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The arena battles in World of Warcraft may be challenging and fun to play, but can they also be fun to watch? Blizzard is hoping the answer is yes, and pro-gaming league Major League Gaming is hopping on for the ride. As the headliner for their new PC Circuit, they are betting big that the millions of people who play the game will want to tune in to watch the best of the best battle it out. $22,500 in prize money is set aside for the top competitors at each of the PC Circuit's three stops. One of the 32 competing teams will be walking away with some serious money for upgrades. 31 teams will be shaking their heads and wondering what happened.

GotFrag eSports is giving the event the full coverage that sort of money demands. What nobody knows is how many spectators will tune in to watch what will likely be a competition nearly impossible to follow without a good understanding of PvP in WoW, or some commentators who really know their stuff. PC eSports fans were hoping for CounterStrike 1.6 and seemed disappointed with the selection of World of Warcraft as their initial gaming platform. But hey, we love WoW here. Bring it on! Just, please, be sure to get commentators who know what they're talking about.

VirtualVikki made this video, Lost in There Quest Commercial, for ThereCon last year. Taking place in July 2007, it was a week of science fiction events and activities in the virtual world, There. In order to motivate the viewers, she created this parody of Lost in Space.

There is an interesting platform for machinima. They have a limited range of motions and customization, but they do have lip-synching ability built in to their voice system. The result is a bit more cartoony than Second Life, so it appeals more to the teen demographic. Many companies are doing interesting things in the platform, though, so we'll keeping our eye on it!

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

Great news for World of Warcraft gamers today, as the weekly Tuesday maintenance leaves behind a nice present: patch 2.4.2. WoW Insider has the full monty on what you can expect when you log back in. The full patch notes will give you the details you crave. WI always goes that extra step, though, and has additional information from the community about stealth changes. Did you know there's a new Zebra mount being added to the game?

Here's the bullet-point rundown:

• Major changes to the PvP Arenas.
• The Mage spell Polymorph now works quite differently.
• Tweaks to the Jewelcrafting, Enchanting, Engineering, and Leatherworking professions.
• The bosses Vexallus and Kael'thas are no longer immune to taunt on Normal difficulty in the Magisters' terrace encounter.
• Hunters will have to learn new tactics due to some controversial changes to class and pet abilities.
• Weaponsmiths will now be able to enjoy their non-unique one-handed items.

Lineage 2 players love the PvP opportunities the game offers, but even the most hardened warriors must rest sometime. Where do they go to spend some money on leisure? Why, to Fantasy Isle, of course! This is the same island that hosted the Bunny Money event we covered previously, but there's more to the proceedings now.

The Underground Coliseum is an arena in which PvP team deathmatch events concerning two teams of at least seven players each occur. This type of PvP is new to Lineage 2 and should help invigorate players who might be tired of the same-old, same-old.

Today on Massively's sister site Big Download, there's a featured article all about the World of Warcraft Arena Tourney. The BD team sat down with Tom Chilton, Paul Della Bitta (Senior Manager, Global Community and eSports) and Joong Kim (eSports Manager) to talk about that huge $200,000 prize purse, the future of World of Warcraft as an eSport, and the reaction players have had to the Arena.

We found especially interesting the news that eventually these online matches will transition to live events. They're still looking for a place to throw the Global Finals this year, probably sometime in October or November. Eventually, they'd like to look into televised matches; it may sound strange, but Guild Wars has definitely shown there's a market for that kind of event. Go check out the interview, and stay tuned for more details on the WoW Arena Tournament.

It's a little disconcerting to be told that your game genre of choice, massively multiplayer online role-playing games, is the last refuge of people who more or less play games in their sleep, unable to hack the action of a REAL game. As played by REAL gamers. Who are not us. How does AT Wire's Alex Taldren come by this startling conclusion? Keen of Keen and Graev's posted recently that Age of Conan's combo-based melee system just replaces a single keystroke with five, and that gamers will soon automate combos with macros or smart keyboards back to one key only.

This was the moment when Taldren threw up his hands and admitted something that should have been clear given his upright posture and relatively hairless body: He was not originally an MMO gamer. In fact, he had come from the realm of first person shooters, and looks in on us scratching his head and watching MMO gamers "wiping their asses with leaves". This is a man who loves his keystrokes with a fiery passion. And why aren't MMO gamers real gamers? Writes Taldren, "MMO gamers are people who generally don't enjoy playing their games."

There it is. Real gamers play because they love playing games. We MMO gamers play MMOs because we don't ... like ... games? We have to admit to some confusion. Maybe Alex will stop by and clear this up.

[Via MMO Gamers]

In their on-going efforts to win over the hearts and minds of gamers everywhere, the NetDevil team have been out on the prowl, sending out lead writer Keith Baker out to conduct a a pair of interviews to keep Jumpgate Evolution at the top of every gamer's mind.

The first interview over at TTH focuses mostly on the Solrain Empire, the premier mercantile power in the JGE universe. Baker explains the choices players have within the faction and the general voice and tone that the team was going for in developing these hardened profiteers. The other interview over at Vault focuses on more general information like the link between Jumpgate Classic and Jumpgate Evolution, and gives an explanation for the context of the larger universe. You can tell that Baker is excited about his work and that excitement is sort of contagious.

One look at the most recent Weekend Wrapup for Tabula Rasa and you'll see that the TR community is flourishing as strong as ever. Amid concerns from many early-adopters of the game, these community-run events seem to be popping up everywhere.

• PlanetTR's Hottest Armor Contest - The top seven winners of this glorified beauty contest are showcased and praised in the PlanetTR forums.
• Friday Night Fights - The FnF for May 16th will be the first time it will be done in the C.E.L.L.A.R., which is the brand new boxing ring still on the Public Test Server. So yes, this means the FnF itself will be on the test server as well. It's still not too late to sign up for this, but even if you don't participate in the fighting this week, it will certainly be worth watching!
• It's Raining Bane - This dev-supported event is basically a giant collection of players running around the Torden Mires killing stuff. Sounds great to us!
• PvP Singles Tournament - Sponsored by the Warlords of Exodus clan, this PvP tournament seems to be a well-organized event with some rare purple items as prizes, courtesy of the GMs.

ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) take the normal boundaries between games and reality and skew them just enough so that the two overlap, offering a new way to think about entertainment interaction. Perhaps one of the most famous of these is the "I love bees" campaign, which was developed to promote Halo 2. Certainly hundreds played, and part of the gameplay mechanics was taking clues from various places on the Web to complete the puzzles and solve the mystery.

However, is "hundreds" enough to typify the term "massively"? Given that you could play alone and never see another player, only becoming part of a grander, more widespread team, is that really "multiplayer"? If the entirety of gameplay isn't online, does that satisfy the "O" requirement? How precise does the "MMO" definition need to be?

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• Peering Inside -- The US billing provider that Linden Lab won't talk about.
• Megaprims for everyone -- Nicholaz hands out the candy with custom viewers, or roll your own with patches.
• Second Life suspended -- Offline for asset fixes.
• Linden Lab hiring -- Looking for Web-devs and *nix gurus.
• Playboy bunnies seeking violators -- What else can we say?

Linden Lab is looking for Web developers at all of their offices, particularly at Brighton, Mountain View, and Seattle, as well as remote (telecommute) staff for Operations from all over the world, though particularly from Singapore and Australia.

If you're interested in working for Linden Lab and can pony-up with the sort of strong skills they're looking for, you should check out their job pages. From what we've been told, Linden Lab pays below market-rates for staff, but prefers top-class people who love their work and would rather have job-satisfaction.

Back at E3 2005 I had the opportunity to interview David Jones, creator of Grand Theft Auto, about their cops and robbers MMO, All Points Bulletin . Since its announcement at E3 not much has been revealed about the game... until recently. Last week rumors swirled that APB was going to turn into GTA Online, then there was the re-acquisition of the IP rights by Realtime Worlds from Webzen, and now we have an in-depth and revealing interview with Walter Kong, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Realtime.

While the concept of APB may sound similar to Grand Theft Auto, it's not. In APB gamers can play as either cops or robbers within the three dimensional, open world. What's more, Realtime is going to use "players as content. " Basically, they are attempting to take the PvP experience and craft missions around it. Most games are either PvE or PvP; APB will bring those two very divergent styles together.

PMOG, which we've covered before, has launched today, coming out of a 10-week beta phase. It's ready for everyone to jump into, leveraging the power of constant site-surfing into a rather unique interactive experience for anyone with a Mozilla-compatible browser.

Interestingly, PMOG isn't taking advantage of the opportunity for extra revenue by allowing websites to pay to be included as special landing areas, where players could receive additional badges just for visiting. This both reflects well on them and makes the inner capitalists in us cry out in agony. Sign up for PMOG today!