set to go live? That's pretty impressive. It's much faster than certain other games that I won't mention by name.Click here to check out the patch notes.
Tabula Rasa devs foster Friday Night Fights
Destination Games posted another Tabula Rasa Weekend Wrap-up this morning, revealing the results of the latest Friday Night Fight. As part of their burgeoning community-centric approach to their game, they've been heavily involved in supporting the event that, not unlike the group in a particular movie starring Brad Pitt, seems to have started organically and has gradually grown with the support and interest of the player base. In Friday Night Fights, players roll new characters, strip them of all their high-tech weaponry and armor, and duke it out in hand-to-hand in a tiered series of battles.What separates FNF from a nude gnome raid on Iron Forge is that the developers have actually helped facilitate transforming it into a legitimate community event, building a boxing ring for the event to take place in, and making sure that Tabula Rasa dignitaries like Sarah Morrison and General British are on-hand to cheer the fighters to victory. They're so involved, in fact, that after this past weekend's tournament, the winner was granted one of General British's berets, the only one like it in the game. When is the last time Thrall paid players the same mind?
