Talk:A Tale in the Desert

Opinions about Tale 3
I have removed the following two paragraphs as I cannot find any supporting information about them, and there seems to be no one who is interested in providing it. I've included the internet archive links to forum posts, so if you are able to find it there, please by all means put these back and reference something!
 * The primary complaint in most cases is that players feel forced to take part in something they have no interest in, for the sake of doing something they do - a substantial change from the prior Telling.


 * Many of these have been lauded as excellent, where others have been considered to be pointless by long-term players.

-Andriyko (talk) 17:54, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

ATITD merge
Wondering if I could merge my article with this one. I swear that I searched and searched to see if it was here, but somehow I skipped over this, and now we have two ATITD articles. I'll merge some in, but no major stuff without your approval. --Pastor of Muppets

Why is this game "controversial" as is stated in the first sentence? I can certainly see "different" or something like that, but controversial strikes me as odd. Also, I think that any article referring to a subject as controversial should have a heading descibing the controversy. Imsdal 13:49, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

-- I dont really see what's contraversial about the game either. It's infact somewhat of a "carebear" game (I dont mean that as an insult btw, I adore the game). There was the ingame riot over a gender experiment, but really all of these games have the odd eyebrow raising incident. The funeral massacre on WoW springs immediately to mind. Also, I think it might be nice to tone down the hyperbole. I really do love the game, but I think it does the game no justice for its article to be so gushing. Words like "humongous" and "egypt in all its glory" are not encyclopedic really. Otherwise, a great article for a great game. Duckmonster 12:44, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

The trader was very controversial at the time, in-game riot or not, and there's the Test of the Demi-Pharaoh, which gives PLAYERS the ability to ban other players without objection from eGenesis. (Teppy has stated that if a DP wants a player banned, it will happen, period.)

For references to the Trader Malaki, see here:

http://wiki.atitd.net/tale2/TheTraderMalaki http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/10/a_riot.html

The Trader Malaki was widely discussed and hit slashdot and a number of other publications less focused on MMO gaming.

The Test of the Demi-Pharaoh is also found in the ATITD2 wiki. --66.92.76.65 15:18, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

There were a lot of other "controversial" aspects to this MMO, and except for a select few events (trader event mentioned above) they have been toned down since Tale 1 (first "run" of the MMO, essentially). 1) There are players who are elected that can ban player accounts (this is still in the game, although no clear government has formed around these Demi-Pharaohs); 2) In earlier tales players were married to other players, and could not divorce them - the other player had full access to their spouses account - everything barring billing information, including the ability to quit the player; 3) players had the ability to ingest a poison which gave them more "travel time" (warp time), but slowly killed them - they could, in secret, also poison their spouses. These examples are just a few, and are/were core  features of the game, and were not GM run events of any sort.  The game is "controversial" because the developers risk losing players by integrating these features into the game, solely in order to run an "ant farm" social experiment.  "Controversial" does not mean normal griefing and ganking that is rampant in MMOs, it means that the game is taken in a wildly different, and risky, direction, in order to become more of a game - to become a social experiment. -76.166.23.65 05:45, 15 June 2007 (UTC) [Qetesh]

Timelines for the tales?
Would someone add timelines for Tale I, Tale II, and when Tale III started? --IanOsgood 00:53, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Done, under 'development' on the recent chain of edits. (Gods, I'm sloppy.) Theogrin 05:43, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

4 welcome islands?
"In the Third Telling, when a player enters Egypt they will find themselves on one of four "Welcoming islands". Huh? Last time I checked there was one. Belindalibrarian (talk • contribs) 23:44, 15 May 2007 (UTC).
 * It should say "In previous tellings"; the welcoming islands were integrated in Tale 3 into one. -76.166.23.65 05:47, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Notability Complaint Correction
Somebody tagged this article as being not "notable" and unverified. After reading the guidelines, I took this to mean it lacked references to information from sources independent of the game itself. (Presumably "notability" means that somebody other than people involved with the game cared enough to publish something about it.) So I:
 * Corrected a couple of existing references to indicate that the information is independent of, and the servers not maintained by, ATITD's developer, eGenesis
 * Added further references from online journalistic sources
 * Verified the information in the article against my experience and available sources

--Bobertmurphy 03:53, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for fixing those. I've added more information, hopefully cleaned up the format a bit, and added some other references, most from ATITD.net (the main fansite) rather than ATITD.com.  The two are completely separate, and eGenesis does not sponsor the fansite.  If we can get stuff from Slashdot, Terra Nova (well, more of those) and whatnot, it might almost be presentable!  I'm also going to be making another few edits for more recent screenshots.  Theogrin 05:37, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Holy moly. This must be the first time I've ever seen such an improvement after tagging an article. However, the references aren't particularly good, most of them being the to the (de facto) official forums and the references aren't for any of the significant facts about the game. --TheSeer (TalkˑContribs) 07:42, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I've never edited a wikipedia page before so not sure how best to add these but there are numerous articles/reviews on ATITD. Hope this goes towards it being notable.
 * http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/taleinthedesert/review.html - ATITD is a social experiment
 * http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2006/09/ataleinthedesert3/ - New feature of tale 3
 * http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/january03/atitd/index.shtml - interview with Andrew Tepper on many of the unique parts of game.
 * http://www.mmorpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10053&ID=1225 - ATITD is based on social puzzles.
 * http://www.gamesxtreme.net/pc/game/a-tale-in-the-desert-3/review.shtml - ATITD is a Massively Multiplayer Society.
 * Another significant thing that should probably be mentioned in the article is unlike most MMORPGs, you can join any number of guilds simultaneously. The game is much more than economic, the social and political aspects are much more significant and the multiple guild joining creates networks of people that interact in different ways via family/home guilds, trading guilds, political activist guilds, etc.
 * --Questionor 14:16, 15 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and added Questionor's links (one was a duplicate of an existing one).
 * The references are admittedly weak. And due to lack of footnotes, much of the article appears to be original research, but in fact can be gleaned from the external links to independent sites. Perhaps someone can go through them and set them up as references, or I will do it when I get time.
 * --Bobertmurphy 08:35, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

The article states that the game's players are friendly but a recent in game event has shown otherwise. anomalous 16 march 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.108.183.59 (talk) 08:21, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071113123924/http://pc.gamezone.com:80/news/12_10_02_09_25PM.htm to http://pc.gamezone.com/news/12_10_02_09_25PM.htm
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20030603171710/http://atitd.com/ to http://atitd.com/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20070522185555/http://www.gamespot.com:80/pc/rpg/taleinthedesert/review.html to http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/taleinthedesert/review.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071026145501/http://archive.gamespy.com:80/interviews/october01/atitd/ to http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/october01/atitd/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20071113174400/http://archive.gamespy.com:80/interviews/january03/atitd/index.shtml to http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/january03/atitd/index.shtml

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