The launch of Beta 6 on November 3rd, 2000 came with ambitious expectations for the game. Though this update didn't offer much in the way of technical upgrades, the change from all the old graphics felt like a major upgrade. With this visual shift came other big plans, which looking back at them now, were very ambitious.
The four CIP members, wanted to add many new features to Tibia. Through an article on the website we can see that they planned to add sound, provide players with alternate ways to earn experience such as through quests, and even develop a crafting system. They wanted to improve every aspect of Tibia from increasing the number of monsters and items to adding more player created content. Even improving monster AI and redesigning the fundamental parts of Tibia like vocations and magic were being considered. Tibia was now moving away from the basement school project to the more open possibility reality of a professionally managed game. Players thought some of these changes might take months or a year, but the reality was many took decades, if at all, as CIP continued to create new content at the same slow pace.
With their studies coming to an end their first step was to replace the university server with one of their own, and since Tibia was not able to generate any money, they settled on using Gamez.de. Their agreement with them allowed the use Gamez.de's servers in exchange for advertisements on Tibia's website. This agreement would work out only for a few months. Perhaps both CIP and Gamez.de underestimated how fast Tibia would grow.
In these early days of finding a host, CIP surprisingly had intended for players to host their own Tibian servers and would even allow players to move characters between them. For unknown reasons this plan never came into being, though it is interesting to see what Tibia might have become. Players would later create their own servers anyway, but the rise of the Open Tibia (OT) servers was still many years away.
The game would change in other ways this update with one of the largest being the elimination of multiclienting. Before players had been able to open as many game windows as they liked as you logged into each of your characters individually. You could heal up after a hunt or make runes semi-AFK while working on another character. Cheaters used this to their full advantage, blocking players, and gaining unfair advantages though multiclienting. The early game client had no reason to be programmed to detect multiple instances of itself but the chronic abuse and later plans for a user driven login pushed the necessary change on the game. Now players would only be able to play one character at a time, or that was the plan. Many of Tibia's players were experienced in technology like programing and found it easy to use a hex editor to remove the coding which blocked a new client from loading if one was already running. Even if you could find a player who abused this, it was very difficult to prove.
Only Gamemasters could now legally multiclient as it was needed for their role. To bypass the lock, they received a special client with the multiclient check code removed, the same as what others made with the hex editor. CIP had intended for this client to also have other features like the ability to create in game quests for the public and even edit the map, but this was never carried out.
Also added was the ignore player function which allowed for wild cards like * which blocked all variants using a prefix or suffix, and ? which blocked all variants of a specific letter, giving greater flexibility in the fight against spammers. Securing your character was a real concern as the game moved towards paid content. To help CIP eliminated the storing of your password in the preferences tab, which forced players to memorize their passwords for all characters. When you now logged in you would be shown the password one final time, but many players didn't read this change so lost their character when they ignored it and couldn't log in later.
The client was also improved to reduce the amount of screen bugs by adjusting how it communicated with the server. This small change would finally eliminate many of the hilarious bugs around logging in only to find that the GUI menu was the only thing that loaded. The Tibian client also had one other small change, the knight statue which brought you to the skill and character states would now be replaced with a Tibian avatar which did the same thing.
CIP also started production on the new DirectX client at this point, which would be run in parallel to the regular client. This new client would allow soft scrolling, real animation, and possibly sound. Players would not need to download the whole client every update, which would conserve bandwidth, an important concern at the time. This new client was still several years away as CIP was just four people and needed to solve their first hurtle as a new company; turning a profit.
Moving towards a professional game required that CIP added some new features to the website. One of these was introducing their own forum so players could discuss topics on the official website. With this change, Tibiains would no longer find themselves suddenly cut off from communication like what happened with Yorin's site.
To use the forum, you had to log in on the website with your Tibia name and password. Annoyingly you had to enter your password every time you wanted to do anything on the forum as there was no accounts or way to save your credentials. Though a centralized place to discuss the game would remain an important fixture of the site, many still chose to use the popular World of Tibia (WoT). One of the reasons for this was that players who broke the game's rules on the official forum, as they would be nicknamed by players, would also result in a game ban.
The new website now also included a nice mini summery of the history of Tibia, which briefly chronicled their path from Alpha 1 to Beta 6. This important history summery formed the original basis for my own research and offered players a look into the then recent past of the game. Most players would not have played during these early years and looking at early versions of WoT, the history of the game was important to players during this period. It is interesting to note that CIP has created many more of these history vignettes, but details seem to change with every iteration. I have added these to the website so you can check them out for yourself in the resource tab.
It seems from their requests on the website that CIP wanted to bolster their content, asking players to submit their own content, such as tutorials, stories, hints, and pictures. Looking back at the changes its plain to see that if they received any content from players, it never made its way to the website. Why this happened we don't know, perhaps it was just the result of one more ambitious idea that never came into fruition.
Naturally with the new update came game breaking bugs. The forum experienced some minor bugs though I don't recall what these were. CIP did specifically mention that no cookies were saved and that they would never send the password back to your browser so you couldn't be hacked by using the forum. The game was also crashing regularly which took longer to fix, annoying the player base. For those who used the Linux client to play, they would not be able to experience the update until the client for Linux was finished on November 7th.
Unfortunately, with 300 players online, broadcasts (BC) were quickly becoming a headache. Players were going as far as to hunt down BC spammers and complaining loudly (often by BC themselves). To help curb some of the spam CIP increased the cost from 30 mana to 60 on December 5th, 2000. Unsurprisingly it only slightly decreased the spam as players were using the broadcast spell to mana waste anyway. Some players even advertised that this is what they were doing which further aggravated the community. A real solution to this issue would not be forthcoming for awhile, so players continued to be pestered by the endless stamp and most of us used the ignore player features of the client to block out of the more annoying players.
With more players able to access the game, it was time to finally increase the maximum amount of players online to 300 which occurred on November 11th. Just 8 days later the cap would be hit for the first time. Players had constantly complained that the monsters respawned too slow, so to help CIP changed the rate to spawn faster when more players where online. This made playing at peak times much more reasonable, reducing the waiting between respawns.
On November 22nd, 2000 the new set of Tibia rules was officially launched. These rules included banishments for lying, threatening, or killing a GM while they were working or for their work. Though PKing in general wasn't banishable, killing players below level 10 was considered "newbie PKing" was to allow new players time to get used to the game. Massive and disruptive PKing was also banishable though no defined numbers of what was a massive amount of killing was provided. Trapping random people was considered mass PKing, even if you didn't manage to kill more than a couple of people while doing so. Unfortunately with the game rapidly expanding, so too was the number of rule violations, which forced CIP to change the online banishment list to become alphabetical to improve load times (this change occurred November 15th, 2000).
CIP also launched a new feature on the website called "voting poll" which allowed players to vote on topics CIP posted with their characters. Each character could cast one vote using the same method of logging into the forum to confirm their legitimacy. CIP experienced problems with the vote system right away, producing an "illegal vote" error when players tried to submit their vote. Once this was fixed the first poll was made on November 26th, 2000 titled "Tibia's biggest problems". In this poll players could select up to 3 issues they had had with the game. From the results it looks like too few monsters, PKing, and too few skills were considered the most urgent. Looking at the least voted for issues it looks like TIbians mostly liked the graphics and found no issue with the player limit. Also note how only 6.6% of the 859 votes felt that a soundless Tibia was a problem (hint hint).
One of the other interesting poll was on why you played Tibia. Players could again login and pick 3 options from the list. Overwhelmingly most people played Tibia because it was free (70.8% of the 503 voters), while second highest was for the Tibian Community (56.7%). Many players also liked the unlimited character improvement which would become a hallmark feature of the game (33.6%). I wonder if the 169 players who voted for this option realized that they contributed to us seeing level 2k plus chars today. Interestingly the download size and game requirements were no longer a concern for players, even though this was a large part of Tibia's early success. Technology had rapidly progressed at an astonishing pace during the 90s, dampening many of the restrictions which prevented early adoption. People now had access to cheaper and more powerful computers and increasingly fast internet which was replacing dial-up with broadband. People could connect to the game at 10x the speed of the past which made downloading less of an issue.
Another interesting poll is the item loss poll in which 2051 players participated. Those who voted were mostly split on which option of loss they wanted but 52.7% of players wanted only the items in their backpack to become lost which is very close to the system we have today.
One final interesting poll from this period is a strange and seemingly short-lived council election which was to be made up of 12 players. The council was designed so that players would set up an army to protect Thais, give jobs to players, make laws, organize events like tournaments and quest, and provide entertainment. Despite extensive looking I couldn't find a single piece of information on this. You can click on some of the names and see the statements of the candidates, and if you are an old player, you might recognize some of these names as belonging to the former IRT guild. Perhaps this council morphed into the foundation of the IRT? Whatever CIP intended, it never made it out of the voting stage and was forgotten about entirely.
Content in other areas of the map changed with the update to include an easier path to Carlin. Players would no longer need to travel through Mt. Sternum as a new wood bridge was installed over the water to the south. The bridges directly south of Thais to the Cyclops at the end of the map were removed this update. Players would now have to walk the long way around the river to get to the Cyclops camp.
Thais received a few changes as well with the east wall now pushed out and straightened, giving the city more room to expand. A new two-story bank also opened in Thais between the sorc guild and the barracks, which was staffed by NPC Suzy. The placement of the bank was problematic because PKs liked to hang around in the area and the bank with its single door was a very easy place to get trapped. All the other new bank locations were more forgiving. The empty music store now had staff as NPC Quero moved in and would sell players many of the instruments available in Tibia, which was great for roleplayers. The empty jeweler store was now open with NPC Hanna offering small gems and other trinkets. At this point you could trade the new stackable small diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and amethysts for the same price you bought them at. The diamond was the best of the group, as you could sell and buy for 300gp each, making it an excellent store of wealth as players were still relying on gold and now the new platinum coins. Making rare purchases by coin required many backpacks of gold coins. I once conducted a deal that cost 2.5 backpacks of platinum coins (500k) which was very cumbersome to exchange.
McDonald's now had a pig farm which extended behind the barn, and included I think 3 Pigs, Tibia's newest monster. Over in Fibula the mill was moved from its place well off the path to right along the edge to make it easier for players to spot.
Finally, the mini map received a small change in how it showed mountains. Previously a mountainous area had been denoted as a light blue color, but now the map would show mountains as a maroon color. You would need to remap the area for the change to take effect which was annoying. Also noted is that the bridge which connected the west side of upper Thais to the north of Mt. Sternum was no longer there.
Two new creatures were added to the game at this time, the Pig and Orc Spearman. The pig found its home in the expanded farm in Thais. Killing the creature earned you a reasonable amount of food which you could use to heal, though no experience points were rewarded and the creature would not fight back.
The Orc Spearman was added to some of the Orc spawns around the map, which provided a little more difficulty for those spawn. Interestingly the sprite for the spearman was the same as the old orc sprite as the plain Orc received a new basic skin which confused players. This new orc would shoot you from a distance with a spear attack. Killing them dropped plenty of spears for those who were interested in training, and other basic equipment which might have been of interest to new players. Though not very strong, they could become very deadly if you were unable to attack them while other creatures blocked your path. This variance in combat type would be a major design feature of areas during this version.
Many of Tibia's items graphically changed with the update of new sprites but only a few items were added or changed this update. CIP added the Carlin Sword which was a 15 attack, 13 defense basic weapon that looked really close to the Short Sword. Small Stones were also added which could only be found as decoration on the map surface. This stone, which had 20 attack, could be thrown like the spear and would later become the weapon of choice for paladin to train with due to their much lower weight. Equipment was largely left alone with one change to the defense of the Dragon Shield which decreased from 35 defense to 32.
The jewelry that was added to the SPR earlier now officially became obtainable. I seem to recall that you could only buy trinkets like the Ruby Necklace, Emerald Bangle, Golden Amulet, ect. They were both expensive and not often purchased. One of the most important changes was the addition of the Soccer Ball which could be bought at Gorn's and would behave the same as the Bear corpse. The ball looked hilariously flat but was a significant improvement over the Bear so no one complained.
Another change is worth mentioned is the graphical revision of the decay sprite. Upon death you would still leave a pool of blood and the body would still decay in 7 steps, but now you would see the updated version the dead body which was the same for all players and even some human monsters. I still preferred the old sprite to this one, but it did make death a little less graphic compared to the old sprite due to the reduced red of the body.
Though players appreciated the graphical changes, they still wanted new content. Just less than a month after the launch of the new client, a huge new expansion was launched which would fill many of the empty spaces on the map. This new update arrived just in time for Christmas, providing the next major town to the game.
