Massively^™

Over the course of the week, we've been getting scattered reports of problems on the Second Life grid relating to the new Mono script-engine runtime that was deployed as a part of SLS-1.24. The key phrase seems to be "catastrophic mono bytecode serialization failure".

The problem itself doesn't appear to be highly reproducible, but by the accounts we're getting, when it occurs, the Mono runtime flings a complex exception, and most or all of the Mono scripts in the simulator where the exception occurred shut down, and stay that way, pending individual and manual attention.

SLS-1.24.4 rolled out on 3 September, though that apparently did not correct the problem, as we have reports of it from users as late as 4 September, despite the relative infrequency of its occurrence.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

EverQuest players rejoice! You now have the ability to use Station Voice for your in-game communications, thereby saving you typing -- or your own Vent or TS server costs. Eventually, this will also include the ability to get in-game voice mail, allow players to receive external voice connections (like phone calls) and even offer voice synthesizing. This should help players change their voice for role-playing their characters. Best of all, Station Voice is completely free to current EverQuest players with accounts in good standing.

Aside from that, all EQ players will be glad to know that SOE has removed the weights on EverQuest's coinage. No longer will you have to stop and run to the bank to change out all those pesky coins that like to pile up. This particular change may not seem like it would be all that large a thing to other MMO players. However, EQ players who have ever had their run speed decreased because they spent a little too long out playing and landed bags heavy with coin weight will understand why we're cheering for this particular (no pun intended) change.

If you're curious what else changed in today's update, join us past the break for the full update notes!

Some potential changes to Tabula Rasa have arrived on the Public Test Server in the form of "Deployment 12," which we recently hinted was on the way. NCsoft has posted the patch notes for Deployment 12 which include changes and improvements to much of the game.

One of the more significant updates mentioned is the Omega Labs instance, which is only available to level 50+ players, but numerous other changes to maps and missions are detailed at the Tabula Rasa site. Improved game mechanics, fixed interactions, and enhancements to how shadows and hues are displayed are all outlined in the patch notes as well. The changes on the Public Test Server are extensive, so be sure to see the full breakdown for a look at how Tabula Rasa is gearing up for the next Deployment.

CCP Games promised a number of fixes to EVE Online in Empyrean Age 1.1, the "power to the people" patch. Now that the patch notes are up, it seems they weren't exaggerating the extent to which the game is being tweaked. The patch will be deployed on Tuesday, September 2nd. Although it's a lengthy downtime (11:00 - 17:00 GMT), they don't anticipate the forums being taken down.

The patch notes themselves are... extensive -- approaching YellowPages length -- and will continually be updated (in green text) as the September 2nd rollout approaches. Empyrean Age 1.1 primarily consists of bug and exploit fixes, and overall is aimed at making gameplay smoother, regardless of what your activities in EVE are. Player responses in the forums seem positive thus far, but questions about the changes are being addressed by the devs presently. As always, complications with patches and expansions can arise, so CCP recommends setting a long skill in training before the extended downtime.

While talking to Mythic's Jeff Hickman at PAX08, he mentioned a rather large update coming for the open beta hitting around September 7th (the date of the Open Beta). Some of the content in the upcoming patch includes player vaults, guild vaults, auction house, tons of fun new emotes, and a lot of general effects cleanup. There's even a new Public Quest and standard quest tracker for the user interface. It sounds like Mythic is making a really big push for the launch of the game. So even if you're in the beta now, expect some pleasant surprises once you hit the Open Beta or Live game in just a couple of weeks.

We've got tons more information coming from our time spent with the Warhammer Online guys at PAX08. Keep your eyes peeled for further updates.

You might be wondering, you know after all the hooraw last week, just what precisely happened to SLS1.24, the Mono-enabled deployment of the Second Life server code that was supposed to deploy on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week.

Well, that was 1.24.0, and as you may recall that not long after the pilot deployment the Second Life grid went kind of whack. But that's alright, because 1.24.1 to the rescue! Nobody said quite what was wrong -- heck, maybe they can't -- but 1.24.1 fixed that and it was rolled out to replace 1.24.0 on the pilot simulators.

Now, stop us if you've heard this one before, but while 1.24.1 fixed whatever it was that was wrong with 1.24.0, but was kind of well ... crashy.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

New information has come to light about what CCP Games is planning for EVE Online players as the Empyrean Age progresses. EVE Associate Producer Arend Stührmann spoke with MMORPG.com's Jon Wood in a Leipzig video interview about the releases slated for the rest of this year, and how CCP views their accomplishments thus far.

The goal of the Empyrean Age expansion was to create a lower-risk PvP environment that would encourage more players to experience this aspect of the game. Stührmann says that there is a solid core of players who've made factional warfare their livelihood, with over 40,000 players that enlisted in the first few weeks. Stührmann also spoke about the effect of factional warfare on non-participants. War can invigorate an economy and this idea holds true in New Eden as well. Factional Warfare in the Empyrean Age has had an impact on the market, particularly with tech I ship and module production.

The players of Final Fantasy XI have voiced their anguished concerns over a certain Notorious Monster (NM), and Square Enix seems to have listened. We recently reported on the extreme levels of commitment needed to take down the NM Pandemonium Warden in Final Fantasy XI. A linkshell (guild) ironically called Beyond the Limitation attempted to take the boss on over a solid 18 hour period, and still weren't able to succeed. Consensus from FFXI's players who've been vocal on the matter is that Pandemonium Warden isn't just beyond this particular linkshell's limits, they're beyond anyone's limits.

In response, Square Enix stated, "Discussion has spread significantly throughout forums, and it has become apparent that this is indeed an issue of major unrest in the community." The company implied that the methods players have employed may have been sub-optimal, as Square Enix didn't anticipate that NM encounters would be as protracted as they've proven to be. To remedy this, they will alter the difficulty of defeating Pandemonium Warden, Absolute Virtue, and Jailer of Love. "The aim of these changes is to create battles where a decisive outcome may be reached within a shorter period of time," they said. The changes will go into effect with the next version update, which is scheduled for early September.

[Via 1up]

According to an announcement by Linden Lab, the SLS1.24 (version 1.24 of the Second Life server/simulator code) rollout to servers is happening right now. While Linden Lab have normally given at least a little advance notice, and a schedule for the server-side software updates (which can be disruptive), no such notice or schedule were published. All we have been told is that it will "take a number of days"; we assume that is probably different to the usual three-day schedule. Actually, if you haven't been reading Massively lately, this whole update probably comes as a complete surprise.

As we mentioned previously, the 1.21 release candidate viewer that you'll need in order to take full advantage of this release isn't due until next week, though you can probably access the Mono functionality with the preview grid viewers -- just remember to change the grid target to -grid agni in order to access the main grid.

Patch notes are after the jump.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Linden Lab is expected to roll out SLS1.24 (version 1.24 of the Second Life server/simulator code) this coming week with both the new Mono script-engine runtime and Qarl Linden's new touch-position code. We're confident that you'll see announcements for those on Monday or Tuesday (the 18th or 19th) describing the update schedule through the course of the week. We wouldn't be surprised to see something of a media push accompanying it; that would be consistent with the way the new Lab is operating these days.

The Mono script-engine runtime increases the amount of memory available to new or recompiled LSL scripts (from 16K to 64K) -- though at the expense of increased memory consumption -- while also largely increasing the speed of them, especially for intensive calculations. Mono is, primarily, part of the platform stabilization project rather than a new feature for the sake of new features.

---

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

It's time for another round of changes over in Age of Conan, and the Funcom developers have served us up with a hefty bunch, scheduled currently to go live on August 6th. The patch can currently be accessed on the Testlive server. The revised PvP system is also still on Testlive only, along with a level-bumping NPC, so there are plenty of reasons to go and do some intensive testing if you haven't already.

Of the classes, Conquerors come in for the most changes, and feedback so far is hesitantly positive. Full notes can be accessed on the Testlive forums; you'll need an AoC forum login.

Our collective eyebrows raised at one patch note in particular: 'Due to popular demand, we've forced some of our female Derketo followers to burn their bras.' Yes, this is a reference to that ridiculous censorship debate, only now Funcom are on the offensive. During the lengthy debates in which some players claimed Funcom was censoring the game, the (alleged) inappropriateness of priestesses of Derketo wearing clothes was often brought up as an issue. By the look of it, this won't be an issue any more. Oh, and men get sexy dances, too! What more could we possibly ask for?

Tonight (Monday), Tuesday and Wednesday, Linden Lab is having yet another attempt at rolling out the SLS 1.23 update to Second Life servers. Now versioned as SLS1.23.2, there aren't any new changes over the original version. Just fixes for things that prevented the deployment from following through.

While not the most fraught upgrade the grid has had, this one is turning into an epic mini-series in its own right, and we wish Linden Lab the very best of luck in getting it successfully deployed. If you're wondering where Mono is, that's currently scheduled as SLS1.24 and if all goes well, should be in the next round of rolling updates.

Earlier today we sat with Age of Conan product manager Erling Ellingsen. Due to the development cycle Conan is in right now, Ellingsen didn't really have anything in particular to show us - but he did have some things to tell us. Primarily we were there to find out about some lessons learned from the first months of Conan's launch-life. The man himself offered up:

• Timeframes for the addition of new high end content like Imir's Pass.
• The welcome news that the female avatar DPS bug will be squished much sooner that the 'few months' we'd previously heard.
• Confirmation that the DX10 version of the game should be viewable at next month's Leipzig event.
• The news that fan (especially male fan) favorite Keira will be an important quest NPC in the Imir's pass zone. The dealy assassin will offer important quests to all heroes of the appropriate level.

And a good deal more. Read on below the cut for our full interview with Mr. Ellingsen.

The twice-delayed deployment of Second Life server software version 1.23 will not roll out in its current state this week. Simulators that have been updated with the new version are exhibiting higher than average crash-rates and memory leaks.

While the issue isn't described as being severe at the moment, starting at 8PM SLT (US Pacific time) tonight, Linden Lab is going to revert all updated servers back to 1.22.4 -- in order to prevent larger-scale problems from developing. Presumably, we'll see another attempt to deploy 1.23 in the coming week.

Frequent displeasure remains constantly expressed in our Hellgate:London post threads. If you are still looking for an admittance of failures from someone at Flagship Studios, Max Schaefer, operations chief and co-founder recently acknowledged mistakes were made and lessons learned. The main one being the grandiosity in the overall vision for the game and an early launch that more or less turned Hellgate:London into a recovery process. Still there is a fanbase, and it was well received in South Korea. The developers are working hard, and hopefully with enough patches it will prove to be a better experience for those willing to give it a second chance. Have you?