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Ye sea loving scallywags looking for adventure better look to Pirates of the Burning Sea, it has plenty of adventuring waiting in the latest 1.5.46.0 patch. Fitted just last week a build discrepancy caused sails to rip apart, a server reboot followed causing disgruntled nations on Rackham to take cover but the storm has since calmed. There will be twice a week scheduled server restarts to work out the remaining kinks on both NA and EU servers set to take place on Tuesdays and Fridays at 1:30am PST.

There's a lot of new content in this patch, including a new six man epic mission in Fortaleza Da Luz. The mission is intended for level 50 players and balanced at a high difficulty. Numerous other changes and updates in this milestone update can be viewed at the official Flying Lab support site. Also, both the testbed and live servers are now in synch with the same build and players can now copy a live character over to the test server. Forewarning, any active auction listing will be delisted. Vote on your favorite PotBS video, transfer a character or stick to plundering on a live server, it's time to get back to playing and drinking some rum!

This is my bow. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My bow is my best friend. It is my life. My bow without me is useless. Without my bow, I am useless. Such is the life of a Ranger in Funcom's Age of Conan, at least once you've gotten out of the starter area. While the careful use of abilities plays a larger role in determining the success of any given Ranger, using the right equipment is still paramount maximizing damage. And when you're a straight DPS class, that's why people want you in groups.

That's why we were so delighted to see a guide being built over on the official Age of Conan forums, detailing the locations and stats of the most desirable rare bows, crossbows, and quivers in all level ranges from Tortage to the end-game. With the truly tremendous amount of bitching that goes on over at those forums, we love to see useful information like this floating to the top of the morass. If you've got a Ranger or regularly group with one, make sure to check out the list to see if you've got the best bow for your level.

Ignorance is bliss.
-- Thomas Grey

Knowing is half the battle.
-- G.I. Joe

It goes by many names -- Rumor. Speculation. Innuendo. Suggestion. Suble hints. Vague allusions. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Slips of the keyboard. Loose lips sinking ships. Detective work. Snooping. Unearthing forbidden knowledge. Call it what you will, by whatever method you choose, but it's become an increasingly inescapable fact of life regarding the games we play, especially those in the shared iterations of persistent worlds.

We're referring, of course, to knowing about content before it's on our hot little hard drives.

[Note: Many of the links that follow do, in fact, go to information about pending updates and patches. If you're averse to reading this sort of information, please skip over link text that contains an asterisk. (*)]

One of the delightful things about the development of Warhammer Online is that it has breathed life into a tabletop game that, for many, was an every-present fantasy standby as they grew up. While few people we know of were actually rich and/or talented enough to put together that 2000 point painted and converted army that is the stuff of dreams, just about everybody could inhale the lore in the army books and fancy the day when they could.

Cicadymn over at The Greenskin is doing his part to get everybody back into a Warhammery mood with a recent blog post about the chaos god Tzeentch--pronounced "Zeench" for those who tend to side with the forces of Order-- the first in a series highlighting the plethora of Warhammer gods. As he rather astutely points out, Tzeentch, as the changer of ways, is really the patron god for any MMO player who strives for the next level or who has ever gone back to fix his talent layout. More than that, we think EA Mythic opted to go with Tzeentch over one of the other Chaos gods because they couldn't stand the thought of making a game without those nifty Discs of Tzeentch.

Once again, NCsoft and ArenaNet will be making an appearance at Seattle's Penny Arcade Expo this year. The NCsoft booth (#642) will be packed full goodies during the weekend of August 29th through the 31st, and they will be showing off some of their new and old favorites, including Exteel, Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Tabula Rasa and the brand new Aion.

As they did last year, ArenaNet will be holding contests where participants can win valuable prizes. Developers will also be on hand to meet and greet with the players. Possibly the most exciting news is the fact that ArenaNet will hold another after-party at the Game Works across the street from the Washington State Convention & Trade Center, as they did last year. This is your chance to meet the folks at ArenaNet in a more casual setting and even challenge a few to an arcade game or two!

Lets go back about ten years or so to the original EverQuest. Now it isn't my intention to pick on any one game, I just happen to be more familiar with it than Ultima Online or Meridian 59. For the sake of immersion let me assume the role of a 1999 copy of EverQuest that you happen to be playing on your gaming machine back in the last year of the last century.

You just died in EverQuest. How dare you die! Since you had the nerve to be defeated in combat, you'll now be required to run from your binding point -- which could potentially be very far away -- to your dead body, which contains all of your equipment and bags that just happen to hold all of your inventory. If you fail to do this, then you lose all of these items. Oh but you've already lost some experience and possibly de-leveled if you happened to have recently leveled up.

Hey! Why are you logging out? So what if you think you'd rather play Half-Life right now, this is the game you're paying for monthly. Don't you think you'd better get the most out of it? Hah! See? I knew you were only bluffing. All right, now get to running, noob.

Sure, the price of oil may seem harsh tese days, and pulling up to the pump is certainly no bargain ... But the worst is yet to come. Those whose business it is to track the price World of Warcraft gold goes for on the black market have seen the price of gold double in the past couple of weeks, likely due to a mighty swing of Blizzard's ban hammer. With the highly profitable gold farming operations shutting down due to the suddenly lowered demand and supply, an easy source of liquid assets is now gone. The ripple effects will be felt globally. Until those brave gold farmers can get back in business, long lines at the pump may translate to long lines in the unemployment office.

An over-reaction? Perhaps. But Andrew at GameRates describes, in a tongue-in-cheek way, how protests against the high price of fuel will lead to protests against the high price of gold. So seriously -- have you stopped buying gold until the price comes down? What's the best price point for WoW gold? And would you consider buying gold at a higher price in order to help the Chinese gold farmers over this difficult hump?

Note: Massively in no way condones the buying and selling of gold or the breaking of any EULA in any way We're just interested in hearing from people who choose to on their own accord.

In January, we introduced you to a World of Warcraft machinima series, Azerothian Super Villains, by featuring the five episodes that had been produced at the time. Ian Beckman is back with the sixth episode, "The Virgin Kael'thas," a humorous video about Illidan's plot to take over the isle of Theramore by distracting the leader, Proudmoore. When he realizes that there are no other options, he enlists Kael'thas, the village idiot of the group, to complete the job, but as always, there are some complications ...

[Via Warcraftmovies.com]

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

Free to play, community-developed fantasy MMO PlaneShift today announces their latest release, version 0.4.01. PlaneShift runs well on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux, and wouldn't it be nice if more MMOs followed that wonderful example? PlaneShift boasts 500,000 registered users, a fully immersive 3D world, quests, monsters, and so many features that they're having to cut some out. This newest version of PlaneShift comes with more changes than we can list here, but you can find the entire change log on their site.

What would a high fantasy MMO be without an accompanying orchestral soundtrack? The themes to EverQuest, World of Warcraft, Dark Age of Camelot and so on bring weight and importance to the adventure, and nobody can listen to the theme to the game they loved without having all the memories of close calls and fun times immediately come to mind.

Runes of Magic publisher Frogster has asked renowned German soundtrack composers Dynamedion to compose just such a soundtrack for their upcoming free-to-play fantasy MMO. Managing Director Pierre Langer (pictured) says about the soundtrack, "We see Runes of Magic as an amazing challenge. It is [...] our first Fantasy-MMO, one of our preferred genres." Dynamedion has contributed music to games such as Spellforce, John Woo's Stranglehold, Anno 1701, Drakensang and Die Siedler V & VI, and movies such as 10.000 B.C. and The Bourne Ultimatum.

We've set the pictures from yesterday's peek into the starting zone, to some of the newly-composed music to Runes of Magic, after the break.

Laugh while you can, Luclin. In five hundred years, you and your whole frickin' moon get blowed up. All the Akhevans who worship you, all those bubble-headed Centi alien creatures, all those weird red-skinned cavemen, those mana-sucking mind worms, it all goes kablooey. But you know all about that, don't you? Because when that world-enveloping storm, the Maiden's Scar, swept through this old Akhevan city of Ka Vethan, and left behind the Akheva Ruins we know today, and all your four-armed, sexless minions ran off in terror to Vex Thal, you just stopped caring. Let it all blow up, you screamed in your dark joy. Let them all die.

The Akheva Ruins, that old stronghold of the Akheva made of crystallized shadow, a once-living shrine to their mistress and creator, the Dark Maiden Luclin, is in shambles. Though seen today mainly as the level 50 to 55 hot zone, it's still a place of dark mystery and lore, explored in EQPlayer's latest entry in its "Into the Depths" series exploring the lore behind EverQuest zones. One thing they don't mention? How great Centi Toes taste in stew!