Since the rollout of Second Life server 1.26 the already unreliable Second Life group-chat system showed an almost crippling drop in reliability, compared to the previous 1.25 release. Linden Lab have estimated an overall 60% drop in the number of group-chat messages successfully delivered, and the problem skews towards the larger groups, prompting many group owners to completely disable their group's chat functions to avoid online members from being spammed with error messages.

Linden Lab is reporting that server version 1.27, currently in quality assurance, represents a 300% improvement in group chat reliability over version 1.25 (or almost 1000% more reliable than what is currently operating on the Second Life grid today). As yet, no deployment date has been announced, but for many, the update cannot come soon enough.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC4 is the fifth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). It's looking increasingly like the objective is to release before the Second Life sixth anniversary (23 June).

Barely any changes this time around, so either Linden Lab isn't really aware of any showstoppers or doesn't perceive them as such. The context menus have had one small reversion, there are updates to the Mac crash reporter, and a fix relating to object updates that affected poseball visibility.

In the last two days, we've walked you through character creation in Aion: Tower of Eternity and introduced you to the starter zone of Poeta. Now it's time to get to the interesting bit, the Ascension quest where you finally transcend your frail Elyos form and become a Daeva. While this ascension can take place any time after you ding level 9, there are a number of campaign quests which must be completed first These begin much earlier, around level six when you befriend the Forest Lord Daminu and gain the amusing title Tree-Hugger.

Becoming a Daeva and earning your wings -- literally in this case -- is one of the reasons players have been so excited by Aion. It is your destiny and an inevitable part of the game play but it has some caveats. We'll get to those in a bit but first, join us after the jump, when we take a deeper look into the Ascension quest itself.

An upcoming patch to Vanguard has been designated as the "Player's Choice" update, and recently the players decided that it should be focused on bug-squashing. The next phase of this process is now underway, and players can submit their choice of which bugs to fix at this thread. There are a few guidelines for people planning to put in their two cents, the most important being that each person can only submit one bug, and they should do their best to avoid repeating previously suggested ones.

The thread will be open for two weeks, and after that time, a poll will be created for forum-goers to vote on Vanguard's worst bugs so that they can be targeted with priority. When one player asked why the devs wouldn't simply work off the bugs submitted by players with the "/bug" command, Salim "Silius" Grant replied, "This way we are hoping to get the most high profile bugs that the players want fixed right away. Digging through /bug does not tell us just how important or how many people are seeing this problem." If the whole thing goes to plan, a bunch of really irritating bugs should be eradicated when the update rolls out.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC3 is the fourth release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

We're expecting this one or the next one to be the last before official release -- because frankly, there's not a lot of time-left before the Lab's self-imposed deadline. Probably the biggest reason you'd want to try this one out, is that it fixes a bug introduced in an earlier official viewer where cached information was discarded too aggressively, leading to things that should have been cached having to be redownloaded.

Oh, there's a bunch of good bug-fixes besides that, but that's really the one you want. Read on for the rest.

While there's little doubt that Free Realms is a wonderfully fun, addictive game that more and more old-school MMOers and non-MMOers are enjoying together, it has had some pretty nasty snags since launch. The most glaring of these for social gamers has really been the problem with trying to add someone to your Friends listing. As the mechanic currently works, if you want to add someone to your friends listing in the game to find them later, you must be signed on to the same server at the same time. If you don't happen to know your friends are online, you have no real way to find them. This is leading to players having to hook up on Twitter, via IMs or email, or just by calling one another before they sign in so they can meet up in a particular zone on a particular server to finally be "friends" in Free Realms.

Yesterday, while talking to Andrew Sites from Sony Online Entertainment here at E3, we were told that they'd noticed, while Free Realms is incredibly popular, it's not necessarily as social as they'd like it to be - at least not yet. The friends list problem, they acknowledge, is a good portion of this, as players can't find their friends as easily as they'd intended for them to. As such, they wanted to let us all know that they're currently working on a fix for this particular issue and we should see it rolling out to the live servers within the next few weeks. Good news for those of us who have been frustrated by not being able to play with - or even locate - our friends in Free Realms.

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Massively is on the ground in Los Angeles this week and covering all the latest E3 MMO news coming from the convention. Check out our breaking coverage (or all the Joystiq network E3 reporting) and keep your eye on Massively's front page for the latest developments.

Nobody likes server crashes. They always seem to come at the most inopportune times. However, there is no greater inopportune time than during a city siege in Darkfall.

Sadly, an ill-timed server crash right after a city siege finalized in Darkfall. This lead to data not being properly saved inside all of the systems, putting the siege result into jeopardy.

Tasos Flambouras, Darkfall's producer, took a moment to relate the announcement to the community, and outline that the siege results will be corrected during the server maintenance. As a result, the city ownership will be finalized during the maintenance, and the game will move forward from that point.

For Tasos's full remarks, check out his post on the official Darkfall forums.

[Via MMORPG.com]

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC2 is the third release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

This release features six crash-fixes, problems with window-sizing, and issues with trees. Restore-to-last-position has been disabled, to prevent potential inventory-loss. There are some more pie-menu changes, but some of the changes in the previous candidates have been reverted.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC1 is the second release candidate in the 1.23 series (Linden Lab starts counting from RC0). The 1.23 series is being fast-tracked, as it is scheduled to go live by the end of June.

The last RC's propensity to false-trigger at least one anti-virus program has been sorted out, along with several fixed to appearance updates (though if you try a strip-tease, you'll likely crash the viewer), along with a bunch of bug-fixes that include some crashes and a failure to startup.

Linden Lab have made a new Second Life viewer release-candidate available. RC0 is the start of a new series of release candidates, apparently scheduled to complete by the end of June.

This release features a number of changes, including the promised Shadow code (which is more than a little experimental), and the new support features for Adult content. While it has only been out for a day, there's quite a bit of controversy over a reordering of texture layers on the avatar head, which reportedly breaks a lot of skin content and makes avatar faces that use them appear 'clownish'.

Certain European locale settings may cause this release to crash on startup, and the viewer itself may be unusually slow to start up.

Usually games give players a heads up when they're going to be changing some things, so this way people can prepare or comment on the upcoming edits. This isn't the case for Darkfall, however, as the development team has literally surprised the player base with some worthy changes to the game.

One of the biggest changes is the reduction of maximum positive alignment from 100 to 10. This means a player will only be able to kill someone from their own faction once before they feel the sting of the "rogue player / murderer" social system, instead of letting players gain reputation up to 100 and then go on a virtual killing spree without any punishment.

Don't worry, today's Warhammer Online screenshot isn't a prank - Mythic isn't letting Squig Herders run around on doubled-up mounts. It is, however, a rather strange graphical glitch that was caught by Tru and sent in for us to all giggle at. He writes in: This image is of a graphical glitch with squig herders. When you get killed while trying to get into squig armor, when you re-spawn you look like you're in squig armor, but you're not. So that means you can use all of your ranged attacks and even get on your mount, which is what I'm doing here.

If you've caught a strange screen in your favorite game, send it in to us.! We love to see wild, weird, and otherwise interesting goings-on in all the different MMOs out there. Just email it to us here at oneshots AT massively DOT com along with your name, the game it's from, and a quick description. We'll post it here and let everyone gawk at it too.

EVE Online's latest expansion had a fairly smooth deployment, particularly considering how many radical changes were made to the game. Premium graphics were extended to all celestial objects, with entirely new models for asteroids. The Apocrypha expansion also introduced a new, extremely deadly NPC race with an AI far more advanced than what's been experienced pre-Apocrypha. However, this huge list of new features has also led to a number of smaller issues that CCP Games will patch this week.

The patch was originally slated for today but considering the laundry list of fixes CCP plans to make, patch 1.0.2 will deploy on Thursday instead, with a slightly extended downtime. Downtime should last from 11:00 GMT to 12:30 GMT, and will fix issues with Epic Mission Arcs, the Skill Queue, and many other fixes are on the way, as detailed in the patch notes. Players into exploration (or hunting down other players) who've been taking advantage of the strength of Deep Space Scanner Probes should note that they've already been nerfed; tomorrow's patch will reduce their strength. Given that there are quite a number of minor changes being made, EVE players may want to skim over the patch notes before the end of Thursday's downtime.

Tasos, Darkfall's community guy, posted an update on the official boards on Saturday addressing a litany of concerns that have been plaguing the user base since the game's launch.

While he did include patch notes in the update, the majority of his message dealt with issues beyond the game's live design. Tasos claims server queuing has been resolved, as have lag and random crash issues that have been popping up since release.

He also says Aventurine, Darkfall's developer, will credit players with 34 days of free play time to compensate for the problems they've been experiencing.

Since Aventurine only made the game available to a limited number of subscribers, North American fans of the game haven't yet been able to actually buy the game. The company is hoping to make the game available for sale again "sometime this coming week; again it will have to be a limited amount of copies to allow a smooth integration of new players into the game." But no news on which regions will have access to Darkfall yet.

In addition to availability issues, Tasos specifically mentioned unattended macroing as a problem Aventurine wants to address. The practice of using third-party programs to improve a character while the player doesn't monitor the character's progress is as old as MMOGs; it was particularly popular in another skill-based game, Ultima Online.

The company as yet doesn't have a hard-coded solution to deal with macroers, but Tasos included this note in the update: "we will appeal to players not actually playing the game to log off rather than leaving their character in-game. This will allow more people to be able to enjoy Darkfall instead of unmanned characters taking up server space. If you're skilling up by not playing the game as it was intended, you will be kicked and repeated offenses will result in a ban."