It looks like Runes of Magic is getting in on the 4th of July MMO celebrations this weekend. Frogster America has announced that players can usher in Independence Day with bundles of fireworks (minus any fines or risk of bloody nubs), which they can pick up for 1 diamond in-game. They've also said the holiday celebration will bring specials in the item shop with prices on three Power Bundle slashed by 75%.

Frogster America also announced they'll launch a new PvE server tomorrow, "Reni", and there will be other summer activities that kick off on July 4th as well: a community screenshot contest; item and prize giveaways; and a leveling contest for players and guilds on Reni. Be sure to see their full announcement for more details on the Runes of Magic Independence Day contests and giveaways.

Agent missions are one of EVE Online's most popular pastimes. While EVE is most often lauded for its open-ended gameplay, player-determined markets and PvP action, a significant portion of the game's players use missions as their primary income source. There is something comforting about missions that seems to draw players in. For many, running missions and upgrading their ship with the ISK becomes the focus of their achievements and their primary measure of progress. The ability of mission-running to provide a direct translation of effort into a stable ISK income offers us a reassuringly linear work-to-reward scheme in a relatively risk-free environment. Missions and exploration are EVE's primary PvE experiences and new missions are released with each major expansion to help keep the game fresh for casual players. There are even several epic mission arcs planned for the future, long sequences of storyboarded missions much like the quest chains you might find in other MMOs.

In this multi-part guide, I will thoroughly examine the profession of mission-running, from the basics to ship fittings and finally some tips and tricks for maximising your performance. In this first part of the guide, I look at the basics of mission-running from mission types and rewards to agent standings and how to find the best agent for you.

Star Trek Online is a game being built upon many years of television and films of the sci-fi IP, which has been packed with hundreds of skirmishes and full-on battles. It's not surprising that a number of gamers who are curious about STO want to know about the game mechanics of space combat in the upcoming MMO, and if they'll be able to do the things they've seen play out on their television screens. This was the focus of yesterday's dev chat at Cryptic Studios, where Star Trek Online executive producer Craig Zinkievich fielded questions from the game community.

Starship navigation in Star Trek Online will allow for a range of movement but it won't be possible for ships to dogfight. (And honestly, should these massive ships really be pulling barrel rolls in combat?) But even the smaller vessels with very different attributes will be subject to limitations in movement, so "there's no strafing, no moving backwards and shooting (kiting)" says Zinkievich. He clarifies this by saying that ships can move in reverse, but doing so wouldn't be useful in combat. So apparently the game will not have Jumpgate Evolution-type scenarios where smaller ships move with blazing speed and agility, as STO combat is by design a more tactical experience.

The city of Al Zahbi, the jewel of the East, is besieged on all sides. Her enemies build their reinforcements, storm through the outlying regions, and then beset their rage upon the walls of the city itself. But there is one hardened group of adventurers who will not let them pass -- who will not let the city fall. The Siren server.

Congratulations to the Siren server of Final Fantasy XI for having over 2,000 successful defenses of Al Zahbi without losing the city once! Yes, that's right, Siren is undefeated when it comes to stopping the hordes of beastmen from tearing the city apart. In fact, out of all of FFXI's 32 servers, they are the only undefeated server.

This also means that Siren has never lost the city in over three years of gameplay. Al Zahbi was released in the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion pack, which arrived to all territories in 2006. So cheers to you, Siren, for three years and 2,000 defenses of Al Zahbi. Keep that Astral Candescence safe!

Yes, yes, you're all clamoring about Final Fantasy XIV, but let's get real here people and get to the present. Final Fantasy XI isn't dead yet and it's getting itself a nice version update.

The upcoming version update will bring a new slew of Wings of the Goddess missions as usual, but players will also be able to look forward to seeing brand new areas of past Vana'diel being made available, more job adjustments like what was done with the White Mage, more additions to campaign and Moblin Maze Mongers, and even more that's still being kept secret.

The update is currently being scheduled for late July, but more information about the update will be released in the coming weeks. Keep your eyes peeled for more new things coming to FFXI!

In the early years of the MMO genre, developers and game masters routinely ran special once-only events to immerse the playerbase in a game's storyline. Storytelling has always been one of EVE Online's strongest features and in the early days of EVE developers showed a significant commitment to immersive events. These events unfortunately became plagued with difficulties and inadequacies, leading to the eventual shut-down of events altogether. Of course EVE isn't the only game hit by these issues, it forms part of what I consider to be a very disappointing trend. In recent years, many MMOs have opted to replace authored events with predictable seasonal festivals or have even eliminated events altogether. EVE's storyline is now simply a collection of stories and the news items tell tales of in-game events which never actually happened. In my opinion, this was one of the biggest mistakes the game's developers CCP Games have ever made.

In this article, I grapple with the problems EVE's events have had and find potential solutions in some unlikely places.

Global Agenda is coming right along nicely -- we last saw the game in action at GDC, and today at E3, executive producer Todd Harris was nice enough to sit down and show us a never-before-seen part of the game: PvE gameplay.

We started off by checking out the character creator, which has come along quite a bit. They've built a very in-depth face creator -- there are about eight or ten different factors to switch between (eyes, mouth, and so on), and for each one, there are seven or eight sliders to adjust and tweak. Which allows for quite a few different variations, as you might imagine. Hair and skin color can also be edited, but Harris told us that body shape will generally be determined by the armor you wear (which is more or less determined by the class you choose).

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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.

My "Engineer" equipped, we ran over to the PvE mission master, grabbed a mission, and then got a cinematic of a dropship taking off and landing in the zone. After a little experimentation with the force fields and turrets (Robotics characters put down a marker which then needs to be repaired up to full strength with a special weapon), we dropped into the building, and were instantly confronted with some Star Wars-style droid robots. With the character at mid-level already, they were a little tougher than beginners will find, so at first, when we tried just a straightforward assault with the "flubber" gun, they got the better of us. But after a short delay (death brings just a few seconds' respawn time, and then you can respawn and warp back into the battle through a respawn beacon), we went back into the fray, and when we used our special skills (put up a one-way forcefield and created a turret and a robotic pet to help us fight), we finished off the robots (including a "worker," who served to bring in reinforcements and had to be taken down first, and a bigger ED209-esque boss robot).

Next up, we tried jumping in to some PvP. Players in Global Agenda will be able to level up via either PvE or PvP -- PvE missions will accept 1-4 players, and while the enemies may be the same (though Harris said they were experimenting with putting players in at different spawn points or switching up enemy spawns a little bit to give the levels some more variety), they'll scale in difficulty depending how many friends you bring along. PvP missions are more common shooter settings (Attack and Defend, Capture the Flag, Escort), though sometimes with a special twist: The CTF maps are actually "capture the robot," where the flag is actually a giant mech that players need to jump in and return to their side to score.

This time, we specced a medic together, and saw a few of the different ways you can play that class: you can make it very much like a TF2 medic with just a single target healing gun, or go with a chain-healing gun (that can hit multiple targets with the tradeoff of being weaker), or you can choose a "nanite" weapon, which hits with single shots rather than a channeling stream, and provides a heal over time when they hit. All weapons and abilities are governed by an energy stat, which works like mana in other MMOs -- there's no ammo, so if you have energy, you can fire, otherwise you'll have to seek cover and rest. Lower level guns can be fired indefinitely, but more powerful guns have a rate of fire just limited by how much energy you use with each shot.

Turns out our medic did pretty well -- not only did we keep up some friendly players in the Attack and Defend map, but with the medic's boost ability (all classes also build up "boost" as they play, and when you fill that meter, you can use a special move that usually affects the whole team, very much like Call of Duty 4's perks), we laid down some great AoE healing that turned us into a pretty powerful force on our own, too. PvP was actually lots of fun -- given that the game is still in alpha, it wasn't completely balanced yet, but the feeling of a good shooter is there: we took attack points, Robotics turrets defended until they were overpowered, medics held up tanks through enemy assaults, and Recon characters snuck around with stealth and tried backstabbing with melee.

But while the action is in a good place, the rest of the world still needs work. Harris says that outside of battle, there will be similarly instanced social areas to go through, but the places we saw were still pretty generic: you can visit mission givers, buy armor in an auction house, and buy dye to customize that armor, but otherwise the social areas were pretty lifeless. There were still people running around -- the game is currently in an alpha, and is starting up a closed beta this summer -- but there's no open world, no place to watch matches in action, and no real social mechanics to tie people together. At the highest levels of the game, the world depends on huge guilds working as a team: players will be competing for hundreds of different maps to try and advance their Global Agenda (see what we did there?). But while there will be a pickup matchmaking system in place, with no open world, it'll be interesting to see how players find each other. A little social boost might go a long way.

But other than that, Global Agenda is shaping up well -- Hi Rez is doing a great job of mixing in some uncommon influences and combining them with the persistent MMO genre. We'll definitely be on the lookout for the beta later this year.

Mission running in EVE Online is one of the more lucrative activities players can spend their time doing, at least while in the safety of high security space. The cumulative rewards from NPC bounties, loyalty points, salvage, and loot -- in addition to the mission rewards from NPC agents -- make Level 4 missions a decent ISK/hour income for many of EVE Online's pilots. Level 4 missions are the most popular, due to their relative ease and multiple battleship (high bounty) NPC spawns which yield better loot drops and more salvage components, as well as optimal loyalty point gain. However, the grouping of agents that give the best missions leads to 'mission hubs' where hundreds of players operate in the same solar systems.

The latest dev blog by EVE's lead content creator CCP Molock is simply titled "New Level 4 Agents", and deals with dispersing the crowds (and clutter) from some of the high sec mission hubs in New Eden. CCP Games has added twenty-three new level 4 agents to the game in locations a bit removed from the heavily populated mission hubs, hopefully encourage more mission runners to fill quieter solar systems in the galaxy. Molock lists the new agents, along with their corporation and quality, as well as system security ratings for each location.

Developer Tasos Flambouras of the Darkfall team stopped by the official Darkfall forums again with a lengthy update concerning pretty much everything under the sun for Darkfall -- from cheating to future updates -- all in one large swoop.

One of the big notes of the post is the acknowledgement of a North American server coming down the pipes, but coming with restrictions to character transfers. Original plans detailed that characters from the European server could transfer off onto the American server (as North American players are certainly playing the European version right now) but this transfer will now be delayed by several months. So, if you're itching to get off of EU-1, looks like you might be waiting for a while unless you wish to create a new character on NA-1.

Past the new server, Tasos has outlined some of the priorities for the Darkfall team, including an enhanced newbie experience, improvements to the economy, upcoming improvements to the solo and group experience, and improvements to the game's PvE system to name a few. While exact details haven't been given, it's nice to know that things like this are on the developer's "to do" list for future updates.

The full post containing all of the juicy details can be read over at the official Darkfall forums.

[Via Hardcore Casual]

Murder. Death. Kill. These words are synonymous with most MMORPGs (oh, and 1993's Demolition Man too, but let's not go there). There have been a number of systems introduced to the genre since its birth, but combat (PvE and PvP) has always been at the forefront. One blogger wants that to change.

Syp of BioBreak has been playing a lot of LOTRO lately and he's starting to feel like Turbine are a bunch of nature-haters forcing players into the roll of exterminator extraordinaire. "It's not just 'kill 10 rats,' it's 'kill 10 of every freakin' last thing that ever walked, crawled, slithered or flew over the earth, just because'." This got him wondering about what the alternatives were. If done well, what activities would he choose over combat?

He came up with a fairly extensive list of established features that could use some buffing up in his opinion, including: crafting, mini-games, puzzles, trading card games, vehicle action, achievements, and diplomacy/politics. Head on over to read his thoughts.

This year's addition to the Adventurer Appreciation campaign, the Mog Tablets of King Kupofried, has become such a rousing success that it will be a new permanent game mechanic for all Final Fantasy XI players.

The quest involves finding 11 hidden tablets scattered throughout the world and bringing them back to the Explorer Moogle in Jeuno's Ru'lude Gardens. Once all of the tablets are recovered, three of King Kupofried's super kupowers are released all over Vana'diel for adventurers in the areas introduced by the main game, Rise of the Zilart, and Chains of Promathia, excluding Dynamis, Tu'lia (Sky), Lumoria (Sea), and Promyvion.

These powers do things from providing teleportation from the capital cities to the boat towns of Mhaura and Selbina, provide the gilfinder and treasure hunter traits to everyone in affected areas, give fully healed players bursts of speed, and more. The powers will last for a week before the tablets scatter to the winds and the hunt begins once again.

For the full explanation of this brand new permanent game mechanic, check out the page on it at the Final Fantasy XI main site.

Guild Wars fans are in for a treat with the announcement of a whole host of PvP and PvE skill updates designed to balance gameplay which have just been added to the game. ArenaNet have posted a nice explanation of what this latest update is trying to achieve:

"The major goals for this update are to address the power of certain spike builds, make pressure builds a more viable option, adjust some skills to encourage tactical use, and provide some buffs to underused skills. In GvG, we have continued to see extremely versatile spike builds dominating; they are able to split, be defensive, and output high damage spikes while still having many of the tools needed to counter other build types. They could do it all, and do it all a bit too well. We've targeted certain key skills to tone down these builds' ability to do high damage spikes and shut down other build types."

You can find the full run down of the changes here.

In all but the most staunch sandbox-style MMOs, the Quest has become the cornerstone of directed player content. Gone are the days when they'd just give us a graveyard full of skeletons, and experience bar and tell us get on with it, and the modern MMO, such as World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online, is very much a task-driven experience. Very little occurs without an accompanying quest journal entry these days, and thanks to generous cash, experience and item rewards, working through the quest chains can often be the most efficient way to make progress and headway in the average MMO.

The quest can also provide a little narrative to the otherwise formless adventuring of the typical MMO character; a set task and sometimes even a reason for the ensuing mayhem. That many of us simply skip the text is hardly the games fault. In any case, even without caring what the specifics or backstory to the job actually are, the mechanics of gameplay can be greatly improved by taking an endless and unbroken monster killing spree starting at level one and ending at level fifty, and breaking it into a large number of smaller distinct tasks, suitable for planning a gaming session around.

There is very little not to like about the currently widespread quest system; while individual implementations may vary and have their own quirks and peculiarities, the general principle of having something specific to be doing in a gaming session is a good one, and if it isn't, well, they are generally optional anyway and the graveyard of skeletons is always out there. But ask anyone with more than thirty completed journal entries to their name about questing in general, and two specific gripes are likely to come to light very quickly, the 'Kill Ten Rats' quest, and the 'Fed Ex' quest, two types of task that seem to resurface over and over, from back to EverQuest and beyond, in almost any MMO where there are quests at all.

What else can we be given to do, or are these two templates doomed to underlie everything we do in all our MMOs?

The latest devlog for Pirates of the Burning Sea is written by Lum and focuses on improving the game's mission system, particularly fixing the problem of mission farming. Lum writes, "When we create big mission arcs, we design them to be a fun, engaging, and most importantly, a linear experience. We want players to get a sense of story and to do something interesting. We also want to reward players who accomplish the goals for those missions."

He says that mission farming and the in-game monetary rewards aren't necessarily the problem, although it's not what the devs had in mind for players. Lum says that since people stop to repeat the most lucrative parts of a given mission arc, they're not experiencing the game as it was intended for the players. Even worse, some players make faction choices on the basis of how lucrative a certain mission with that faction is. Flying Lab Software wants to change missions in Pirates of the Burning Sea so that players are continually progressing through stories rather than motivated to remain in place to reap the gold harvest.