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CCP will begin testing EVE Online's recently announced Emyprean Age expansion on the Singularity test server beginning this Saturday, the 17th of May. To celebrate the event, the dev team is hosting an event at 19:00 GMT. Everyone is invited to test the new features -- particularly Factional Warfare -- with the dev team.

There will be awards for achievements like "most kills" and "most bizarre bug found" once the dust has cleared. If you're an EVE subscriber, read the announcement for more details. If you want to jump right in, don't forget to download the patch and apply it to your client (not the installation with which you play on Tranquility, though!). Once you're all patched up and ready to go, log in on Saturday and join the chat channel "Faction Testing."

How often do you get the chance to blast the entire EVE dev team out of the skies? Sounds like fun.

Great news for World of Warcraft gamers today, as the weekly Tuesday maintenance leaves behind a nice present: patch 2.4.2. WoW Insider has the full monty on what you can expect when you log back in. The full patch notes will give you the details you crave. WI always goes that extra step, though, and has additional information from the community about stealth changes. Did you know there's a new Zebra mount being added to the game?

Here's the bullet-point rundown:

• Major changes to the PvP Arenas.
• The Mage spell Polymorph now works quite differently.
• Tweaks to the Jewelcrafting, Enchanting, Engineering, and Leatherworking professions.
• The bosses Vexallus and Kael'thas are no longer immune to taunt on Normal difficulty in the Magisters' terrace encounter.
• Hunters will have to learn new tactics due to some controversial changes to class and pet abilities.
• Weaponsmiths will now be able to enjoy their non-unique one-handed items.

Last week we had the chance to talk to Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Game Developer Lenny "Tiraslee" Gullo about the new racial mounts and spell graphics being introduced for the upcoming Game Update 5.

Today we have a transcript of that discussion, running down the numerous additions to the game slated for the coming patch. Click on through to read the full interview with Tiraslee. You can catch his views on where the best Vanguard new player experience is, which mount is his favorite, and a full rundown on how to grab one of these fantastic new rides.

On April 30th, Vestgame Entertainment announced a major upgrade to their martial arts MMORPG, World of Kung Fu. Some of the highlights include citizenship to countries, with the ability to hold office, new quests for higher level players, "no kill" zones for the newbies, and more customization options. For a complete list of upgrades in this patch, check out their release notes.

They also hinted at what's coming in future updates. With 25 fairly large items on the to-do list, the WoKF devs will be keeping quite busy. Among the teasers are decreased waiting time on spawn, increased spawn spots, and special "Bruce Lee" events!

Check out the trailer for the upgrade after the jump ...

A new addition to Final Fantasy XI is coming this summer, and it's set to be a pretty big deal for players of Square's MMO. The Legendary Weapons of Balrahn will be an entirely new set of powerful items, each geared specifically to one of the game's many jobs. We first heard about these weapons from Fusionx, who theorizes that they'll be included in the version update this June. He's hopeful that these high end weapons will be easier to obtain that the current relics which, as he puts it, "require 120 million gil or more to completely upgrade."

The handsome axe above is name simply Conqueror and is intended for the Warrior job; each of the class weapons is highlighted in an article on the official FFXI site. Several classes (Dancer, Thief, Bard) are getting daggers. The Dark Knight is getting a huge scythe, the White Mage an impressive looking club, the Black Mage an impressive staff, and the Beastmaster a fantastic looking hand axe called the Aymur. Each of these implements is supposed to come with an all new weapon skill - a big changeup for the game, and some great high end content to sate the longtime players of this venerable title.

Thanks, Fusionx!

Dungeon Runners "Big Boss Man" Stephen Nichols dropped into the official forums to lay out some detailed patch notes for Build 118, the next "heave" coming to the game. See, big updates are "chunks" and ... right. This title, which at first glance seems so off-the-rack, immediately stands out with witticisms and humor - right there in the patch notes.

Highlights include:

• The Bling Gnome, which we've previously discussed here on the site. We already knew that the gold-loving companion will only be available to folks who buy the retail box. Nichols let it slip that the package will be hitting shelves in late June. Your gnomish ally will put his bowels to work for you, apparently, 'pooping out' a powerful item every once in a while.
• Several new skills, including Barf-o-Rama (a poison ability) and I'm Rubber, You're Screwed (a knockdown power).
• Bonus experience from completing quests. A modifier labeled "15% More Cowbell" will hit your character for 5 minutes after turning in a quest. This modifier increases the experience you gain from killing monsters by 15%, and can stack up to five times after multiple turn-ins.
• A number of different changes to Dungeon Runners membership privileges, some of which are likely to be highly unpopular with free players. Members now gain experience faster than free players, but this is purely at a cost to free players. In other words, free players have been nerfed out of a percentage of their xp. Members also find gold faster, pay less when buying items, and have a much higher percentage rate of finding valuable loot when it drops.
• Numerous other changes, including tweaks to PvP, new chat channel options, new quests, skill balancing, adjustments to the way ads are displayed, and more.

The new changes are already on the public test server, and Nichols indicates they plan to have this out on the live servers within a week.

What's this? A Tabula Rasa patch surprising us on a Monday morning, filled with goodies for all! We thought this day would never come! The cake was getting stale and the candles had all burned out, but it was well worth the wait.

According to the official patch notes, the Rangers were especially blessed this time around. Tactical Evasion is the newest strategic method at getting the Ranger into and out of a fight while suffering minimal damage. We've known about many of these changes for awhile, referring back to the Public Test Server notes from what seems ages ago, but we now have a few other goodies thrown in as well. The anticipated AI changes to make creatures more aggressive and more intelligent when returning fire are now in effect. This is something the community has been clamoring for, and simultaneously dreading. But most importantly, more so than any other tactical, strategic or skill-based change to the game (as is apparent by its top-of-the-page placement in the patch notes), the female avatars have been refined to create a more beautiful weapon stance and body shape in Motor Assist Armor! Huzzah!

EverQuest 2 Associate Producer Jennifer Gerull posted an entry on the official EQ2 developer's blog the other day, discussing the process involved in pushing out a hotfix to the game. Though she equates herself to 'George Jetson with longer hours', endlessly pushing buttons all day, it's an interesting look into Sony Online Entertainment's revision process. As Gerull describes it, code fixes are pushed to an internal server, where the QA department can take a look at them. If the build of the game compiles nicely, it's reviewed by Quality Assurance to ensure the changes are working as intended. If the build doesn't compile nicely, some poor developer gets saddled with "a really ugly doll named 'BoB' that gets to sit on their desk until the next coder gets the "Breaker of the Build" title."

While most of the time the team waits patiently for QA to do its work, important hotfixes result in rushed phone calls and nervous waiting. Inelegantly applied solutions can have the QA team sending one or two of the items on the hotfix list back to the coding team, which in turn requires Jennifer to start a new internal update. She notes that each internal update is labeled with a letter, starting with A and working down. "A few times I've gotten all the way to L, M and N builds, but that is usually the exception rather than the rule on the number of iterations in one day. By the time we get to N, its usually time to go home and try again the next day." Make sure to read on for the full view of this process, and hints of future developer updates to come.

Given the answers to our weekly WRUP query lately, we've got a pretty good guess what you'll be doing online this weekend: it starts with "book" and ends with "13". Yes, the Lord of the Rings Online patch is out, and odds are that quite a few of you will be heading off into Middle-earth to survey the new content. But don't leave us too far behind -- Massively's got tons of great coverage for you to look over before you head out there.

Are you rolling into LotRO? Is WoW more your style this weekend? (It's mine -- I'm still working on getting my Hunter to 70 -- 63 and climbing!). Are you trying to dip into a certain beta test that's becoming more and more open lately? It's Friday, and the weekend's here, so let us know: What aRe yoU Playing?

Both this week and last week the Friday Features on the official Star Wars Galaxies site have been all about the Jedi and their legacy. Last week team artist Christine Chugon walked us through the process of creating the amazing new heroic instance, the Tomb of Exar Kun. Kun was just recently added to the game in the Chapter 9 content patch. Chugon offers up the simple pencil drawing on lined paper that was her starting point, and takes us through the various steps required to bring the maze to life.

This week's Feature is also all about the Jedi's world - this time a walkthrough of the new Expertise tree coming to the class in Game Update 3. The tree is split into two parts, representing the Light and Dark sides of the force. The Light side offers improvements in saber technique, a simple snare or two, and the 'mind trick' ability to confuse/de-aggro an enemy. The Dark side is much more straightforward, offering crit enhancements, the ability to drain life, the force choke snare ability, and the power to throw deadly force lightning. For further discussion of the new Jedi powers, check out the vigorous thread on the official forums.

The Vanguard Players site just released information on the upcoming Game Update 5. Slated to hit the test servers at the beginning of next week, this latest in Vanguard's ongoing series of large content updates looks to be another doozy. Highlights from this update incude:

• Racial Mounts: We featured two exclusive screenshots of the Dark Elf and Half Elf mounts this morning, but every race has their own unique ride. The folks at Ten Ton Hammer snagged their own shots, showing of the Gataro Raki mount, and the Kurashasa Scorpion mount. The full list of races and their mounts is on the site.
• A city faction system they're calling 'Citizen Favor.' Players will be able to complete quests to earn positive faction standing with each individual city. Certain creatures can be slain to earn tokens, which are then turned in to earn standing and rewards. Raid-level monsters will drop ancient coins of exceptional value in this system.
• Three classes received some TLC: the Psionicist, the Blood Mage, and the Sorcerer. Broken abilities were fixed, spells have been updated, and "all three classes should be more in-line with their intended vision." Exactly what was changed will be listed in the final patch notes.
• Performance improvements, new particle effects for a number of classes, and more will also be added in the patch.
  

We'll have more on Game Update 5 in the days ahead, so make sure to check back.

The ninth chapter update to Star Wars Galaxies was released to the live servers yesterday! This chapter is entitled "The Fury of Exar Kun", and continues the SWG team's commitment to regular and targetted content updates. This one, unlike Game Updates 1 and 2, is nothing but a love letter to the players. The official patch notes spell out all the gory details: PvP collections, the Exar Kun heroic instance, improved Storyteller tools ... even the chapter gift (a housing-placeable terminal that lets you track the progress of the Galactic Civil War) is getting a really positive player reaction. For details RPGVault has up a piece giving us the full rundown on the Chapter, from badges to blasters.

With Chapter 9 out and being explored the next content updates are already in the works. Game Update 3 will see much love given to the Jedi and Bounty Hunter classes; the developers are testing the changes to the Jedi and have been sharing some of their play experiences with force-users on the forums. They've also been releasing information on the upcoming Chapter 10 goodies. The next big content drop will see significantly improved player search options, making it that much easier to find a group of fellow adventurers in the Galaxy Far, Far Away.

Unless you've been completely ignoring MMO news lately, you know that World of Warcraft has been gearing up for its final large content patch before the release of their upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. This morning, after much watching and many cups of coffee, they announced that 2.4 was indeed releasing today. With it comes a plethora of new content, gear, and much more. Of course, as many veterans to Blizzard's patch-day hijinks expected, 2.4 has claimed its first victim; the WoW servers. Just minutes after bringing up the realms at 2:00 PM Eastern (the originally announced end of the maintenance window) the WoW servers were taken off-line and the downtime was extended to 3:30 PM Eastern.

Now this isn't to say that it will likely slow too many people down. Any time a new content patch is released that includes a raiding instance, there's generally a mad rush to be the first guild to ever clear the new instance on live servers. For the rest of us who, while curious, won't be heading anywhere near those instances tonight (knowing how unstable they're undoubtedly going to be) have no fear! Our sister site, WoW Insider, has been cranking out the 2.4 love all day. If you haven't gotten a chance to check it out, or are afraid you'll be buried in the backlog of postings, don't worry. They've created a handy "All you ever wanted to know about 2.4 but were too busy to look up" page. Curious to see more? Just click on the patch 2.4 Sunwell banner above. You'll be up to speed in no time!

Last week's deployment of 1.19.2 onto the Second Life grid did not go at all well, and affected simulators had to be rolled back to the earlier 1.19.1 version. Linden Lab's Bridie Linden tells us that the issue with the new server software (exactly what was wrong was never mentioned) has been identified and fixed, and a new three-phase update will be taking place this week, starting tomorrow evening.

The first batch of 500 simulators will be updated Tuesday evening from 8PM. 1,500 more simulators will be updated from 7PM Wednesday evening, assuming all goes well with the first 500. Finally at 6PM Thursday evening (again, assuming that we have no further issues resembling last week's problems) the all of the remaining simulators will be updated to 1.19.2 (with the exception of the simulators in the Havok Early Adopters Program).

There is another multipart update on the way for Second Life this week to version 1.19.2 (we certainly hope it addresses some of the problems that have taken place today. It has been a rough one). While the multipart updates probably total more actual time than the earlier kinds, we like them better because they afford more opportunity to back out of major problems that are discovered along the way.

This update supports PRIM_GLOW in scripts (but the viewer doesn't, so you won't be able to use it right away, necessarily). Some internal changes to do with reducing database load (hey, there's an awful lot of that going on, we've noticed) that won't be initially enabled, more internal logging and diagnostics (we suppose the servers will be logging everything in more detail), and fix for a bug where an IM might somehow wind up sent to the wrong person.