NC firing ppl, Tabula Rasa stops

Can it be true? Tabula Rasa will shut down on February 28, 2009. Before it does, however, the game will become free starting on January 10th. Reason is the low player population. And it is true, I checked.

It is only recently, that in an open letter on the Tabula Rasa web site, the game creator Richard Garriott has announced his separation with NCSoft, the company he partnered with to develop and publish Tabula Rasa.

It will be interesting to see if the Austin branch of the Korean headquartered company will continue to exist considering it was opened to work specifically with Garriott.

NCSoft is going to lay off an undisclosed amount of their employees, too. Their spokesman, David Swofford said, "We're going to be scaling down. We currently don't know how many people will be affected by that."

How will this affect L2 players??

Some (few though) players are expected to migrate from Tabula Rasa, especially given the free time that NC will offer them as a retribution. More importantly though, less NCSoft stuff (especially in Austin), might mean less communication between the players and the (korean) game developers.

L2wh.com Upgraded

Our favorite site has new functionality added! Now you can limit the results of the market-price list. In this new field you can (optionally) enter part of the item name you are looking for.



During the past few months, the l2wh team has been working hard to implement a variety of tools for us. Some of them include:

Black Marketeer Helper:
Tools->Shop Tools->Black Marketeer Helper
Lists the prices of the Black Marketeer NPC (but he sells few items!)

Blacksmith Lahm Helper:
Tools->Shop Tools->Blacksmith Lahm Helper
Lahm is the NPC for the S80 sets/recipes (arktic.net has a list compiled too). This tool lists all the necessary items (shards mainly) you need for each of them.

Mammon Foundation Helper:
Tools->Mammon Tools->Mammon foundation helper
Lists what you need in order to start using a foundation item (usually some special varnish-enhancer). If you ever get a foundation item, that is.

Note: Make sure you re-load the initial page, in order to see all the new menu items (shift +pagereload helps).

Grats L2wh team!!

Aion beta

It has been a week already, that Aion has started its open beta in Korea. Just in case you don't know, Aion is a new game by NC Soft, scheduled to launch in Korea within the year and launches in China, North America, Europe and Japan planned for 2009.

According to NC, the number of players has reached an un-proceeded record

More than 11,000 people were logged into the game after only two minutes of open beta service. In less than an hour, that number had ballooned to 40,000. Currently the number of concurrent players has leapt up to more than 170,000.

According to pirate-ninjas (I like these guys more and more every day), it might be a mistake to implore only korean testers.

There are no plans for any non-korean open beta. There are only a few short Preview-Events planed North America/Europe. So the real beta testing and playerbase influence gonna be again Korea. For NCSoft self proclaimed next big triple A IP (thats supposed to become an international success) this isn’t too promising. With that and the Lineage 2 failure in mind: Aion will be NCSofts next international failure, event tho it got a huge potential - just like Lineage 2 had.

I could be persuaded to give it a try.. Anyone else interested??

Some more Aion-related sites:
Official site: http://eu.aiononline.com/en/
Greek article: http://www.mmorpg.gr/features.php?read=1829
Pirate-ninja's article (and sneak view!): http://www.pirateninjas.net/aion/aion-korean-open-beta/
Aion Global: http://www.aionglobal.com/
Aion Source: http://www.aionsource.com/

Celebrate!

Best Wishes to Ubba, Aristotelis and Chryssa. It's birthday, birthday, and saint's day respectively.

Lolcatz @ Pailaka

Following Summoner's advice, I tried the second Pailaka named Devil's Legacy with an alt toon. As indicated in pirate-ninja guide, the NPC gave me an Ancient Legacy Sword which came with a special skill called Summon Tigress!

After killing each of the first two mini-RBs, I got the weapon enhanced, so finally I had both Ice Chill and Chill Strike. I so much wanted to keep the sword after finishing with the dungeon!! Maybe add some divine stones one day ;-)

On a more serious note, you can find an excellent guide at http://l2vault.ign.com/View.php?view=Guides.Detail&id=453

GMs have a sense of humor

System Announcement:

That's from http://img207.imageshack.us/img207/9115/spam2tt7.jpg , you can also check http://s1.ipicture.ru/uploads/081111/kM5g7c2vw1.jpg for another similar shot.

Many thanx to Archmage for digging these.

Gracia flying videos!

Links from the official forum about the future impressive flying features in Gracia:

Solo flight and combat

Flying ship

Grinding Comic

I need two of those for the endless solo grinding nights!

From the Adam@home comic series.

GM Spam

Check this out - it's wonderful! Click on the picture to load the larger version of the image and make sure you read GM Spam's words.

It is said that half an hour later, IT was empty :-D

Many thanx to a lovely Nercocerer for sending the shot.

Coffee and Cookies, November the 9th

On Sunday, November 9, there will be a meeting for coffee and cookies in Athens, Greece.

Time: 12 o'clock, somewhat sharp :)
Place: Flocafe at the Aleksandras & Eslin junction
How to get there: Metro station "Ampelokipi" plus various buses (like trolleys 3,7,13,14)

Any non-greeks are of course welcome if they happen to be in the area!

Rift SA crystal nerf

It has been reported by Teon's PP hero that after the patch the hero rift RB does not level SA crystals in the same way.

Before the patch the whole party had a chance to level a crystal (i.e. all 9 at once), now just a few of the members have the chance.