We had the chance to sit down and catch up with the guys from Frogster Interactive as well as a few of the Runewaker Entertainment developers at E3. While we knew Elves were coming to Runes of Magic, we didn't have too many details of just precisely how they'd be implemented into the game. As part of our talk, they let me check out the never-before-seen area that the elves will be a part of, as well as showing off some of the new instance content and guild buildings that they're adding to the game.

This next chapter - The Elven Prophecy - will give players the option of playing the elven race (surprise) which starts out in a strange and wonderous new area. Beyond that, they're also working on PvP arenas, destructible guild buildings, and some new epic powers. Along with this sweeping update, the game is being updated with several graphic improvements including updates to things like water, and adding in some incidental sounds and music to start to help close the gap in regards to the dearth of sound issue many have decried Runes of Magic for. If you'd like a preview into some of these areas, be sure to check the gallery below, as well as the newly-released trailer showing off the Elven Prophecy, coming to Runes of Magic this September!

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Massively was on the ground in Los Angeles last 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.

Now that Free Realms is live - and by anyone's standards, tremendously successful - SOE's Free Realms team (at around 100 people) is busy working on new features and improvements. In September (or October, perhaps) they plan to add in player housing for everyone to enjoy. For those of you who have been pelting them on the forums for a home of your own - your request has been heard! A nice, shiny home in Free Realms should be yours in time for the holidays.

You'll be able to select land, size, and style of house; then really dig in and modify it to make it all your own. The plan is also to create new mini-games involving maintaining your house as well - we're guessing something along the lines of time-management games, perhaps? According to what we've heard, the garage coming out in July will be attached to your house, so you can show off your cars to friends. Neighborhoods will be instanced (currently planned for three buildings per personal plot with no word on neighborhood size) but they expect this will give players a new place to hang out and enjoy their time in Free Realms. There's currently no specifics on what will be available for F2P and paid members, so we'll have to wait and see.

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Massively was on the ground in Los Angeles last 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.

Wizard101 has introduced housing into the game today with their latest May patch. This housing feature has been highly anticipated by the community and allows for your character to have up to three houses, plus your dorm room. These "Castles & Lands", as they're called, are available for players level 10 and above.

In addition, this patch brings even more voice-overs to characters in Marleybone, MooShu and Dragonspyre. A new Mark & Recall feature lets you easily teleport around any points in the game, when pinged with special marks that cost a small amount of mana. Be sure to read the complete patch notes on Wizard101's site for more information, and definitely check out Tipa's review of all houses available.

It's been a while since I've done a full-blown opinion piece but this week I figured it would make a nice change from yet more coverage of the recent Apocrypha expansion. No matter where you go in-game, everyone has their own opinion on what features EVE Online needs. For some people, being able to put mining rigs on planets would sound interesting. Others might prefer a new exploration-specialist science vessel or a module that gives resistance to energy neutralisers. There are a lot of ideas out there and some of us spend long nights chatting to friends in-game about the ones they'd like to see implemented. A few pilots have gone as far as to write up full scale proposals to present to CCP on the forum and some of those have even been implemented. This got me thinking – what features would I most like to see implemented in EVE?

In this concise opinion piece, I take a look at the top four features I'd like to see make it into EVE Online. What's your top four?

Hello again adventurers! Today's topic is once again back on hard gaming ground instead of community theory as I introduce quests and their purpose.

Questing in Final Fantasy XI is not like questing in other games. Quests exist, but they don't jump out at you with bright yellow exclamation points. NPCs don't scream, "I have things for you to do for me!" Quests don't hold your hand as you pursue their goals. Also, most importantly, quests don't reward experience.

So why bother, right? If you're only going to get come cruddy gold and maybe an item, why should you spend your time doing the quest? Beautiful question, and a very accurate one. Let's take a look at the quest system, what it has to offer you, and how to find some quests at your level with ease.

The patch notes for Star Wars Galaxies game update 8 are two posts long and full of information about all of the changes and additions coming to player run cities -- one of the staple pieces of content of SWG.

One of the biggest changes comes in the form of a 90 day log in time placed on all citizens of a city. If a citizen does not log into the game for 90 days, their character will be removed from the citizens list of the player city and their house will be eligible for pack up. On the bright side, this will allow city mayors to remove unused buildings and items from their city, should they be cluttering things up. On the down side, each character must be log in at least once each three months.

Past that change, other additions include a new guild master elections system, the ability of city vendors to wear bodysuits, a new 69 month veteran reward, and increased experience when in groups.

For the full list of changes in update 8, check out the patch notes over at the main Star Wars Galaxies forums.

Paragus put together a comprehensive guide to Darkfall's city construction on MMORPG.com. Darkfall seems to be following the Shadowbane school of urban planning: Every city exists in the open world, and each building demands a substantial monetary investment from the city's future inhabitants.

Just to get up and running, the average Hamlet-sized city, which Paragus owns, will run about 38,000 gold, not including the wood and stone players need to harvest. The majority of the cost goes toward modules, which act as building blocks for new structures.

Here's a cost rundown for a basic Hamlet:

• A Clanstone, which allows you to claim land: 10,000 gold.

• The Construction skill, which one person in the guild must have in order to build cities: 5,000 gold.

• Ten modules for the Bank,which must be erected before anything else can be built: 2,500 gold.

• Thirteen modules for walls, which Paragus claims don't actually protect the city from invaders: 3,250 gold.

• Twenty modules for two buildings of your choice, which increase the member limit on guild rosters: 5,000 gold.

• Fifty modules for your first resource unit, like a farm: 12,500 gold.

What's more, the modules weigh quite a bit; most player's can't carry more than two at a time. Paragus goes deeper into the entire process at MMORPG.com, but Darkfall is keeping its hardcore promise when it comes to putting down stakes.

Here we are nine days before Runes of Magic is set to officially launch, and the new features just keep popping up. Case in point: today's announcement from Frogster concerning the activation of guild castles in the game. Starting today, your guild can have their very own guild castle to furnish to their likings. This gets us one step closer to the long-awaited guild battles where guilds can fight over thrones. Plus, guild castle just sounds so much cooler than guild hall or guild house, amirite?

How can you get your very own guild castle? All members of the guild must be level seven and the guild's community coffers must be stocked with enough wood, ore and gold to accommodate. The instanced castles will contain a guild bank, full furniture availability plus teleporters and gates to make travel times quicker. Once guilds obtain their own thrones, they can battle it out with other throne-holding castles for domination and loot. The complete guild battle functionality will be introduced to the game at a later date. Follow along after the cut below for the complete press release and more images of the guild castle.

Last time we checked in with Saylah from Mystic Worlds, she was off enjoying the free to play MMO Runes of Magic. Her goal was to perfect her home crafting station, allowing her to turn her house into a small store to sell items to the people she met in her travels.

Well, it looks like her home crafting shop has been completed and is now ready for public consumption. As an added bonus, she's posted on her blog some good tips for how to put together your own workshop for just a couple bucks a month. Plus, if you want a closer look, you can check out her home inside of Runes of Magic and get some ideas from the things she's already put together.

Her full post is available over at her blog, Mystic Worlds, and it's a pretty good read for anyone who's interested in crafting in RoM.

If you feel dainty and pretty, oh so pretty, then perhaps you should stop by Final Fantasy XI's Doll Festival, going on now until March 3rd in Vana'diel!

The Doll Festival is the yearly celebration of the women of Vana'diel, where all wish happiness and health to the young girls and women in the world. Each year the cities are dressed up in a very elegant and formal fashion, while adventurers can look forward to collecting the yearly festival dolls and bonbori lanterns which can be used to decorate your mog house.

Collecting these items from your local neighborhood moogles can earn you good fortunes and decoration bonuses for your mog house, so don't turn down the free items when the moogles are just handing them out on street corners! Moogles will be stationed in northern and southern San d'Oria, the mines and markets of Bastok, and Woods and Waters districts of Windurst.

"Why you should be playing ..." is a freeform column from Massively.com intended to inform you about our favorite parts of our favorite games. We want you to know why we're playing them, so you can know what to play.

Runes of Magic is enjoying some well-deserved attention lately as it's wrapping up its open beta and preparing for a launch in March. To offer some more incentive for interested gamers to check out the game, we figured we'd let you in on a little secret: this game is awesome! How awesome? Although this would be a 10,000-word essay if that question were to be answered entirely, we're going to give you some information on just one of our favorite features of the game: open crafting professions.

What exactly is open crafting? It's a crafting system with no restrictions and no limits. The crafting profession system in Runes of Magic is the gathering and manufacturing of materials to create in-game items. It's the process of creating these items with special recipes and selling them on the Auction Hall. This is something we're accustomed to in most of our favorite big-name MMOs, but in RoM, you can take all crafting and gathering professions right from the start.

Massively multiplayer online gamers spend hours -- so many hours -- working towards obtaining virtual gear. Epic armor sets, mounts, player housing, faction ships... the list goes on, and will continue to go on. Our collective fascination with these intangibles ensures our desire for them -- and for those things beyond a player's reach solely within the virtual realm, real world cash makes all things possible.

This is the research focus of Ph.D. student Vili Lehdonvirta of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, who breaks down our buyer's impulse according to three criteria:

• Functional attributes, such as speed, hitpoints, teleportation.

• Hedonic attributes, or how the virtual gear looks or sounds, its provenance or its connection to the background fiction of the setting, and of course customizability.

• Social attributes, particularly the prestige accorded with ownership of a rare item.

Have a look at his "Virtual item sales as a revenue model: identifying attributes that drive purchase decisions" for a thorough analysis of why many of us are so inclined to obtain something that's ultimately ephemeral, which goes beyond the simpler "useful vs. decorative" angle.

The march of progress rolls forward in EverQuest 2! Coming soon to the world of Norrath is the 49th update to SOE's flagship title. GU49 adds in the latest chapter in the ongoing Void Storms world event and gives player housing a whole new breath of life ... but what players are really waiting for are the huge new structures they'll be able to own in-game.

With Game Update 49 comes the brand-new guild halls. Guild fortresses would be a better term, as these enormous structures tower over the Commonlands and Antonica, proving well and truly who the mightiest of these player organizations are. Whether you're a Freeport guild or a Qeynos guild, you'll find the change in scnery most welcome. Join us as we explore the guild halls through video and screenshots, check out the newest live event in the game, and see how all your EverQuest 2 crafting buddies are going to be going ga-ga for growth!

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	Well met, fellow Norrathian! Make sure to check out all of our coverage of the next EverQuest II expansion, The Shadow Odyssey as well as Seeds of Destruction, the next expansion to EverQuest!

The Shadow Odyssey, EverQuest II's fifth expansion, is not just the usual bump to the level cap, a couple of new raids, and a reset for all the armor you already got. It's none of those things. What SOE has done with this expansion is go through the level 50 to level 80 portion of the game and say, let's make an expansion that has something for pretty much everyone. Let's make an expansion where even if no upgrades drop, you can be working toward some awesome stuff just by playing.

The original EverQuest started out as a supremely casual and social game. It was the players that pushed SOE to make the game more raid focused, but sometime after the heavily raid-oriented Planes of Power expansion, the casual players asked when they'd get an expansion for them. SOE came out with the Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which offered three or four variants at each of six dungeons, meant for single groups of averagely-equipped players. The difficulty and mission type could be selected, and every time you completed a mission, you got points with which you could buy hard-to-find spells, armor of near raid quality, adornments which would push that armor into the quality of raid gear, and some cool stuff only available through the LDoN merchants.

The Shadow Odyssey is EverQuest II's Lost Dungeons of Norrath -- and more. Click on through to see why TSO might be the best EQ2 expansion yet.

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	Well met, fellow Norrathian! Make sure to check out all of our coverage of the next EverQuest II expansion, The Shadow Odyssey as well as Seeds of Destruction, the next expansion to EverQuest!