This week, Linden Lab announced that it was going to start charging listing fees and minimum commissions on its Second Life Xstreet Web-shopping adjunct in the near future. Within hours, vendors took down thousands of products, many abandoning the service entirely in favor of alternative services.

It's unclear just how many vendors have abandoned the Xstreet SL system, but it apparently was enough to temporarily overload the Web-sites of third-party sites such as Slapt.

"Companies should just stop gold farmers." It's a consistent complaint in many games, with "gold" replaced by your game's currency of choice. As complaints go, it's right around "somebody should do something about all the problems" in terms of overall utility, but heck, no one likes the practice and it should just be eliminated, right? Well, as Scott Jennings has pointed out recently, it's not quite that easy.

As Lum points out, there are several common misconceptions about the entire process. Among them are the idea that the game company doesn't step in because they're getting kickbacks, which is pointed out to fail the simple test of Occam's razor. When developers want to get more money from an existing game, there are usually better ways to run it, such as the Champions Online model or the Dungeons and Dragons Online approach. He also tackles the infamous statement that the farmers are paying customers and therefore the company has even less incentive to stop them.

So if everyone hates RMT, why is it still around? The article briefly touches upon it, but We Fly Spitfires had a recent post that articulates more specifically: more people buy gold than would necessarily admit it. Since no one will admit to it, no one ever asks, and as a result there's a large culture of silence that publicly despises it and privately takes part. In short? As long as there's a customer base, the farming will continue. Food for thought all around.

Well, it's a possibility, at any rate. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, was officially released November 10th with what the LA Times described as a "Hollywood-scale launch". The launch expenses turned out to be money well spent, as the game had generated $550 million in sales as of last Saturday. Fans lined up days in advance to pick up their copy of Modern Warfare 2, complete with free night vision goggles.

While this was all very nice for Activision Blizzard, it was the end of the article that really got MMO fans interested: "One person close to the company said it also was considering adapting Call of Duty as a massively multi-player online world. The genre, in which Activision's Blizzard Entertainment subsidiary is a leader, requires huge upfront investments but can be very profitable as players pay a monthly subscription fee."

The possibility of a Call of Duty MMO is an exciting one for a very large group of gamers, and Blizzard is certain to be aware of that. We will definitely be keeping an eye out at Massively for more news on this possibility.

[Thanks Abel!]

Subscription fees are a fact of life for us MMO players. Most of our favorite games come with one, and it's usually 14.99 nowadays. Ages ago, we could remember paying the 9.99 a month for our games, before that slowly rose to 12.95 a month and then became the current plateau of 14.95 a month.

Sure, we always have the option of playing more money up front to pay a reduced monthly cost, thanks to the miracle of multi-month subscription plans, but today's question isn't about that. It's about your thoughts on the subscription fees. What do you think is a fair price to charge?

Now don't be silly and say free, because we all know servers don't run themselves and bandwidth isn't free. While we're not all in the know about the cost to a blockbuster MMO, we do know how much we're willing to shell out for our games. What's the price you'd like to be able to shell out?

Virtual environment operator Linden Lab has partnered up with 888 Holdings plc's Gisland/Dragonfish division to provide payment processing for non-US Second Life customers.

A spokesperson for Linden Lab told us, "We're working together with Gisland on a cashier interface and other tools that will give Residents more payment options and make it easier for Residents to pay in a wider range of native currencies than they can now. Gisland will also help Linden Lab implement appropriate anti-fraud measures as we expand these payment options. In addition, Gisland will assist Residents directly with payment-related issues, including failed transactions."

That last part is fascinating, as that would be something of a first insofar as Second Life payments processing goes, as is the tantalizing hint of expanded payment options – something that is of considerable interest to users outside North America.

You've taken part in the endless debates online about pirates versus ninjas. Admit it, you have. Well, add cowboys, knights, wizards, and nurses into the mix, and you're nine-tenths of the way to Lost Saga, a new game launched by OGPlanet. Billed as a massively multiplayer online fighting game, it features a variety of different gameplay modes and "heroes" that combine for what looks like an entertaining and frantic experience. Character types run the gamut, from soldiers to assassins to (you guessed it) pirates and ninjas, each bringing a small collection of different abilities to the table.

It might sound a bit simplistic, but there are some interesting features such as the option to change heroes mid-battle -- in essence a quick class change whenever needed. The game also features some interesting battle modes beyond the prosaic Deathmatch style, such as Boss Raid, which allows one player to take the reins of an intensely powerful boss while the other players struggle to take said player down. And let's not forget that the game is also free-to-play, so you can satisfy your curiosity without commitment. Lost Saga won't revolutionize the industry, but it looks to be quite a bit of fun, so you might want to check out the official site for more information and to sign up.

You ever wish that you could get paid for recommending games to your friends? Well, if you're a Darkfall fan with an active subscription, now you can with the Darkfall Community Publishing Program.

How does this new program work, you ask? Simple, my awkwardly insultingly named hardcore PvP friend! Go over to the Darkfall community forums (AKA, ForumFall), read the instructions, and sign up using the NA or EU server links. They'll give you a special link to the Darkfall store that will give you credit when a game is sold.

For each game client sold, you'll make 20% of the sale in commission. Right now, as the Darkfall box is still going for 50 dollars, so that means you'll get 10 dollars every time you sell a copy of Darkfall. High selling users will be offered better commission rates and may be invited to work with the Darkfall publishing team.

Is this anything new? Well, it is if you haven't seen EVE Online's affiliate program. However, it is certainly a smart use of the very passionate and eager Darkfall fan base.

Runes of Magic has been enjoying a nice burst of success recently, and as a free-to-play game one of the biggest things that helps it is increased visibility and access to the game's microtransaction system. So it should come has little surprise that Frogster Interactive has teamed up with PlaySpan to start moving branded game cards into 7-Eleven stores, improving both visibility and accessibility in one fell swoop. In addition, Diamonds will be purchasable at PlaySpan's online store, already a hub for several popular free-to-play game currencies.

The game cards, which will come in $10 and $25 denominations, can be redeemed for in-game mounts, enhancements, and other improvements. Overall, this deal will give Runes of Magic a game card presence in over 46 thousand stores inside the US, a high visibility for a fairly young game that's pushing a still-developing business model. And it's certainly not going to hurt that you can pick up some game currency at the same time you grab a soda and one of those little taquito things for a snack on your way home from work.

It's always nice to get a little something extra for what you were planning on doing anyway. It's even nicer when the "little something extra" is something you would want on its own merits, at that. Fallen Earth has decided to give its new players exactly that variety of something extra: if you buy now through the official site, you will receive the lovely and (dare we say it) eminently pimptacular hat displayed to the right.

The hat isn't enough reason for you? Well, clearly you aren't looking closely enough at the hat itself. You also might not know that the hat provides your character with Scavenging, Nature, Geology, and Social skill points just by donning it. It's a really nice hat. Lest we get carried away by gushing about the hat, however, it should be duly noted that the hat is also a limited-time offer for purchasers of the game, and is only being distributed by purchasing the game from the official site. So if you've been on the fence, this might be the time to get off the fence and get yourself a truly excellent hat for your troubles.

Telstra BigPond (a major Australian Internet Service Provider, with an approximate 50% market-share) has had one of the most popular corporate presences in the virtual environment of Second Life, even including a customer service center staffed eleven hours per day, five days per week. In a nation with expensively metered bandwidth, BigPond even refrained from metering a portion of the data sent to its customers from Second Life. All of this for what has basically been an experiment.

That, however, appears to be coming to a close. BigPond intends to shutter its Second Life presence on 16 December.

Free-to-play MMOs have been staking out an impressive share of the gaming audience, and one of their poster children is Runes of Magic. Frogster Interactive, is understandably pleased with the success that the game has enjoyed, so they've taken the time to share some interesting figures of the game's popularity.

The most recent chapter of the game, The Elven Prophecy, was released only a couple of months ago. Since then, over fifteen million quests have been completed (even more staggering when one considers that the game has recently cleared the two million mark for registered players). A quarter of a million bosses have been brought down in that span of time, as well as over sixteen million items crafted. Even allowing that some of those were likely craft grind fodder, those are impressive numbers.

Of course, one of the wonderful parts about any sort of free-to-play game is that any curiosity about the game can be satisfied by playing right away, which has no doubt contributed to the success Runes of Magic has enjoyed thus far. While it's not the biggest name in the industry, it's experiencing a groundswell of popularity, good news both for fans of the game and the business model alike.

Thus far, one of the key factors in Second Life performance has been the class of server hardware hosting the simulator. There are plenty of other non-server items that might contribute to perceived poor performance, of course, but server class versus server utilization is a pretty consistent factor.

Traditionally, each class of server has a numerical designation and represents a certain basic equipment and operating system specification. In the past, some estate owners have opted not to upgrade to a newer class of hardware in order to avoid higher monthly fees. Now the server class system is coming to an end.

In addition to this Q&A -- found after the jump below -- Alganon is also announcing their open beta that kicks off today. So if you find David's answers interesting and think you might want to try the game out for yourself, head on over to this link and check it out for yourself.

Thanksgiving, for those of us in the US, is still a couple of weeks away. But beta testers of Global Agenda will have something to be thankful about earlier than that, as this weekend promises to host another beta event for the game. The testing will be running between 11 AM to midnight PST, and the event spans both Saturday and Sunday, each one testing another aspect of the game's growing combat systems.

Saturday will be focused on PvE content, including a new mission type that promises to offer some interesting new dynamics to the gameplay. The "Double Agent" mission type, which is limited to regular subscribers at launch, puts one player amidst of a horde of NPC allies and pits them against a four-person squad of players, thereby mixing PvE and PvP combat into a single arena. Sunday's testing, by contrast, is a pure PvP slugfest. 10v10 matches will be run, allowing people to queue up in groups of up to four to help establish allies for coming events. The developers are also teasing at new maps being dropped into the mix during this testing.

The bad news is that only a small number of new testers will be added for the event -- this party will mostly be confined to existing beta testers. Watch your mail closely, either in hopes that they let you in or for the preparation mails Hi-Rez Studios is forewarning testers about, and keep an eye open for a chance at some early testing starting on Friday.