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The Podcast of Reckoning recently had the chance to sit down with Josh Drescher, the Associate Producer for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Their lengthy discussion covered a lot of aspects of the upcoming Guild Beta, information we imagine you'd be keenly interested to see in print. Thankfully the GreenSkin is all over it, offering up another '50 bits of information list' culled from the podcast. Some of them are just wacky fun, but others are really interesting and give us a good sense of EA Mythic's dedication to the art of WAR. Some examples:

• The developers have joined some of the major pre-release guilds in secret, to get a better 'feel' for player interests.
• Exploring the world and engaging in multiple parts of the game will offer players a more 'well rounded' character than one who simply power-levels through the game.
• There are extensive guild tools in the game built from the ground up by and for guild leaders and members.
• The developers see the testers as a part of the team, and treats their feedback with a great deal of gravitas.
• Drescher's wedding was actually scheduled to avoid Warhammer's development period. That's dedication.

Make sure to check out the 'cast as well.

Factional warfare in EVE Online, by design, ensures that ships of a much greater ship class cannot engage smaller ships in certain deadspace mission pockets. If you and your fellow militia pilots are in a zone designated for nothing larger than frigates, for instance, you shouldn't find yourself getting locked by battleships fighting for your rival militia. Apparently this has started to occur; some players have found that the jump gates to these zones don't actually prevent them from warping in ships of a magnitude not allowed in such areas.

GM Grimmi had this to say at the EVE Online site: "Flying bigger class ships than allowed by the jump gates to Factional Warfare complexes has been classed as an exploit. If you are found doing this we will be forced to take in-game actions as abusing game mechanics is not allowed." So there you go. You might still be able to get in there with something obscenely overpowered and pop frigates like balloons, but you'll say goodbye to your account over it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in Runes of Magic (AKA Radiant Arcana), Runewaker Entertainment has taken all they loved about Ultima Online and World of Warcraft, combined that with elements from EverQuest, EverQuest II and Final Fantasy XI Online to make a free-to-play MMORPG combining all the elements of both Western and Eastern games. It's like a highly-concentrated booster shot of high fantasy goodness -- and it's free!

Runes of Magic will include a dual class system, where you will choose a primary and a secondary class, armor dying, player housing, crafting, an auction house, unique mounts, a fully customizable user interface and either click-to-move or WASD controls.

The starter zone of Taborea has a deep and rich lore, a colony struggling to stave off the darkness, with your help. You'll need a PDF reader to read that, but we have some of the highlights in our gallery. Can a free-to-play homage to some of the Western world's greatest MMOs succeed on in North America? Distributor Frogster is looking for a US publisher to take that chance.

The game play video from the Chinese open beta (you can find that after the break) shows clearly the developers at Runewaker loved World of Warcraft perhaps more than is really healthy. Still, a free-to-play WoW clone may be exactly what players want, and Runes of Magic may just be different enough to make it interesting.

On this 232nd day marking Independence in the United States, we wanted to feature some of the patriotic videos created in MMOs. They range from quick videos showing off fireworks in platforms such as Second Life, Everquest, and World of Warcraft, to artistic videos set to Bruce Springsteen, all the way to silly safety tips from the Red vs. Blue boys. As you're planning your real life festivities this year, considering taking some time to pop into your favorite game to get in on some of the action. Happy 4th of July!

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.

Check out more videos after the jump!

Cryptic Studios was the developer to bring us a superhero MMO with City of Heroes. Since that time thousands of people have spent a lot of time both creating and playing their fantasized superheroes over the past years, including us here at Massively. Essentially, we've always felt like Cryptic games were pretty damn good. Recently, Jack Emmert made a post sharing with the community how the Champions Online team stopped development of new content for two weeks in order to thoroughly play and polish a single zone.

Is this a sign of things to come from Cryptic? We certainly hope so, because with three titles in development -- Star Trek Online being a strongly-rumored guess for one of them -- there's already quite a lot that's different about the guys that brought us City of Heroes back in 2004 these days.

Lockpick Entertainment announced today that they have signed an exclusive agreement to distribute their MMORTS game Dreamlords -- the Reawakening in North America. Aeria Games, publishers of Stone Age 2, Dream of Mirror Online and many, many more free-to-play MMOs, will have Dreamlords in beta in July, looking forward to an August release.

Spencer Chi, producer at Aeria Games, called Dreamlords an answer to gamers' demand for a fun MMORTS (massively-multiplayer online real-time strategy) game. Dreamlords players will be able to buy in-game items and equipment with the Aeria Points currency common to all Aeria's games. Interested and want to know more? Then turn back to our extensive coverage of Dreamlord's path to publication.

Arr! Closer come ye, for I have risen with news of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean Online!

Be ye an honest captain or be ye a pirate, be there one amongst ye who can clear the seas of the scum that floats upon 'er? Aye, I be talking about Privateering! Turn your sheets into the wind and lash the wheel tight and bring yourself to Isle D'Etable De Porc if ye be friendly to the French, or Isla De La Avaricia if the Spanish have y'r loyalty. Seek ye there crew, provisions and ammo fer the fighting ahead! And may the wind be ever at your back but pass over the sails of yer enemy! Privateering only be available to Unlimited Access members on the Test Server, but it be coming soon enough to the Live servers.

I wager there be more news after yon break. Click ye through to see thar th' rest.

The ups and downs of the Assassin skill Shadow Form has been quite the topic of debate lately in Guild Wars. Back in May, the skill had its duration increased which made it the perfect skill for ecto farming builds in the Underworld. The inevitable progression from there evolved into ecto and shard prices dropping dramatically from the over-farming of all the big farm spots. However, in the June 2nd skill update, Shadow Form had quite a change. Now, the caster does 50% less damage while Shadow Form is active on them. Not only that, but the Mindblade Spectres in the Underworld have received Hex Breaker to help combat the hex-based farming builds that have always been so popular in this area.

Now the question is, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, if you're one of the people who farmed ecto with your A/E Chaos Planes farmer, you might not be very excited by this update. We've found that generally, most players do welcome this change though. Not only for the projected rise in ecto prices (making them worth obtaining the old way, and selling on the market again), but also to give a bit of credibility back to the Assassins who enjoyed their class for what it was before they became easy money-makers.

Wanna bash stuff up good? Wanna capture little dinosaurs, train them up right and then send them into battle? When you see a broken tree branch with leaves on it, do you think "oooooh, a new club and a snack!"? If any (or all) of these sound like you, then you owe it to yourself to try out Aeria Games' latest prehistoric-themed MMO, Stone Age 2. Thump stuff good, collect baby dinosaurs from all over the world that will forever think of you as "Mum", and make the world safe for yourself and your tribe.

Our sister site, Big Download, has the client ready to download. The Stone Age 2 team has brought the servers up and open beta has begun. If you signed up in advance with Aeria, you may be finding a surprise in your in-box. For a complete list of the exclusive open beta goodies -- and a warning from the devs -- you can just go ahead and click on the break.

It's a month and a half since City of Heroes Issue 12: Midnight Hour went live, and by now the developers will have been hard at work on Issue 13 for some time. While there has been little in the way of concrete information, over time the Developers have given out a multitude of hints and comments that have enabled us to put together a speculative look at some of the coming content. As we'll see, there's been a lot more hinted at concerning powers and game systems than new mission content or zones.

The safest bet for Issue 13 is the introduction of the Shields powerset, which Back Alley Brawler has described at length: 'Shields will be a defensive powerset, not an AT. They'll also be useable with any unarmed or right handed weapon powerset... because Shields require their own combat mode animations, they have to work with every attack power, every buff, debuff, hit reaction, pool power, ancillary power, and patron power that might be used while holding a shield out in front of you. So the bulk of work on Shields is just all the animations.' The bulk of those animations were completed with Issue 12, as many of the Cimeroran NPCs use shields. Since the NPC hero Blue Steel is famous for his shield, we'd be surprised not to see him play an active part in the game at last.

There are many races within the Star Trek universe to choose from when it comes to your favorites -- and we say that in plural form because lets be honest, you can't pick just one -- so of course we're curious about your personal choices. If you had the power to choose four or five races for Star Trek Online, what would they be? Vulcan? Cardassian, Bajoran, Ferengi, Klingon, or Romulan? Or maybe something less expected like the Voth? We'd totally roll some bipedal hyper-dinosaur characters. Obviously we're assuming that Humans are included in this list, but hey if you want to exclude them feel free.

There's certainly a lot of room for discussion on this topic, seeing as there have been six Star Trek series (if you count the animated series) and ten -- but soon to be eleven -- movies. One thing we personally thing is that all Game Masters should be forced to be the Q race, because come on... that just makes too much sense!

Famous Teen Second Life user Katharine Berry has spoken out on conditions in Linden Lab's Teen Grid. While, of course, there are rules about content and conduct, they're neither well-followed, says Berry, nor well-enforced.

'Of course, these rules are completely ignored ... Once upon a time, in 2005, Linden Lab would keep track of these things. Today, in 2008, they do not,' asserts Berry, citing an example in her experience where an unauthorized adult in Teen Second Life took more than a year to be removed.