by: Tony "RadarX" Jones

It's been an extremely busy week for Tabula Rasa soldiers, and the AFS has kept us engaged with the launch of the game and the end of beta. Here are the highlights of this week and what you need to know!

Patch 10.31.2007

This patch did a whole lot of back end work that you and I will never probably appreciate. Seriously, if you are reading this you are very likely an English speaker and most of the patch revolved around other languages.

If you really are interested in the updates to the NC Launcher you can go to the official site.

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Killing General British - This didn't make it on last weeks report because it took place late Friday night. With the beta servers shutting down, NCsoft decided to give us one big awesome ending by sending General British himself at us. That night thousands of players converged on positions and were attacked by British clones and Bane support forces. While many players could chew through even the highest level Bane, the clones (controlled by Devs) proved to be a little trickier and casualty rates were very high.

While there was lag which could be expected of hundreds of people in one place, the event overall proved to be chaotic fun no matter where you went. You can find a write up on the entire thing here.

Pre-Order Servers go up - We were given an early treat Tuesday night as the Live servers went up about 3.5 hours early allowing people who didn't think they'd play that night (I was among them) to hop in and get leveling. While there were a few notable issues that kept some people locked out through the entire night, the next days patch fixed up everything it could. Most of us enjoyed a lag free environment for quite some time, but as more and more joined everything seemed to be going back to normal and many were having as much fun as ever.

Tabula Rasa Launch Giveaway - Sure, it's shameless but it's me, what do you expect? Ten Ton Hammer announced a contest this week giving a few lucky winners a signed Collectors Edition of Tabula Rasa and a few Zboards including Tabula Rasa keysets. I've found mine pretty useful so far and I'm in fact typingt his report from it. What do you have to do? Nothing but submit your email address for your forum account. How hard is that? So go and enter now!

Note: Premium Members actually get 99 more entires than a non-Premium member. Want to learn more about Premium Membership? Head over to the store and check it out.

Next-Gen Biz Q&A with Richard Garriott - Now if you are anything like me you have seen DOZENS of Q&A's with Garriott over the past 12 months, could there be anything he hasn't covered? Believe it or not, yeah there is. In this interview he discusses where he thinks the MMO game market will be in 5 years and freely admits the biggest design mistake he ever made as a developer. It's an interesting read so if you have time, take a look.

Random Question Q&A - A number of randomly ordered FAQ's were posted on the official site covering a myriad of things on many peoples minds.

I was there for the EoB event. When do I get my special emote?

http://www.rgtr.com/community/contests_promotions/thanks_for_helping_us_wipe_the_slate_clean.html

I hit level 15 in beta? Do I get anything for that?

http://www.rgtr.com/community/contests_promotions/presell_promotion.html

3 Day headstart (you must have a pre-order bonus pack to participate) – Starts 10-30

http://www.plaync.com/us/support/doc_6287.html?prod=47

Halloween Event – Starts 10/31, Ends 11/1

http://www.rgtr.com/community/community_news/tabula_rasa_halloween_event.html

Launch! 11/2

http://www.plaync.com/us/support/doc_1026.html?prod=47

Does TR have a veteran rewards program? Yes!

http://www.rgtr.com/community/veteran_rewards/tabula_rasa_veteran_rewards_program.html

Where are the message boards? We use our fansite boards!

http://www.rgtr.com/community/fansites/index.html

How much is the game?

http://www.plaync.com/us/support/doc_6160.html?prod=47

These are all pretty much self explanatory but there was some confusion on when people could get into the servers. Just because you have your box does not mean you can start playing.

Rumors, Rumors, and more...Speculation - We had an interesting rumor float up from one of the forum posters regarding a few things General British said in global chat on Orion. General British has been known to make candid statements about the game in chat so this is far from unreasonable, but it'll be interesting to see when we see these things announced.

According to our chat witness British stated the next race we'll see in the expansion will be a hybrid alien. This would provide players more customization options and begs the question "Will they consider certain traits for different races?" Adding additional character models should be simple, so I'm sort of curious why we couldn't play Foreans from the get go, but hey we can be patient.

The other statement he made was the large alien assault ship above Concordia on Foreas will hopefully one day be a playable instance. This would mean squads could travel into space and assault that ship which would be very cool indeed.

TabulaCast - TabulaCast is the ONLY Tabula Rasa podcast I know of. I stumbled on to it over at Virginworlds (which is a great site for general MMO game news by the way) and the guy doing it has been podcasting awhile now. Head over and download it for some thoughts on the game and news.

I'm afraid that's it for this week folks. The news has been a little slower because the game is launching and we've all been playing. Join us next week for more news and to stay even more on top of things stop by our forums.