For this week's Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa Feedback Friday, lead designer Paul Sage talked about a couple of new features that the now-smaller post production team will be focusing on.

The first is an improved "looking for squad" system. A lot of the fun in the game comes from playing in a squad, so the dev team wants to make sure people can find other players to team up with.

One of the improvements being considered for the "looking for squad" system is a better lock feature. When players lock on to a target, the lock stays even if the target is behind the player. There will also be a lock for both friendly and hostile actions.

The second item on the devs' plate is clan-owned control points. Apparently, this feature will be for both PvP and PvE. Control point tokens will also be renamed to prestige. Prestige will still work like control point tokens, but ways of earning them may change.

Right now, the following can be done in PvE  to gain prestige: killing a control point attacker or defender, killing a control mini-boss, reaching the maximum killing streak, getting a blue or purple drop, gaining a level, or completing some special missions. The prestige system is being tracked to go into testing with release 1.8.

Sage also gave a bit of an update regarding the fates of PAUs, flashpoints, and command opportunity. PAUs are still being worked on by the artists and will go into development once the dev team feel that enough people have freed up after clan-owned control points.

Flashpoints, meanwhile, are actually already in the game. Kind of, anyway. There are a few missions in Tabula Rasa that activate for more than one squad on overland maps. These missions are now called flashpoints. Flashpoint instances requiring more than one squad, as they were originally intended for, currently aren't in development.

Finally, command opportunity. According to Sage, before the team can work on command opportunity, they still need to make sure that the current summoned minions respond better to orders. Work on this feature will probably commence once class balance is worked out and if it still fits with the game.

That ran a bit long, but if you want to learn even more about what's coming up in Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, just click on the source link below.