Some gamers were disheartened when NetDevil opted to delay the Jumpgate Evolution launch in order to refine some aspects of gameplay, but we're hoping the extra time they've bought for themselves will equate to a more polished release. One of those aspects of the game they're improving is Jumpgate Evolution's economy, which is the subject of an interview that producer Hermann Peterscheck gave to JGERadio's "Tikigod."

Throughout the interview, Peterscheck emphasizes that Jumpgate Evolution's economy should, by design, function in ways similar to a real world economy (but hopefully with a lot less fail) -- a far more dynamic system than one driven by NPC vendors. Peterscheck says, "I actually think the changes make the economy more alive. What we have done is moved away from an AI-based economy to a player-driven economy."

Over the past few weeks, the developers at Cryptic Studios have been walking readers through the various powers that will be available to Champions Online players, from Energy Projectors to Martial Arts, as well as Power Replacers. Now they're giving us a look at the game's Mystic power sets -- Sorcery and Supernatural -- for those players who want to dabble in the dark arts.

Do you know your Circles of Power from your Circles of Summoning? When should you use a Sigil instead of an Invocation? The Champions Online devs explain all matters arcane in this latest, and final, "All About Powers", and discuss their intent to create subsets of Mystic powers that better fit a given character's concept. Whether you're looking to create a Primal Shaman, a Necromancer, or a pure Arcane-type, you might enjoy this latest dev blog on the official Champions Online site.

EVE Online senior producer CCP t0rfifrans just published a dev blog about the next major update to the game, Apocrypha 1.5. This is not a completely new expansion, just a significant update they will release in August before EVE's (as-yet-unnamed) winter expansion. While CCP hasn't released the complete rundown of Apocrypha 1.5's features and changes, they have announced a few highlights:

• Perhaps the biggest changes in 1.5 will be factional warfare improvements. Beyond responding to the lag issues many players have been reporting with factional warfare, CCP is going to introduce Loyalty Points (LP) for kills and captures, and each militia will have its own LP store where militia players can cash in for items unique to that faction.

• Several Level 4 epic mission arcs will be introduced, tied to specific races in New Eden. CCP t0rfifrans writes: "These captivating stories deal with moral ambiguity, intrigue, honor, and some people's lack of it. This should come as no surprise to those who know EVE and what we are about. As before with the epic arc that was released with Apocrypha, they provide a deep, interesting story, where your choices influence the outcome."

• One of the long awaited buffs for Black Ops battleships will arrive: specialized cargo holds. The first use of this system will be to give Black Ops ships fuel bays, but this feature paves the way for similar additions to other ship classes in the future. For instance, some ships may one day be given ammo bays, freeing up valuable cargo space.

• Rigs will be offered in different sizes, with frigate and cruiser sized rigs introduced to the game. These new small and medium rigs will be cheaper to buy or manufacture, and thus provide a lower cost way for players to trick out their ships.

CCP t0rfifrans also dropped a few hints about the forthcoming winter expansion, which will *not* be Walking in Stations. He writes: "All I can say, is that it is focused on sovereignty and you will not be able to walk in it."

We'll keep our eyes open for more about Apocrypha 1.5 as information becomes available.

The sci-fi game EVE Online changed yesterday, in a rather subtle way. The developers eliminated one of the principal tools used by players to scam their unsuspecting marks: "freeform" contracts. The change was snuck in as single green-texted bullet point in the updated patch notes:

"Freeform contracts can no longer be created. This is due to griefing problems. You will still be able to view your completed freeform contracts for now but in an upcoming expansion older freeform contracts will be removed as well."

[EVE has a contract system which players use to conduct business transactions between different parties for items or services. They're generally used for legitimate purposes like auctions and item exchanges, but the more flexible "freeform" contracts could be structured so that a seller received in-game cash for items never actually given to the buyer.]

This otherwise unannounced elimination of the feature is perhaps a fitting demise for freeform scams. Those who haven't played EVE Online may be wondering why this is significant, if you scam another player you simply get banned, right? Not in EVE... It's one of the few MMOs out there where all manner of player villainy is permitted by the developer CCP Games, provided it happens in-game.

It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about the City of Heroes Issue 15 beta testing, but this latest update to the game, Anniversary, has gone live. Issue 15 brings a host of improvements to City of Heroes particularly in terms of hero and villain character customization. There are 20 new character faces to choose from, two new costume sets, and costume change emotes, which provide flashy transitions between costumes for your characters.

Issue 15: Anniversary also marks the return of The 5th Column and The Reichsman, and thus new missions at levels 45-50 -- with Villain Strikeforce and Hero Taskforce arcs, depending upon which side of the law you're on. NCsoft has more info about Issue 15 on their Anniversary overview site, and asks, "What does the opening of the Omega Team Time Capsule hold in store for Paragon City and the Rogue Isles?" The answers, we suspect, should be clear as City of Heroes and City of Villains players explore the new Issue 15 content.

Last week we wrote about the upcoming post-apocalyptic MMO Earthrise and how players will be able to use mechas to establish trade and supply routes or, conversely, to hijack them. This brings up another transportation-related question, or several really. How will teleportation work in Earthrise? What limitations will be put on it? Is teleportation accessible to individuals or is it a guild-level ability? The latest Question of the Week entry from the Earthrise devs at Masthead Studios answers these questions and more.

The game's sandbox setting of Enterra is a massive island with many zones. Conventional modes of transportation may not always be the best option for players who need to get from one place to another, hence the developers have included teleportation (travel, not combat) game mechanics, but characters seeking instantaneous travel will need to pay fees for the privilege. There will be two simple types of teleportation -- short range for within zones, and long range, which can be a jump from one end of Enterra to another. The further you travel, the more you pay. Teleporters will be run by NPC factions, available to players aligned with that faction or neutrals, but Earthrise's guilds will also be able to establish their own teleporters.

A post-apocalyptic setting can open up fantastic opportunities for storytelling. After all, it's the end of society as we know it. All our institutions are gone, our belief systems either torn away or seriously challenged. That resulting vacuum would no doubt be filled by new outlooks on the world and on life triggered by the apocalypse -- in rare cases optimistic, but more often utterly deranged. Then again, some survivors might seek to rectify the mistakes made by too many generations before the burn or plague wiped out humanity, and aim to rebuild a better world. There are so many possibilities, and these are some of the avenues that will be explored in the upcoming post-apocalyptic MMO Fallen Earth. Of course, this presents some real challenges for the game designers as well -- what is the best way to integrate these themes into the gameplay experience?

Storytelling in Fallen Earth is the focus of a recent interview with lead designer Lee Hammock, who spoke with The MMO Gamer's Steven Crews about where story and gameplay will meet in the upcoming title.

EVE Online patch Apocrypha 1.3 is slated for a Monday June 29 deployment. CCP Games is pushing ahead with their Need for Speed initiative, which aims to streamline the game's performance and provide a better play experience. They're making some database changes with the next Apocrypha patch that should improve what you experience in your game client with inventory management, but beyond addressing "The Jita Problem" there will be a fair number of changes in the next patch.

On that topic of speed, players should notice a huge change with starbase deployment (or hasty tear downs): players will be able to anchor, online, or unanchor offensive and defensive starbase structures in half the time it took previously. (Ninja POS deployment?) Perhaps more significant to some players than others, station reprocessing will be much faster -- apparently refining stacks of items will be up to 25 times faster than before. Also, some of those changes to Tech III production we've mentioned before are going into effect on Monday, and should ultimately be a boost for Tech III. Apocrypha 1.3's changes extend far beyond what is mentioned here; players heavily invested in wormhole exploration and the production it fuels should look closely at the patch notes to see how CCP's changes to the game might affect them.

The fifth major update to Age of Conan,"Gangs of Tarantia", has gone live. The update adds the Tarantia Commons District, a high level area with both single player and group dungeons, as well as a revamped RPG system. There are substantial system changes that have gone into effect in Update 5, which impact every class in Age of Conan, covering everything from itemization changes to feat trees, as well as abilities, spells, and combos. Plus Funcom has rolled out a complete overhaul of the gem crafting system and introduced new rewards tied in with guild cities. Any in-depth look at the sweeping changes made to Age of Conan with Update 5 is beyond the scope of this post, but are summarized in the patch notes.

In the June letter from the game director, Craig Morrison explains how Gangs of Tarantia is the most significant update made to the game thus far. Morrison also drops some hints about the directions Funcom plans to take Age of Conan with future game updates. He writes that the next update to Age of Conan will focus on three main areas: improving guild gameplay; new high level content in the House of Crom; and more goals and objectives with Border Kingdom PvP.

Beyond the letter from the game director, Funcom has grouped together a ton of information related to Gangs of Tarantia and AoC in general, which can be found in Issue #23 of the Age of Conan newsletter.

Stereotypes and ingrained perceptions can be frustrating to deal with, but let's face it -- some stereotypes do exist for a reason, and this can certainly apply to games as much as to anything else. There have been no small amount of Asian import MMOs that have been localized poorly for the western market, and this has certainly left a bad taste in gamers' mouths. Localization is a major challenge for any developer, and there's a rather wide chasm between what makes a game popular in an Asian market like Korea and what players embrace in the west. The westward-bound MMO that many people are focusing on right now is Aion, from NCsoft.

The westernization of Aion is the subject of another solid interview at The MMO Gamer by Steven Crews, who sat down with Aion producer Brian "Xaen" Knox, the person largely responsible for NC West's localization of this title. Knox talks about what he sees as being the best aspects of both East and West in terms of game development, and how some western influences on Aion's design have actually proven to be successful in Korea. It's a fairly in-depth interview and hits on a number of Knox's ideas about how a game can begin to bridge the game culture divide between East and West, seen in the context of Aion. Check it out over at The MMO Gamer.

Band of Brothers (renamed KenZoku) was once the most powerful alliance in EVE Online with a stated goal, even here at Massively, to control all of the game's New Eden galaxy. Now, KenZoku has reportedly left the contested, lawless frontier of 0.0 space after months of resisting the combined forces of rival alliances.

One of EVE's in-game journalists, Interstellar Correspondent ISD Clarity Brown, reports from the site of KenZoku's last holdout: "GoonSwarm and their allies deployed a camp on KenZoku's sole remaining outpost last night. A joint force of pilots from Pandemic Legion, GoonSwarm, Morsus Mihi, Razor Alliance and KIA deployed 27 titans around the station in a show of force and gave a demonstration of the sheer power embodied in such a gang."

Titans are the game's most expensive weapons of mass destruction, massive ships capable of unleashing 'Doomsday' area-of-effect attacks that melt fleets caught in the blast. To unleash 27 Doomsday blasts at once is... quite a sight, as the video footage demonstrates.

Black Prophecy is a space-based science fiction MMO in development at Reakktor Media in Germany, which we've covered a bit here at Massively. But the fact is that Reakktor may not be a company that many MMO gamers are all that familiar with. The Black Prophecy team has decided to try and remedy this, with a Q&A in their community forums that introduces a bit about CEO Kirk Lenke and development director Simon Bachmann, as well as their approach to the game.

Ultimately, the Q&A answers some of the questions that people have about Black Prophecy, both in terms of game mechanics and the business decisions behind getting the title published.

The Apocrypha expansion for EVE Online introduced wormhole exploration to the game and with it, the potential to reverse engineer advanced technology from the Sleeper NPC race. The goal for many such explorers is ultimately to produce the next iteration of ship technology in the game; these Tech III strategic cruisers feature modular designs that can accomplish some impressive things. This, coupled with their rarity and sky high prices make Tech III ships into everybody's favorite multi-billion ISK gankmagnets, and it's that scarcity that EVE game designer CCP Chronotis addresses in his latest dev blog.

He writes that CCP Games will make some changes in the next Apocrypha patch that will affect the supply of Tech III materials. Specifically, they're going to boost reverse engineering while also balancing out the types of salvage gained from Sleeper NPC wrecks, and increase the availability of Tech III production materials in general. If you're involved in wormhole exploration or Tech III production, consider this dev blog from CCP Chronotis a heads up as to the changes on the way.

I regularly play on testing realms (it is in my job description after all) but my biggest gripe is that I can never get that enthusiastic about it because I know I will lose my characters. Last week we told you about the open beta for Atlus Online's MMO Neo Steam: The Shattered Continent and the interesting news that characters created could be kept and resurrected on live realms. Now this is pretty revelatory stuff. Any one who has played an MMO on a test realm knows that you can usually copy your toons over in order to rest higher level content but there's no way to re-transfer them home after your done. They just get deleted along with the server.

My problem with this is I am less likely to do quests on a test realm because I don't want to slog through them again later. At the same time it's nice to get the chance to use a premade from a different class to see how they play. However I do think that if more companies were to follow Atlus' example (however implausible it might be for the bigger MMOs) that people would be more inclined to hang around after the beta ended. What do you think, constant readers? Would you play (insert upcoming MMO title here) for longer than the beta if you got to keep your carefully crafted toon?

There is a slow but steady shift in direction in the MMO industry from being dominated by fantasy titles to one where gamers have other options, namely in terms of sci-fi and post-apocalyptic games. The smaller game studios producing these titles have some big challenges ahead of them, not the least of which is whether or not MMO gamers will embrace settings and gameplay elements that depart from the fantasy MMO paradigm. One of those newcomers to the MMO scene is Masthead Studios who are developing the post-apocalyptic Earthrise.

This first title from Masthead Studios will present gamers with a futuristic, dystopian setting where two major factions struggle for control over the island of Enterra, the last refuge of humanity after the burn. Continoma are the technocratic elite; they hold the keys to genetic immortality and enforce their ordered societal views on the population they've resurrected. The game's other major faction, Noir, is a shadow government -- the resistance. Earthrise's setting and factional struggles aren't limited to simple right-and-wrong scenarios, though, and this carries over to the gameplay. Players or guilds may align with one faction or another for their own benefit, but the game's numerous sub-factions provide other options for allegiances, or even the possibility of shifting those allegiances.

We had the opportunity to see Earthrise firsthand at GDC 2009 but we've always got more questions. Fortunately, Masthead Studios was willing to oblige. We've had another chance to speak with Masthead Studios CEO Atanas Atanasov about some of the core concepts and lore behind Earthrise, and how their approach to the game and the genre should allow a great deal of freedom for players.