Massively^™

While it initially seemed like good news that FunCom were patching twice a week, and thus doing their best to nail the wheels back on the Age of Conan wagon as it bumped unsteadily down the trail, it didn't work out quite so well in practice. The frenetic pace of updates has meant that new bugs got added even as old ones got found and fixed, and the recent calamity in which a patch had to be rolled back altogether has possibly convinced FunCom that fewer, more rigorously tested updates are preferable.

The additional testing, as we've mentioned, comes with the opening of the new TestLive server. Patches will also be slowed to the rate of one a week; Wednesdays will be the day to watch out for new updates. These two measures ought to make the unfolding progress of Age of Conan much smoother. Of course, FunCom also need to deliver a balanced, fun game as well as a bug-free one. There's a lot more subjectivity involved in that assessment. We've seen some exciting-looking announcments for the game's future; now we just have to see if they can deliver.

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To keep a healthy test playerbase busy swatting bugs and pillaging bleeding-edge content the following standard measure is planned:

"We will be doing several things to encourage people to play on Testlive. We are looking at being able to copy characters from Live, having "buffing" NPCs that will level and gear your character up."

Doesn't seem like much incentive to play on the official test live server, but what else can they do aside from handing out bags of money to all your non-test characters? You tell us.

Say hello to Alan Salmassian. He's the man in charge of ridding Champions Online of those pesky code bugs everyone hates encountering. Sure, it may not be the most glamorous job on the team, but it's definitely got some benefits. We're not sure what those benefits are -- presumably you get to laugh at crazy bugs that make inanimate objects flee in terror -- but we're sure that they're great. Also, it sounds like being a Q&A lead requires you to have tons of management skills, which means we could never do the job.

All right, we're removing our tongue from its resting place in our cheek now. Like all the other people developing Champions Online Alan is equally important. If it wasn't for him and his team we'd all end up playing a game that crashed whenever we tried to open a door in-game or press the 'G' key. Also, we think that Alan's got a killer smile.

Flagship's forthcoming free-to-play MMO Mythos, patched their closed beta with lots of bug fixes and new features. The camera has been completely re-done; it now has four-options -- Isometric Style (the original, far-overhead view); Isometric Orbiting Style, where the camera turns with you; MMO Style, which is the over-the-shoulder view common to many MMOs, and MMO Outdoor Only, which reverts to isometric view when you enter a dungeon. Ambient (non-attackable) creatures have been added to the Overworld to make it more lively; other Overworld creatures have had their aggro range increased and respawn time decreased to make the Overworld more ... deadly.

Why not take a look at the full patch notes, after the break?

By Mitra, is it Thursday already? That should mean a new patch for Age of Conan - and true to their word, FunCom are keeping up the relentless assault on AoC's bugs. Mounts come in for some more attention, Necromancers get a round of buffs, a host of quests are fixed or revamped, some of the sluggish female animations are addressed, and in short, we're impressed. AoC has had its teething troubles, but nobody can say FunCom aren't putting in the hours to get them sorted out.

Also true to emerging tradition, the players are compiling their own set of unofficial patch notes, one in the EU and one in the US, collating everything they've found that wasn't documented. Good news for all players: it looks like the promised alteration of outdoor bosses' loot tables has made it in, along with an overall increase in blue loot drops. The not so good news is an apparent nerf to the Bear Shaman's Untamed Regeneration feat. According to the unofficial player-created patch notes, 'The stamina, mana and health regeneration on the ability "Untamed Regeneration" has been reduced by approximately 40%. Additional damage received has been increased from 10% to 15%.' Nerf or bug? We're waiting to find out.

There's an unpleasant rumor gathering strength in the Age of Conan community. It seems to have begun with this eight-page review, which (despite delivering a relatively healthy overall score of 76) is uncompromising in its criticism of those parts of the game that, in the reviewer's opinion, fall very short of what was advertised.

The bombshell comes on page 7, where the reviewer states outright that '... Age of Conan's weapon swing time depends on the duration of the visual swing animation, and female characters swing their weapons about 25% slower than males - so every female melee character does 25% less damage over time!'

After less than 24 hours on the preview grid (Aditi), Second Life server 1.22.3 is being rolled out on the main grid (Agni) starting, well, now. The first rollout is the pilot deployment of roughly 160 simulators, and should only take a few minutes.

Half the grid will be updated from 5AM to 9AM SLT tomorrow morning (Wednesday, 11 June US Pacific time), and the remaining half of the grid between 5AM and 9AM the day after (Thursday, 12 June).

The only listed fixes for this release are two exploitable simulator crash bugs, and three group permissions fixes, specifically SVC-2489 (relating to object rezzing), SVC-2495 (also related to object rezzing), and SVC-2499 (which is, you guessed it, also related to object rezzing). Given the small number of fixes involved, maybe this release has gotten enough time on the preview grid -- only time will tell.

Sometimes, we play games well past their expiration date. Long after it's stopped being fun, a particular game continues to get our attention. The reasons for this vary: You want to unlock every Easter egg; you can't afford anything new; you play through as a soothing exercise, trusting in your foreknowledge of every beat of gameplay to relax you enough to fall asleep.

However, with an MMO, there are different considerations. Perhaps you're holding out for that patch you're hoping will fix that one annoying bug. Maybe you love your guildmates too much to consider quitting. Whatever the reason you keep playing, there comes a point at which you just can't hold on anymore, and you cancel your subscription. Tired graphics? Abusive chat? Constant griefing? What's caused you to finally quit a game?

If you already own a horse mount in Age of Conan, you are probably extremely unimpressed with your new companion's speed -- it almost seems like you don't move any faster at all. According to this post at AoC's official forums, this is in fact the case. One of the game's designers has confirmed that, currently, even the mighty horse trots along at regular run-speed. A proper fix for this is coming in a future patch, but a temporary workaround is shared for now (which a lot of people in the community had already figured out): simply sheathe or unsheathe your weapon while mounted, and enjoy the mount's speed boost as it was intended.

Also included in the post is the fact that the speed boost itself will be increased very soon. Horses will be slightly faster, and Mammoths and Rhinos will get a smaller boost. As well as this, to address a complaint that those with Mammoth/Rhino pre-order privileges have, the riding skills (charging, attacks, etc.) associated with these mounts will be given automatically with the "/claim" command after a future patch, and those who already have the skills through buying Basic Riding will need to perform the command to receive them again.

EDIT: Going by this forum thread, the mount speed increase is already in effect as of today's patch. Some in-game testing of our own shows that at the very least, the bug requiring weapon sheathing/unsheathing is fixed. More on these other undocumented patch changes shortly.

We'll have to be completely honest with you; ever since Jorgen Tharaldsen's famous proclamation,"You'll see titties," the topic of Age of Conan and its famously epic mammaries is one that comes up rather frequently around the Massively offices. What can we say, we're admirers of the female form... also, we like boob jokes. In any case, we were rather distressed to hear of some Age of Conan players complaining that their in-game counterparts were lacking a certain lactoid luster.

It might seem like a frivolous complaint, but from the images provided by a forum user named Gust, it's become evident that the change in chesticle size is actually significant. And Funcom is taking the complaint seriously, saying in part, "Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed. This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts. We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon." It's sporting of them admit their mistake, and hopefully they'll have it fixed as quickly as many of the other bugs they've had since launch.

[Via Kotaku]

For those of you who have been in-world since Midnight SLT (US Pacific) it is probably no surprise to you that the Second Life grid has been behaving erratically for the last 11 hours.

This has been pinned on unstable database performance and Linden Lab has closed logins for an unspecified amount of time to take control of things. If it is related to recent database issues then we can expect 30-45 minutes of closure before the Lab gets on top of the database problems.

The Second Life grid and website are suffering from major problems with central databases. Apparently a 'resynchronization' is in progress which leads us to the likely conclusion that the problem relates to the new backup asset system that was implemented in the recent update.

Whatever the cause, logins are closed, those few (27,000 or so) users who are still online are advised to basically not perform any transactions, fiddle with inventory, change clothes, rez items, and try not to move around very much. Anticipated restoration time is approximately 12:30 SLT (US Pacific time).

Update (12:25PM SLT): The grid is reopening.

This week's rolling update to Second Life server version 1.22 hasn't been going very well, necessitating an extension of the update process into Friday, and a revised version 1.22.1.

As many users observed, the sound-throttling feature which was not supposed to impact a lot of content has, well, impacted a lot of content. If you heard a distant howling sound on the wind on Wednesday, that was the collective frustration of users who were being spammed by sound-related error messages from their own objects.

According to an email sent to some users of the Second Life public JIRA by Linden Lab, a number of users have unintentionally had their email address published on their JIRA profile page.

Apparently JIRA profiles included the account's registered email address from 20 May to 24 May. Users whose JIRA profiles were logged as being accessed during that period have been emailed to alert them that their email addresses may have been exposed.

Even though email addresses may be considered comparatively innocuous, many virtual world and MMOG users value their privacy very strongly, even if they are not anonymous. This isn't the first time that confidential user-data held by Linden Lab has been unintentionally exposed, and it would be unwise to suggest that it will be the last time.

[Thanks, Sean Heying]