Thanks to all those that participated in the first Beta of A Tale in the
Desert III. I'd like to give my thoughts and observations on the beta, and
then announce our final, 3-week Beta. BTW, I want to get into some detailed
ATITD 3 game design stuff with this newsletter, so if you just want to find
out when Beta 2 starts, skip down to the bottom.
Technically this first Beta went very well. There were no server crashes.
Some of the new content had bugs, but I was able to fix all the significant
ones within minutes-to-hours of their being reported.
Progress in the beta was not as fast as I had estimated. The server was
open for almost 6 days exactly, and in that time, the highest level
attained was level 6. If I had been asked beforehand how far I thought we
would progress in 6 days, I'd have figured the top players would have hit
Level 10. Here are the first 15 ways to gain levels, as configured for Beta
1:

Level 0: Citizenship
Level 1: Principles of Architecture, Principles of the Human Body
Principles of Leadership
Level 2: Principles of Worship, Principles of Art and Music,
Principles of Thought
Level 3: Principles of the Obelisk, Principles of the Demi-Pharaoh
Level 4: Principles of Harmony, Principles of the Acrobat,
Level 5: Principles of the Vigil, Principles of the Prophet
Level 6: Principles of Khefrey's Children, Principles of the Pathmaker

The column at the left is the level required to attempt each Principle.
Passing any Principle increases your level by one. Principles are always
fixed-goals, and are intended to be something that a veteran ATITD player
would find pretty easy.
So if my math is right, the players that did reach Level 6 had 9 choices
on how to reach Level 7. That seems like about the right "bushiness", so
why the (from my perspective at least) slow progress? I think the answer
lies in the Level 2 Principles: Worship requires several kinds of items
that Egypt can not create right away, including Camel Milk and Grilled
Fish, and Thought does also. So even though you've gained a post-Citizen
level, you don't *really* have a lot more choices of what to do next at
Level 2. Perhaps compacting the above schedule just slightly around Level 2
would relieve this bottleneck, which would have the side effect of making a
number of early skills much faster to get. I'm going to try this for Beta 2.
The final item from the Beta that I want to discuss is the Events system.
We ran two events, both of which I was able to code during the beta. The
first was a "dig" event with some interesting scoring features. The second
was a Tug tournament in the Wepwawet Spirit Arena. Technically both worked
well, but I thought that each needed to provide more information after the
event on how Egypt did, as a whole. For instance, as a player I would have
liked to know who won the Tug tournament, what rank they reached, how many
participated in total, that sort of thing. As developer I could retrieve
that information, but really it needs to be accessible to the Events team
that will run many such things during live. So, that's something I'll work
on in Beta 2.
Which brings me to the announcement. A Tale in the Desert III, Beta 2
will begin:

Friday, May 5, at 12:00 Noon EST (GMT-0500)

I expect the Beta to last for about 3 weeks, and I'm going to set a goal.
Let's see how many of us can reach Level 7. It's an individual goal, but
it's also an Egypt-wide goal because the Principles and Technologies needed
to *easily* let others reach Level 7 must be unlocked as a community. Keep
in mind that nobody in Beta 1 would have attained this. Does anyone have a
prediction for Beta 2 on how many will?