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Hello again avid blog reader(s).
Recently a new batch of trainee msquad members have been chosen and not so recently (but still recent enough to be newsworthy) a new batch of trainee GMs have been chosen.
These brave new trainees are as follows :
The new msquad trainees :

• firebolty
• dellalanri
• Eason
• Holotor
• joonveen

The new GM trainees :

• AikidoKP
• Faint
• uFantom
• Lume
• Fivah
• Thrandir
• Teague19

So these people are the future of toribash. The ones that manage to become full members of their respective staff postions anyway. Be nice to them and they’ll be nice right back to you.
This is an exciting time for both them and the rest of the community, what with the impending 4.3 e-sport release, the unknown date of toribash being put in steam greenlight and all the new members of staff.

To get into the head of the staff trainees more I decided to interview AikidoKP. My choice of who to interview was completely unbiased and has nothing to do with the fact that he’s one of the leaders of my clan.

This is how it went down :

MrAakash: Hello AikidoKP, what the bizzle of shizzle.

AikidoKP: Well, the relationship of shizzle to bizzle is quite simple really, you just need to factor in the influence of Flava Flav in modern pop culture.

AikidoKP: Also, hi.

 

MrAakash: Alrighty then, In simpler terms, what’s up?

AikidoKP: Ah, I’m taking a break from studying right now. So not much other than this.

 

MrAakash: Sounds like fun. So you’re one of the new trial GMs right?

AikidoKP: I sure am.

 

MrAakash: So what made you apply for the position go GM?

AikidoKP: Power. I didn’t have enough of it. Or part of it anyways. It’s also to find a way to give back to the community. Toribash has eaten up so much of my time over the past couple years that I figured I could help the little ones walk down the same path.

 

MrAakash: Sounds interesting. How long did they take to get back to you and how did you feel while your application was being processed.

AikidoKP: It wasn’t a long wait, they’re pretty on top of things, or at least they make it look like they are.

AikidoKP: How did I feel? I can’t say I was scared or anything, it was more of a “lets see how far I get.” thing.

 

MrAakash: What were your expectations for your application? Did you think you would get in?

AikidoKP: Hope for the best, expect the worst. I figured I had a decent chance of getting in, but I wasn’t holding my breath or anything.

 

MrAakash: How did you feel when you got the news that you had been accepted?

AikidoKP: Heh, I wasn’t all that surprised, but it was neat being welcomed into the fold of toribash staff.

AikidoKP: Actually, I was really surprised, but for a different reason.

 

MrAakash: Why were you surpirsed?

AikidoKP: It just had to do with a bunch of classified information that was my application.

 

MrAakash: Now that you’re a trail GM what do your responsibilities include and what sort of stuff can’t you do that a regular GM can?

AikidoKP: Well, GM’s hop around, running events and making in-game things run smoothly while also helping new players. Trial GM’s do that, but at a reduced rate. We’re the students doing “On the job work experience” who follow around the doctors.

 

MrAakash: So how much time does the trial gm thing take up for you?

AikidoKP: When I’m not bogged down with school work, I try to devote at least an hour or two each night for it. Ideally I would have time for an event or two each night, but that wont happen any time soon.

AikidoKP: I guess it could take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on what I do.

 

MrAakash: how long did it take for you to get accustomed to being a trail GM?

AikidoKP: Not long, a lot of the experience from running a clan helped there. It’s sort of like treating every new player like a new recruit.

 

MrAakash: Well that’s all the questions I have for now, Aikido, thanks for answering my questions.

MrAakash: If you want to give anyone a shoutout now would be your chance

AikidoKP: Thanks for inviting me to this.

AikidoKP: Hmm, shoutouts eh…

AikidoKP: I’m not big on those, but, the entire Secret crew (past and present), you guys are now in a blog. Jetfox4 <3. To Uric, something sarcastically inspirational, and to everyone else, uh… hi.

MrAakash: haha, well have a nice day then. Bye

Because the members of the msquad were just revealed today, I won’t be conducting any interviews with them in this post for now.

I’ll just end with something about my own experiences and opinions :

As many of you may or may not know, I am a part of the msquad and I was once also a trainee. The existing staff are really helpful and do everything in their power to make sure you turn into the best staff member you can be. Being a trainee is both exciting and scary. It may be too much for some people and others might find it a bit easy. When i was a trainee I had quite literally no experience in moderating but thanks to the effort of msquad members (past and present) I was able to turn into what I am today. The new staff may not look like much right at this moment to some of you, but they will most probably turn into great staff members and will someday be standing upon the great staff mountain looking upon the forums and toriworld, helping people exactly like you.

Hello and welcome to the newest toribash blog post (at least until another one comes up). In this post we will be talking about a series or events that has shaken the community recently, specifically the Russian Mafia’s hostile takeover of the cyber pixies that run the forum and send data packages through the tubes of the internet.
Alright lets get serious for a short while. Recently the forum has been down for a bit, and if you’ve not been hiding under a rather large and hollowed out rock, then you should have heard that it was because someone DDoS’d the forums. I’m going to try to explain what happened a bit better but don’t take my words to be fact because I did all of 5 minutes of research on this topic.

As stated before, some people decided to DoS the servers. In its most simplest form that’s basically flooding the servers with so many requests / things to do that i can’t possibly do them all. Think of it like a shop. Depending on the capabilities of the server, you have a certain number of tills open. If the website never has to handle insane amounts of trafic then you don’t have lots of tills open to save money. There are some legitimate shoppers trying to buy stuff and everything is going well. All of a sudden, some million people come in and try to buy things again and again and again, thus flooding the tills and forcing the shop to either close or making it unresponsive or slow for the actual customers.  Think of it as this compared to this.

So now that you know what has been happening to the forum let’s talk about farming. Some people have started farming tournaments for tc and planned to sell that tc for real money. People made things like 1,000,000 tc in a few days from farming. Hampa has been doing his super detective rounds and started perma-banning people he finds who are farming. He has also put some measure in place to stop people from farming but we’ll get to that later in the interview. If in doubt think of these words : “Don’t farm, since farming is bad.”

That’s basically all I have to say for now. I might add a few things if I find out anything else that’s interesting.

To end the blog here’s an interview I had with hampa yesterday.

MrAakash: Hello Hampa. How are you on this fine day
hampa: awesome

MrAakash: I went on toribash for a quick spot of losing to people better than me (everyone) and saw the tournament rooms had gone. Can you comment on this?
hampa: I’ve disabled them for now, they need an update to prevent excessive farming

MrAakash: Do you plan on restoring them anytime soon, or will there be a major update?
hampa: there will probably be some restrictions on how much TC you can get for them
hampa: it is not mean to be used for bot farming

MrAakash: For approximately how long do you think they will they be down?
hampa: a day or so

MrAakash: besides the previously mentioned tc limit do you plan on making any other changes?
hampa: I think we’ve been to lean or farmers, hackers and DOSers
hampa: I’m a bit disappointed that players who are respected by others, played 20k games or more still think it is ok to DOS the servers

MrAakash: so what changes will you make to prevent things like that that from happening again
hampa: adding more restrictions to the servers and tournaments

MrAakash: speaking of DOS, is that the reason the servers were down recently. Who was responsible for that?
hampa: yes
hampa: the dosing has been from some old and some new players

MrAakash: I’ve heard rumors of some sort of experience point system being implemented or something among those lines. Is that true? If it is, could you elaborate on it?
hampa: no, not yet.
hampa: 4.3 is a e-sports release
hampa: we have a thread about it on the forum
hampa: http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=381817
hampa: we are discussing the features there

MrAakash: that sounds amazing. I can’t wait until it gets implemented.
MrAakash: Speaking of future plans, when do you think you’ll apply to steam greenlight?
hampa: there is plenty of features and bugs I want to fix before I think it is ready

MrAakash: Well that’s about all the questions I have right now, thanks for your time.
hampa: you’re welcome
hampa: cheers

MrAakash: I’ll be putting this on the blog so if you want to give anyone a shout out then now’s your chance.
hampa: Any javascript or linux sysadmins that are looking for a part time job, please send a cv to my email.

In case you’re wondering, hampa’s email is hampus@nabistudios.com so if you’re awesome at the stuff mentioned above then send him an email.

For the lazy here are the contents of the interview in bullet point format:

• Hampa removed the tournament rooms for a day.
• He will be making a tc earn limit to prevent farming.
• They should be back on within a day.
• Some pretty experienced and old players decided to DoS the servers.
• Toribash 4.3 will be an esport update and the link is in the interview for the thread suggesting ideas for that update.
• There are still quite a few bugs that hampa wants to fix and features he wants to add before trying out for steam greenlight.

Aaaaand that’s about all for now, hope you enjoyed reading this post and have a good day.

So you may or may not have heard that the Clan Events Team is now officially dead. To find out more about the death of the CET I managed to get an interview with top (or near the top) GM, Uric. This is how it all panned out :

MrAakash: Hello Uric. I’ve head that the Clan Events Team is dead. Could you confirm this and if possible provide any explanation as to the reason why.

Uric: Sup bro.
Uric: The Clan Events Team (CET) has been brutally murdered by the higher ups and merged into the GMs (when I say merged, I mean the duties, not the CET members). So yes, I can confirm that the CET is dead. The reasons for this are: The CET were “inactive” and rarely did any decent events come out. There was also a little incompetence within the team after the leaders had bbeen switched around multiple times. With the GMs being fully in charge of it now, there is a

MrAakash: Since when has the CET team been inactive?

Uric: Since halfway through the clan league, I believe. The whole thing was hosted at a very bad level overall. But the organisation died off massively halfway through, then the team kinda spiralled from there.

MrAakash: Wow that was quite a while back. If the team was inactive why not simply kick out anyone who was inactive and hold a recruitment like you do with GMs and Msquad.

Uric: We thought about that, however; from the people interested in the position. There was barely anything decent at all to come from it. So the higher ups made a decision to merge them into an already “experienced eventing” group.

MrAakash: Well now that the CET is dead will the clan events board still exist? Some people think it’s a bit redundant and would be better off merged with events since people actually look at events.

Uric: We considered moving the board under the Events parent board. But thought it better to keep it under Clan Discussion from what we’re planning to do with it.

MrAakash: Can you tell us a little bit more about these plans?

• Uric taps nose.

MrAakash: Are there any plans for a new clan league sort of event? Something big that will be on the level of the llama’s vs ponies or vampires vs zombies scale?
MrAakash: and will there possibly be something like that in the foreseeable future even if it’s not planned out now

Uric: No “themes” will come from the Clan Events. That’s more of a GM Event type of thing. However, there will be a few large scaled events like the Clan League to come out in the future.

MrAakash: so now the GMs have even more to do. Any chance of you guys splitting the GMs into GMs who do in game stuff and EMs (event masters) who do forum stuff?
MrAakash: or something of the like

Uric: All the forum stuff can be handled pretty easily by a lead (that’s me ), so with that out of the way it just leaves the other GMs to give ideas and other input. We then churn it all together in the GM oven and make something out of it. This is why there is a lead.
Uric: However; Erth has taken on a larger role with the Clan Events as he is a Clan Mod and requested the area. So I guess that puts two minds behind the forum side of things.

MrAakash: How often do you plan on having official clan events and what would a typical prize be?

Uric: As often as the normal GM events, so fairly frequently. The prizes would vary depending on the size of the event. Clan Events Points wuld also be included.

MrAakash: Is there any scope for collaboration from people outside the GMs for both this and single events?
MrAakash: for example, send in an event idea to be made into an official event.

Uric: We’re ALWAYS open to ideas from the public. So of course there would be. And seeing as it’s clan events, official clans would be given the ability to (after their event has been run by Erth, Firebolty, Uric or Fish) launch an event themselves to host from the Clan Events board.

MrAakash: so would it be possible to have a public run event sponsored by the GMs if they like the idea enough i.e : no entry fee and decent

Uric: It would be possible to get sponsored by the Clan Events Bank which is fueled by the TC that is charged to make clans official. But it’d be rare that we’d sponsor one like that as if a clan wants to host something to raise awareness for themselves, it’d come out of their own pocket.

Uric: If an individual sends an idea in for a generic event not brought to the public by a clan, it’d be considered for sponsorship by the GMs.

MrAakash: well it’s been a pleasure meeting with you Uric. That’s all the question I can think of right now. If you want to add any details to the loving public or give any shoutouts to anyone then this is your chance.

Uric: Keep an eye out for more GM events, and subscribe to the Clan Events board guys. Because there is about to be a lot of activity about that place.

Uric: For those who may not know yet, the first Toribash Wedding occured recently. I am now toribashcially wedded to Stellar. Hello Wifey.
Uric: You’re welcome, Aakash.
Uric: See you around.
Uric: o7

For those of you who found that too hard to read or simply don’t want to look at text written by Uric then look at this condensed list of important things we found out.

• The CET is dead because of inactivity.
• They have been merged with the GMs and Erth is heading that part of the GMs.
• The Clan Events board will still exist and will not be merged with the Events board
• Something big is in the works. It’s also a secret (surprise).
• Uric advises subbing to the Clan Events board o at least taking frequent looks there.
• GMs could potentially sponsor your event as an individual but its not likely to happen as a clan and even as an individual you can’t do it for promotional reasons (i.e : promote your clan)
• Clan events will start happening fairly frequently.

After a few days I decided to track firebolty down and interview him as well since he was supposedly the most active member of the CET. Imet him over in IRC and we got talking. This is how the interview went down

MrAakash: Hello firebolty. How are you?

firebolty: Hey MrAakash, not bad. Yourself?

 

MrAakash: I’m good thanks for asking. So we’re here talk about the death of CET. When did this happen?

firebolty: Hmm ..

firebolty: In my opinion, CET has been dead for a long time already.

firebolty: Seems to me that it happened some time during the Clan League.

firebolty: You know, when the whole thing was delayed for a week or two.

 

MrAakash: so how long have you been a part of the CET?

firebolty: I’ve been in the Clan Events Team for approximately 6 months.

firebolty: – ..Back when it wasn’t so dead.

 

MrAakash: Why do you think the CET died?

firebolty: To me, CET died simply because not many people cared for it.

firebolty: There was a false sense of leadership, sub-par organization, and people simply slacked off.

firebolty: As a whole, the events weren’t that bad.

firebolty: They started to get generic at one point, but that didn’t really affect anyone.

firebolty: No one really paid attention to the CET or the events they [we] hosted, so that’s definitely factored into its death.

 

MrAakash: if the CET members weren’t active and didn’t care for it why not simply kick those members and hold a recruitment in the news board like they do for GMs and Msquad.

firebolty: We actually discussed this at one point.

firebolty: We had mass-recruitments at one point, which replaced a few of our elder members.

firebolty: The new recruits eventually became inactive, in which they were kicked from the team at a much later date.

firebolty: Truth is, we didn’t have many resources.

firebolty: Not many people were interested in volunteering for this under-appreciated organization.

firebolty: As I mentioned before, the leaders soon became inactive as well, which started to take its toll on the rest of the group.

firebolty: No one really cared anymore. CET was just “there”.

 

MrAakash: Now that the CET is under GM management, can we expect anything awesome to happen and if so what will it be?

firebolty: Expect big things from us as a group. The responsibilities of the CET have been shifted over to us, the Gamemasters.

firebolty: We already create events, forum & in-game based.

firebolty: Clan events won’t be too far of a stretch for us. I’m confident we’ll do great as a team.

firebolty: I’m afraid I can’t really get into the specifics of what we’re planning to do. Just know that the things we have in store are amazing.

firebolty:

 

MrAakash: So do you miss the CET?

firebolty: Do I miss the CET?

firebolty: God no.

firebolty: Fortunately, it’s being mixed in with us GMs, so expect change.

firebolty: As ironic as it seems, the destruction of CET was for its own good. It’s in a better place now.

firebolty:

 

MrAakash: How did you guys work within the organization?

firebolty: We were too relaxed, ended up getting the bare end of deadlines met.

firebolty: The members there were great at procrastinating, but I don’t blame them.

firebolty: We usually just thought up events by ourselves, with no outside help.

firebolty: We shared our ideas and tried making our WIPs better, which we [usually] did.

firebolty: Now that I think about it, the organization had a lack of foundation.

firebolty: We didn’t really work as a team, which is why it is what it is today.

 

MrAakash: peaking of no outside help, was there ever any scope for people from the outside to help?

MrAakash: and will that change after the CET has been eaten by the GMs

firebolty: We were a very “private” organization, naturally.

firebolty: We didn’t ask for help, we just made our events the best we could as a team.

firebolty: I know realize that this is another one of the organization’s faults; as a whole, we didn’t think about what the public actually wanted.

firebolty: We just took a blind eye and hoped that they liked our vivid sense of creativity.

firebolty: Now that the CET is under new management, yes, we’ll be more open to the masses’ opinion.

firebolty: Getting everyone’s outlook on certain things increases our understanding as a whole, which is why this is something we’re probably going to be doing on a regular basis.

 

MrAakash: So, thats about all the question I have for now. Thanks for letting me interview you. If ou want to add any further details or give a shootout to anyone then now is a good chance to.

firebolty: No problem, MrAakash.

firebolty: I’ll talk to you later.

firebolty: :-]

MrAakash: bye

firebolty: aa

 

It was loads of fun talking to firebolty and good times were had all around.

If you have any further questions feel free to pm Erth. Even if you don’t have any questions pm Erth anyway. He loves pms and will like you more for taking the time to pm him.

And that’s about it for tonight’s blog post. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this more than I’ve enjoyed writing it because I only had an enjoyment rating of 7.2 while writing this.

MrAakash out. Peace.

So after my last blog post about 4.0 there were a ton of unanswered questions and I just had to have an interview with hampa. After tracking him down which took all of 30 seconds since he was on IRC, he graciously agreed to let me interview him. This is how it went:

MrAakash: Hello. Could I interview a bit about 4.0?

Hampa: Of course

MrAakash: Awesome. Give me the word when you’re ready

Hampa: Ready

MrAakash: Alrighy then. When did you decide to officially release 4.0. Was it a decision you made in the moment or did you have a plan?

Hampa: We did 10 beta releases, after 10 I didn’t have any major bugs left so I released it. I want to keep releasing more often and hope to do 4.1 within a month.

MrAakash: So about the hair … Any future plans for colour variations? Some users have voiced opinions that it should have been black

Hampa: Yes, I’m currently doing the icons for the hair colors and hair textures. Should be in the shop soon.

MrAakash: What are the future plans for hair trading. Will they continue to be non tradable or will you make them tradable and if you do when do you plan to make them tradable?

Hampa: oh, they should be tradable. Give me a sec I’ll enable it now.

… A Short while later….

Hampa: ok, fixed

MrAakash: Awesome. Now I know that normal user won’t be able to make their own hair designs due to the ability to make hair that lags the game. Who makes the current hair designs and how often can we expect to see new designs come out?

Hampa: Admins can create hairs, I’m doing the first batch of hairs. The hairs will be released as often as admins can come up with something cool.

MrAakash: Would there ever be a possibility of having hair designing competitions, qi restricted hair and/or special staff position hairs?

Hampa: yes, that should be doable

MrAakash: by “yes that should be doable” do you mean all three? I know the hair competitions and qi restricted hair makes sense, but so far staff has been given extra stuff on a “do they need it to do their job” basis and as far as I know nobody needs hair to do their job.

Hampa: I haven’t though the hair competitions through, I think having an old white sensei beard being Qi restricted makes sense.

MrAakash: Next, a piece of new that has every market pro scrambling to sell all their joints. The joint textures. I know you’ve assured us that they won’t ruin the joint market. Can you reveal as to how you will be implementing these amazing new items?

Hampa: The joint textures have been there for a while but they where mapped in a weird way which made it hard to play with. It was hard to see what state the joint was. Then the joint textures where rotated together with the joint. Now they are always z-rotated and when you press force the mapping of the textures are the same as hold relax which makes it look much better.

The joint textures are illuminated using the joint color, so white colors in the texture will show what your hold relax color is. This makes it easier to see what state the joint is in if the texture is busy.

To avoid the obvious thing of making a joint texture black and calling it demon joints the joint textures will be USD only items. So they will all be high premium items and available in 128 to 512 versions.

MrAakash: how would them being USD only prevent people from making them black and calling them demon?

Hampa: I mean, they will be priced above demon, so more rare. a demon joint looks different from a texture with black on them, so I don’t think that will be any major problem

MrAakash: Have you determined a price for the joints?

Hampa: no, not yet. I want to update the texture uploader a bit first, it wasn’t really designed to handle the current load of textures.

 

And that’s all we had time for. Unfortunately I had to go, so I left after getting confirmation that I could interview hampa again the next time we meet.

Expect more coming out soon and if you have any questions you want me to ask hampa about 4.0 feel free to pm them to me in toribash (MrAakash).

So for the tl;dr version:

1. - Hair will be getting new colours and is now tradable.
2. - Joint textures will look different to joints of the same colour and will be much more expensive than any existing join. Also USD only.
3. - Joint textures could take a while to come out since hampa has to reprogram some stuff.
4. - There’s a possibility of qi restricted hair and maybe even hair making competitions. As of now only admins make hair and hampa’s the one who made the first three.

Luckily I got back soon afterwards and managed to get in touch with hampa again although this time it took 40 seconds.

The following was the result of our second encounter :

MrAakash: Hello

Hampa: hi

MrAakash: do you have time to continue the interview?

Hampa: ok

MrAakash: Great. So the next topic on the list is the awesome new music. Personally I love it but there have been some people who don’t. Are there any plans to make different tracks? Maybe we even have people able to load custom music.

Hampa: I think custom music is better handled by an external player and anything except ambiance music is going to be repetitive after a while. ambiance for the servers perhaps, that you can upload. That could be cool and would create a bit more variation.

MrAakash: So back to hair. Now that we have body textures, dq textures and even joint textures can we look forward to hair textures in the distant future?

Hampa: coming soon

MrAakash: Now that we have the awesome powers of hair, can we expect facial hair as well and maybe even multiple hair items being able to be activated?

Hampa: yes

MrAakash: Let’s get to the serious topics now. What are the future plans for toribash?

Hampa: Keep adding good features. I’d like to focus more on the competitive aspects of the game, make tournamnets better like new mods and bigger rooms

MrAakash: Well that sounds amazing. Do you have a plan of action at the moment?

Hampa: yes, first features should start appearing in 4.1

MrAakash: any idea what features will be appearing in 4.1 or is it a secret?

Hampa: secret for now. I’ll do a beta for the forum players to try out eventually

MrAakash: well I for one will be looking forward to that. So with the major update to the game side, will there be any changes to the forums?

Hampa: I’ll see if I can fix the texture uploader to handle all the textures better. It wasn’t really designed for that many texture we have and there are good html5 solutions for uploading now that I’d like to use instead

MrAakash: Now for the new noises. Any future changes on that or will you keep them the way they are.

Hampa: I might tweak a few.

MrAakash: Well toribash is a pretty awesome game and I think the reason more people don’t play is because of a lack of awareness. Any chances of tb going onto steam after ironing out the wrinkles? The free games on steam get an insane amount of attention.

Hampa: yes, I’ll submit it to green light

MrAakash: so what do you rate your chances are of getting onto steam or is that still in the distant future. Also how long do you think it will be before you submit it?

Hampa: It is a bit early to know, green light has just been out a week, not sure if they approved any games there yet.

MrAakash: well i just checked and so far no games have been accepted yet. I’m sure you would get in if you got the whole force of the tb community behind you though. Have you tried to get the game onto steam before? If no, then why not? I’m sure the thought crossed your mind or someone suggested it before me.

Hampa: yes, I tried before to submit it

MrAakash: did they give you a reason for being rejected or just simply say no? (I’m assuming you were rejected since the game is not on steam)

Hampa: no reason. The old submission was a web form you submitted a bit of info about the game. The new Green Light system should be good. The web form probably caused a lot of submissions.

MrAakash: well that must have sucked. Anyway I wish you the best of luck getting on this time around. The game really is amazing. Those are all the questions I have at the moment. Thank you again for letting me interview you.

Hampa: you’re welcome

We got some pretty big news here. I for one am very excited about the possible inclusion of toribash on steam. Imagine the influx of new players and the additions to the community.

The tl;dr version :

1. - No custom music, you can just open up itunes but there may be some music variety.
2. - Hair textures to be expected along with facial hair and maybe even multiple hair items at once.
3. - additions to 4.1 is a secret
4. - Hampa wants to improve gameplay, room size and texture uploader. Also there might be new mods and improved tournaments. He might even fix the “ragequit in the finals” problem for tournaments.
5. - Toribash to be submitted to greenlight (the thing that determines games for steam) at a later date when the glitches are ironed out.
6. - Toribash had been rejected from steam before.

Well that’s all for now. The future of toribash should be very exciting and if we do get into steam then all kinds of amazng things should happen. Like solax said, we may even have toribash being an e-sport.

So the wait is over. The mystic toribash 4.0 is out. No longer will you have to look into the horizon and wonder about the future, about the day when you will finally be able to play tb4.0. People in the future will look at you and say “that guy was there at the start, the start of the next big thing, which since it’s the future is technically the current big thing.” and you’ll look back and reply “Yes I was, and it was amazing. So amazing that dolphins wept tears of joy and elephants could be heard across the world making elephant sounds of jubilation.”

So what’s so great about tb4.0 I hear you ask.

What’s NOT great about tb4.0 (well there are a few wrinkles but let’s look past that for the moment).

We’re finally introduced to a whole new world of tb as a variety of exciting features get added.

The most known and looked forward to feature besides maybe hair would be the new metalic look of the joints. I have to say, they do look very amazing. The graphics have increased, or at least i think they have and the screen has become bigger. Added together it makes for a whole new and amazing experience.

Following the wii, the P.C version of tb gets the long awaited “hair”. This comes in three styles for now but who knows, we could get as many hair variations as there are joint colours. It seems though, at the moment hair is untradable. This I certainly didn’t expect and I can only assume that they will become tradable sometime in the future or we will live the rest out our lives in the tb universe unable to sell our hair or buy someone else’s hair. Maybe it’s just something inculded at the start so people would buy the hair instead of thinking to wait a while and get it cheap on the market. indeed there are already some cheap (well cheaper than the torishop) hair items on the market.

There are also a whole load of planned additions to the torishop. The most controversial of these being the legendary joint textures. Hampa assures us thet they will not ruin the join market which leads to some speculation as to how exactly they have been implemented. One user’s take on it was having literal preset textures (e.g : stripes) and the colour of that texture would change with your force/relax. Another less likely possibility is that they’re not very shiny, which probably will ruin the joint market even after the lack of shinyness. I think that they will just be incredibly expensive making it reasonable to simply buy joints instead of the textures. Maybe even around the 1kk mark.

A brilliant new addition is the music option. Now I can listen to some calm relaxing music while getting my head torn out by a yellow belt. Maybe people will rage less. Maybe people will rage more. All I know is that I like it and when i next see hampa I’ll be asking him about an option to add your own music to your tb account to listen to. The music is a bit repetitive but you always have the option of turning it off and turning on i-tunes or f you’re like me, a playlist on youtube.

There seem to be some new subtle sounds as well which I haven’t puzzled out yet mainly because of my lack of gametime, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out when for example you hear a scream when you decap someone. Disclaimer : I don’t actually know if there’s a scream, that phrase was used to example making purposes only.

On the whole I’m very excited about this new toribash and I just love the shiny new metalic feel all over. Don’t go away yet there are sure to be a huge load of additions coming soon to a torishop near you.

One fateful night, in a slightly well lit room, there started an event, an event quite like lots of other events before it, a seemingly ordinary event. Hosted by the creator of toribash, hampa, this event required its contestants to create a racing game, given only the weekend to complete it. As an added bonus hampa himself would take part, although he would be excluded from the list of potential winners.

Many a contestant came forth, keen to prove themselves and win the prize, but in the end only two emerged victorious. Fizik and Box. Although their respective games were considered good, given the time in which they made it, it was hampa’s own game that shone the brightest. Out of the ashes of that event emerged an amazing new racing game called pii racer.

The game was such a success that hampa decided to continue working on it and improve it for all to play. Some said it was “the 2D trackmania” while other said it was “omg awesome” and others even described it as “so much fun”.

Today pii racer, although not fully released yet, has more than 100 user created levels and more than 500k has been given out in prizes to those who conquered the times above all others.  The (slightly disputed) king of the game MrAakash holds the highscore in almost all the most popular levels and has on over 400k of tc by devastating others scores and placing his own upon the throne of 1^st place.

I talked to hampa about the game and gained a few valuable insights. Readers will be happy, if not ecstatic, to hear that the development of the game still continues to this day and should continue for the the foreseeable future. If everything goes well we can expect to be able to play pii racer not only when we have a computer near us, but almost anywhere with plans to port it to iOS.

We can also look forward to some pretty exciting updates. Take the following with a pinch of salt though because nothing is for certain at this moment. A few ideas were bounced around there might even eventually be a multiplayer mode, with optional tc betting.

In conclusion we can be pretty sure that pii racer has a long and glorious future ahead of it. A few quotes from hampa should sum it up perfectly :

“I’m working on an update with some much needed improvements. If that goes well I’ll port it over to iOS” followed by “I have a list of features I want to try as well, that might take a few weeks to go through all of them”.

That’s all for now dear readers, but should you have any questions about this wonderful game feel free to ask about it on the pii racer thread on the news section of the forum.

Hello avid blog readers and welcome back for another update of the toriverse.

This time we are looking at the toribash clan league 2011. In the shadow of the recent tori championships the clan events team are holding the clan version of the popular tournament, the main difference obviously being the participation of clans instead of individuals and the amazing prizes up for grabs. For those of you who don’t know, the joint colour alpha imperial, that eternalised the clan Alpha, was one of the prize options of a past clan league. Battling for dominance, prizes and the right to call themselves the best clan are 32 diverse clans battling in numerous mods in a best to 5 game mode. This is sure to be an intense battle since it has been quite a while since the lest clan league. To get some more information i had a quick interview with a member of the clan events team, Gum. Here is what transpired:

<Aakash> So from what i understand there hasn’t been a clan league in a while. Who’s Idea was it to reinstate it?
<Gum> Well the origin of the idea came from a thread Zinx posted. When I became leader for the Clan Events Team, I decided we should host it and started the efforts towards making that happen

 

<Aakash> Just out of curiosity when was the last clan league and why was it stopped?
<Gum> The last clan league I remember was back in 2009. I don’t know why it was stopped, probably just because no one was available to put one together.It takes quite a bit of work to set up something this big.

 

<Aakash> So im sure everyone is curious as to what the prizes are. Would you like to comment on that?
<Gum> At the moment, we are still working on that. Something we know will be given is quite a lot of clan events points and an achievement to the clans that take first and second place.There will be more, and it will be a very nice set of prizes, we are just finalizing the details for now. I’ll post once we have it all decided.We will be making this league worth the trouble for the winners

 

<Aakash> well i know that one of the previous prizes was the introduction of alpha imperial and the winning clan could chose the prize. Will it be the same for this clan league?
<Gum> We may let the winning clan choose their prize, but there will not be a new color. I’ve been told that is out of the question.

 

<Aakash> Do you think this will be a yearly occurrence or are you just testing the waters to see how well it is received before fully reinstating the clan league?
<Gum> This is more of a test to see how it works and see what we can improve for future leagues. If all goes well there may be another one in 2012. I’ll definitely be pushing for full reinstatement of the league.

 

<Aakash> It must have been pretty time consuming to organise an event like this. I noticed that the sign up for the clan league started long back. Did it take a long time planning this event or were you waiting for enough clans to sign up.
<Gum> Well, we had enough clans quite soon after I posted the sign up. The hard part was actually setting it up and getting the brackets made. The planning is still going on right now actually. Its taken a few months but I’m happy we could get it launched before the end of the year.

 

<Aakash> Well I’m sure everyone is looking forward to the clan league. Thanks you Gum for your cooperation and for bringing back this amazing event.
<Gum> Thank you, and I hope this league goes well. May the best clan win.

So there you have it. The prize unfortunately wont be a custom clan join colour but you can still be sure that, even though the exact details of the prize is being withheld, it will be worth the effort and as Gum said the winning clan will bathe in clan event points and even get their very own achievement. Hopefully this will become a yearly occurrence and may the best clan win.

For more information please go here.