Massively^™

If you just got home from work, planning on digging into a bit of LotRO's Mines of Moria goodness before dinner, you may be pretty peeved to find out that an emergency hotfix has brought the servers down from 5:30pm - 7:30pm Eastern.

But don't fret! That gives you plenty of time to read through our launch day coverage, which includes an interview with Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel, a Know Your LotRO Lore article featuring The Watcher in the Water, an unboxing of the Collector's Edition and more! Plus, don't forget our previous coverage that could be just as helpful today, especially our complete tour of Book 1.
Update: The servers came back up promptly at 7:30 EST. Enjoy Moria!

As the axiom goes, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. If that's the case, Blizzard's doing a pretty good job of setting up for the launch of Wrath of the Lich King at midnight. As many World of Warcraft players have undoubtedly noticed, the servers have been down off and on since the regular Tuesday maintenance window. However, history has shown that launches have been generally unkind to Blizzard's servers.

After the first maintenance extension, many suspected the downtime was related to the Battle.net account collation that Blizzard is implementing with Wrath. The servers came up briefly, but then the word went out that there was a problem with the in-game email system. Blizzard, trying to assure the community, sent a warning email to players letting them know that there was a problem with the in-game email system. The problem is that they notified everyone by emailing players through the messed up in-game mail system. You know, the one on the servers that were going back down to fix the mail problem. To their credit, they did post the message out on the forums, but there was a small catch there; the forums were up and down all day.

Update: As of 1pm EST, the WoW login screen states that all servers are back up and the service should be working as usual.

The EVE Online game servers and forums are presently down in an extended downtime, during which time the Quantum Rise expansion is being rolled out. While EVE players cope with the withdrawal shakes, CCP Games has released a behind-the-scenes video to check out, in addition to the Quantum Rise trailer.

EVE Online: Behind the Scenes is in some ways an introduction for new players to the setting of New Eden and the company that creates EVE. For gamers who are already EVE players, the video is a look inside the CCP Games office in Reykjavik, and features interviews with several developers in addition to some nice visuals of the new sub-capital industrial ship arriving with this expansion, the Orca. This video should really be seen in high resolution to appreciate the details, and can be downloaded from the temporary 'downtime news' EVE site which is up during the expansion deployment. In terms of when Quantum Rise is expected to be ready and the servers open up for players, the latest update from CCP is that they're currently on schedule, with the servers to open on November 12th at 02:00 GMT. In the meantime, we've got the 'EVE Online: Behind the Scenes' video embedded for you below the cut.

EVE Online's newest expansion, Quantum Rise, has almost arrived. EVE dev CCP Navigator writes: "The EVE Online: Quantum Rise patch will be deployed this Tuesday, 11th November. Tranquility will be down from 02:00 to 20:00 GMT. The downtime will affect the forums which will be unavailable for part of the time." The patch notes are up and are definitely worth taking a look at, as they do spell out some major changes for EVE Online.

The breadth of the changes are, quite frankly, beyond the scope of any post we could make at Massively, and we suggest you head straight to the source. As the post title implies, the Quantum Rise patch notes should have publishing rights associated with them, perhaps released as a trilogy. Sequels to the patch notes will be shown on the Quantum Rise patch notes page in green text, as CCP Games updates or revises what's currently posted. If you're one of EVE's industrialists who are looking forward to this expansion with some degree of fervor, you'll want to settle in with some hot chocolate and your copy of the Quantum Rise patch notes, and perhaps discuss the changes on the related forum thread.

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.

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.

Linden Lab has delayed the planned update of Second Life server systems to SLS-1.23 this week, which was originally to take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. The pilot deployment did not appear to roll out as planned on Tuesday and the schedule was pushed back one day to Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Now this has slipped again to Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The questions that immediately come to mind are, what is so dire that it is causing the delays, and what is so important that the update can't be pushed back to next week instead of these incremental delays?

Wanna bash stuff up good? Wanna capture little dinosaurs, train them up right and then send them into battle? When you see a broken tree branch with leaves on it, do you think "oooooh, a new club and a snack!"? If any (or all) of these sound like you, then you owe it to yourself to try out Aeria Games' latest prehistoric-themed MMO, Stone Age 2. Thump stuff good, collect baby dinosaurs from all over the world that will forever think of you as "Mum", and make the world safe for yourself and your tribe.

Our sister site, Big Download, has the client ready to download. The Stone Age 2 team has brought the servers up and open beta has begun. If you signed up in advance with Aeria, you may be finding a surprise in your in-box. For a complete list of the exclusive open beta goodies -- and a warning from the devs -- you can just go ahead and click on the break.

The preview grid (Aditi) has been updated with SLS1.23, and the schedule has been set for it to roll out onto the main grid on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday next week.

This contains a second attempt at the infamous sound-throttling feature that caused widespread trouble for scripts some weeks ago. You've got several days to test to see if it breaks your content on the preview grid before it goes live on the main grid.

Linden Lab is staging a rolling restart of Second Life servers, which started this evening, and will continue tomorrow (Wednesday) between 5AM and 9AM and again between 5AM and 9AM on Thursday to complete the deployment. (All times in US Pacific)

There are no listed changes for this rollout, which experience tells us mean that all the changes are security/exploit fixes. Some users are a mite testy with the lack of advance warning. Prospero Linden says that advance notice of the rolling restart was posted as early as last week, but in practice it actually got only the most minor of mentions from the release team and is easily missed without a careful search.

The Pirates of the Burning Sea official site has announced that, to help with some ongoing issues, all servers will be subject to a regularly scheduled service downtime. This downtime will occur twice a week, and should only be a server restart, meaning you can log back on and resume looting and plundering within about 20 minutes if all goes well.

So far, we know that the downtimes will take place on Tuesdays and Fridays at 8:30AM GMT for North American and European servers -- times for the Australian server will be listed shortly. It has been said that the restarts can be moved around a bit to accommodate Port Battles, which is a very nice touch and shows quite a level of involvement from Flying Lab Software on a server-specific basis. They hope that the regular restart situation will be temporary, but it's good to see that they will try to soften the blow in the meantime.

Continuing with their policy of frequent medium-sized patches instead of intermittent colossal ones, FunCom are bringing a welcome new patch to the AoC servers today. As well as the all-important 'more client and server crashes resolved' and a host of alterations such as a sound effect for levelling up (what's a ding without a ding?) and fixes to quests, there are significant changes to Demonologists that should make the class more balanced.

Many spells have had their damage buffed, their casting time reduced, or their splash damage increased. The hated cooldown for wide-scale Area of Effect damage spells, Inferno of Amher and Shockblast, has even been shaved back down.

At present, very little on the Second Life grid is working. At 2:20AM SLT (US Pacific time) with 30,818 users online, a severe network failure at one of Linden Lab's Internet Service Providers (finger points to Level 3), has largely cut access to the San Francisco data-center (one of three such facilities in the USA where Second Life servers reside). The network failure is not complete, so there are moments where everything almost works for short periods.

While an outage or communications problem at any data center or between any pair of them causes significant problems for Linden Lab's virtual world grid, the San Francisco center appears to be far more important to effective grid functions than the other two. As yet there is no estimated time to restoration, but users are advised to do nothing with money or inventory in the meantime, and are unlikely to be able to travel. Instant messages may also experience significant problems.

Update: (5:05AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved, but warns things will be slow as the systems recover.

Update: (6:50AM SLT) Everything seems to be falling apart again. It appears to be for much the same reason.

Update: (7:05AM SLT) As noted below, logins were closed at 7:05AM.

Update: (9:00AM SLT) Logins still remain closed, and the network provider is still working on restoring function.

Update: (9:30AM SLT) Logins are open, but very slow.

Update: (10:00AM SLT) Linden Lab reports this as resolved. Again.

Jon Wood from MMORPG.com recently interviewed Funcom's Product Director Jorgen Tharaldsen about some of the issues affecting gameplay in Age of Conan. The interview was primarily focused on customer service issues, and hopefully provides a good indicator as to how things are improving in AoC. Some of the key issues that Tharaldsen addressed include:

• Customer support frustrations expressed by players.

• Inability to log in to the game's official forums.

• Funcom's actions taken against exploiters.

• Poor game performance despite meeting required system specs.

• Server downtimes during peak hours.

• Limitations on number of players in certain instances.

• Increasing the number of GM's to handle the petition backlog.

Check out the interview over at MMORPG.com, where's there's quite a string of comments from the readers. Do you think Funcom is handling customer service issues properly (given that AoC had such a recent launch), or are they dropping the ball?

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.