Hackers, as everyone knows, were scheduled to be the mirror class to Choppas... wait, no, that's not right. We're not talking about one of the classes of Warhammer Online, we're talking about that scourge of the paying and fair-playing populace of every MMO. The most recent developer diary on the game's official site is with John Cox, development manager, discussing some of the ways and means that allows Mythic to fight against the scourge of hacking and try and keep the game on the level.

Cox discusses a number of techniques, starting with the most obvious: that several people working on fighting the hacks are part of hacking communities, observing silently and sometimes even testing them internally to develop a response. He also discusses why some of the progress on fighting illegal behavior is a bit slower than the community would like, and why it's not always as possible to shut things down straightaway on the server end. With a discussion of some of the holes in detection, which includes an explanation of why the game briefly had Vista users almost universally flagged as hackers, it's an interesting look behind the scenes at Warhammer Online's efforts to fight the good fight. (That is, the one not involving Order versus Destruction.)

There are elements of games that are turn-offs for all of us. Some of us love PvP, for example, and a world with virtually none of it isn't very appealing. But sometimes we don't event start playing the game before our feelings about it go straight into the dumpster. It's hard to argue that Tabula Rasa's frequent shifts during development inspired players to expect any longevity out of it, and whether or not it's the case Warhammer Online's frequent server merges and population shuffling have given the impression of a game that's struggling a bit.

Sometimes you hear of a developer or project head assigned that makes you cringe, sometimes it's a choice of IP or business models, or sometimes it's just the number of issues you have patching the game to try out the free client. We ask you, readers, what makes you start losing faith before you've even loaded up a game for the first time? It might not be a dealbreaker, and you might even look back at it and laugh, but there are certain things that make you more nervous about committing to a game. What does it for you?

Remember Kevin Alderman (known in Second Life as Stroker Serpentine), CEO of Eros LLC who is one of the plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab for negligence with respect to security and failing to act in accordance with their obligations under the DMCA? Well, it can't be a good week for either him or for the Lab.

During Linden Lab's Burning Life event in Second Life this year (a sort of living pop-art showcase and party that draws many spectators) persons only presently known to the server logs left a cache of copied content, including at least one of Alderman's latest products, and a whole swag of other content belonging to other designers – free for the taking.

It isn't really Burning Life's fault, but if you had to place the stuff somewhere where many people would take it, none-the-wiser that it was unlawful content, that would be the best place at this time of the year.

Last week we told you about Fallen Earth's upcoming patch planned for this week. The patch went live yesterday, and didn't disappoint. While the main feature discussed in advance was the optional expanded tutorial, Icarus Studios wasn't even close to finished. The patch notes were given in the forums on the official site just before, in a post that was the definition of "wall of text". The full list can be seen on the site, but here is a (very) brief overview of what was done.

• The largest part of this update by far was made up of the many, many bug fixes and polishing throughout the game. Things like battle music, drops from foes that don't quite make sense, NPCs standing in the background swinging a hammer at...nothing, and sounds made when someone sits or stands aren't necessarily game breaking, but those small touches add up to make the game.

• You'll find new LifeNet facilities, garages, and merchants in every sector, as well as updates and small changes to quests and events.

• Changes were made to chat -- most significantly that only players below level five are automatically added to the help channel. Higher level players may still access it, but will have to manually add themselves.

• Days of the Dead camps and content added - the Halloween event has begun!

Check out the full notes for all the details, and our congratulations and thanks to the Fallen Earth team for the huge amount of work that went into this update.

The Imprudence project has released the next beta in this release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers (and just about the only one whose licensing status we've been able to verify with confidence).

The new beta has some changes to the pie menu (which often makes people just a little tense), updates Kitty Barnett's RLVa support, fixes 24 bugs including some search and appearance problems, two crashes and some assorted UI weirdness that crept into the last build.

The first round of Windows binaries in this beta release had a minor installation issue, but fresh installers were issued quickly and have sorted that out.

Capping off the first month for Champions Online, a fresh update this-morning has brought in quite a number of changes, fixes and enhancements, but more than a few teething problems.

The patch ran a half-hour overtime, and seemed initially fine. Unfortunately within a half-hour of going live, the character selection service stopped responding, and players were abruptly disconnected from the game servers. At 6:40AM Pacific, a notice went up indicating that Cryptic hoped to have the servers back up in approximately one hour.

That didn't happen, and things blew out another hour, and while servers were reported to have been restored by 8:30AM Pacific, the live servers crashed again almost immediately.

The Imprudence project has started a new release cycle for their Second Life viewer. Imprudence is one of our favorite after-market Second Life viewers, and the new 1.2 beta contains a number of delicious treats.

The new beta features a grid manager, new minimap radar with some useful features, optional support for Restrained Life (using RLVa), a selection of Emerald viewer features, object backups (for your own creations only), and a heap more. Our personal favorite is the option to have a draw-distance slider on-screen, as it is perhaps our single most-commonly used UI feature.

Champions Online got an update today due to a couple of nagging issues from the previous patch. Particularly, maintain-powers on critters weren't operating properly – that is, "not operating properly" in the "grinding your hero's face into the dirt" kind of way.

Additionally, yesterday's patch kind of messed up item-changes as well. As a result all items level 11 or lower have been reverted to their previous state, because apparently the defense values of these items was unaccountably lower than they should have been.

Cryptic are handing around free retcons for every character created before 3AM Pacific, 22 September.

Today's 127MB patch for Champions Online (deployed early this-morning) brought down a whole new bunch of changes and fixes. The nerf-hammer has struck the Gadroon big-time as a part of this (and we can't say we're exactly upset by that).

There's fixes for some ATI-crashes, and some performance improvements for everyone. A couple broken (and potentially broken) missions have gotten fixed, including the notorious My Lost Foot, Waterfront Watcher, and A Bullet Bound For Biselle (though fixes to these may not have been entirely successful according to reports). Jetboots, thankfully, have gotten some bafflers to take the edge off the noise. If you have an Ice or Telepathy power framework, you'll want to see what's been done to your powers today.

As many EVE Online players likely already know, Tranquility's server hamsters decided to take an unscheduled nap yesterday, causing the entirety of New Eden to grind to a screeching halt. While we're glad to note that the servers came up some time later without any major problems, the forums and API remained offline until this morning's regular maintenance at 7:00 AM Eastern. While the folks at CCP were able to get the forums back online and working without incident, they opted to leave the API offline today while they're trying to figure out what happened. Better safe than sorry, we think.

For those of you who are occasional EVE Online players (are there really such beasts?) you'll notice the API shutdown in terms of changes not tracking properly in EVEmon, Capsuleer, or any other external programs that make calls to the API to pull your character information. The hope is that full functionality will be restored after tomorrow morning's regularly scheduled daily downtime. If not, might we suggest breaking out some chocolate covered espresso beans for the server hamsters?

EVE Online is notable among the MMO titles on the market for having a game with a single shard setting. Whether you're an industrialist mass producing exhumers or fighting in fleet battles for a large 0.0 PvP alliance, you're active in the same setting rather than shards. Keeping as many as 50,000 concurrent users active in one vast galaxy has been a challenge for CCP Games, and of course there have been numerous growing pains along the way. Namely, something called "desync".

Desync has been a catch-all term to describe the various things that can go wrong during gameplay, but in short it's been something that has plagued a number of EVE's subscribers. In the words of EVE Software Engineer CCP GingerDude, desync is "the situation where the server and client disagree on the position of an object in space at a given time." Although it's been an issue for years, the problem has just recently been solved, according to CCP GingerDude's dev blog "Facing Destiny".

First Champions, and now Aion. It seems that no game can find that smooth stride regarding their beta testing these days, but thankfully that's what beta testing is for -- squashing bugs. (No matter how much marketing we seem to lump atop these tests these days.)

The Aion development team has heard the community's call regarding the lag, authentication server, gameguard anti-cheating program, forum authentication script, and beta key release schedule. They understand that the problems with the lag experienced by North American users, as well as the login server not working, is frustrating. However, they are devoting resources to finding out the cause and will be patching the game ASAP.

Tomorrow, EVE Online will launch Apocrypha 1.5, which CCP Games has dubbed a "mini-expansion." The Apocrypha expansion was released in March and introduced a slew of new features to the game, but there were more changes in the works that didn't make it into that first release. The 1.5 changes slated to roll out tomorrow are numerous and will introduce a few new aspects to EVE Online, more than a typical patch would, but cannot be considered a full expansion release either.

[UPDATED]: The maintenance window has been extended "due to delays earlier in the deployment process" per CCP. Tranquility is expected to come online at 16:30 GMT (12:30 PM Eastern).

Read on for Massively's highlights of what Apocrypha 1.5 will bring.